The Canadian Charter of Rights and the minister of justice: Weak-form review within a constitutional Charter of Rights
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In a series of influential works, Mark Tushnet has questioned whether the “parliamentary” approach to bills of rights that exist in Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom can strike a middle ground between constitutional supremacy and judicial supremacy. In the case of Canada, Tushnet argues that the failure to employ the notwithstanding clause and the reluctance of parliamentarians to confront the judiciary account for the instability of weak-form review and Canada’s transition to strong-form review. Although the notwithstanding clause has not been a significant aspect of weak-form review in Canada, the Charter has not transitioned to strong-form review. Four variables explain this: first, legislative reversal of judicial decisions through simple statutory amendment, a practice we label as “notwithstanding-by-stealth” to distinguish this practice from the formal use of section 33; second, the structure of the Justice portfolio and its fusion of justice and attorney general within a single department and parliamentarian; third, the lack of transparency in the reporting duty of the minister of justice that significantly reduces the need to employ the formal instruments of weak-form review; and finally, the Supreme Court of Canada’s acceptance of legislative reversal of its Charter jurisprudence as evidence of dialogue with Parliament.
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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 | 0.013 | 0.031 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
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".