The Failure of Proportionality Tests to Protect Christian Minorities in Western Democracies: <i>Alberta</i><i>v</i><i>Hutterian Brethren of Wilson Colony</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1974, the province of Alberta began to issue drivers' licences with photographs of the licence holder but exempted persons who objected to having their photographs taken for religious reasons from the photograph requirement. At that time the Muslim population of Canada was tiny and it was an unspoken assumption that the exemption was created for the Hutterian Brethren who have long had a number of colonies throughout the Prairies. In 2003, the province made photographs mandatory for all licence holders and created a provincial facial recognition data bank for the photographs. The Wilson colony of Hutterites objected to having their photographs taken on the ground that photographs constitute an infringement of the second commandment concerning idols (Exodus 20.4) as they understand it. Without drivers' licences, the colony is unable to make off colony trips to take their produce to market, or their ill members for medical treatment, or to be volunteer firefighters in their surrounding area, that is, the absence of licensed drivers makes it much more difficult for them to sustain their largely self-sufficient agrarian communal way of life which is also a matter of belief (Acts 2.44) without the expense of hiring taxis or outside drivers on an as-needed basis. The province offered a compromise that Hutterite drivers be issued with photograph-free licences but that photographs would still be required for the data base. The colony suggested a photograph-free licence bearing the words, ‘Not to be used for identification purposes’. Neither side accepted the other's proposal and the colony initiated litigation on the ground that the freedom of religion of the Hutterites pursuant to section 2(a) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (the ‘Charter’) had been infringed. The colony succeeded at trial and by a 2–1 decision in the Alberta Court of Appeal but lost in a 4–3 decision in the Supreme Court of Canada because in the view of the majority, written by McLachlin CJC, the photograph requirement was a ‘reasonable limit’ on religious freedom and ‘demonstrably justifiable in a free and democratic society’ under section 1 of the Charter.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.064 | 0.184 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".