Regulated Out of Existence: A Case Study of Ottawa's Ticket Defence Program
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The centrepiece of this research is a case study of the Ticket Defence Program (TDP). Between 2003 and 2007, the TDP, an Ottawa-based collective of volunteers, provided vital and effective legal assistance to street-involved people charged with minor provincial or municipal offences. While some of the TDP’s work resembled the work of a paralegal (such as requesting disclosure and appearing in provincial court), none of its members were licensed to provide legal services in Ontario. In the first part of this article, I provide the historical and legislative context to paralegal regulation in Ontario that informed the Paralegal Standing Committee’s (Paralegal Committee) interactions with the TDP. In the second part, I survey the TDP’s structure, accountability mechanisms, and operations developed to address the unmet legal needs of Ottawa’s street-involved people. In the third part of this article, I examine the Paralegal Committee’s decision, on the one hand, not to recognize the TDP as a group beyond the scope of the Law Society Act (which would not require a paralegal license to provide its service) and, on the other, not to exempt the TDP from the new regulatory structure (requiring the TDP to obtain a license in order to continue to provide legal services).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".