The impact of extra-judicial service on the Canadian judiciary
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In a 1985 speech to the Canadian Bar Association, Chief Justice Dickson emphasised the importance of an independent and impartial judiciary in maintaining and protecting the rule of law. For Dickson, the rule of law required not only that the judiciary should be the exclusive arbiter of disputes, but that the judges should ‘not depart from their proper function of law interpretation and application’ and their ‘primary task of deciding cases and dispensing justice’. Dickson stressed his increasing concern ‘about certain extra-judicial activities which could tend to politicise the role of judges and detract from their impartial and independent status’. He specifically cautioned judges against accepting requests to serve on public inquiries and royal commissions. Recent experience has demonstrated that Dickson’s advice has not always been followed. Canadian governments at both the federal and provincial levels have increasingly looked to sitting judges to occupy non-judicial roles. Sitting judges have not been shy to accept these appointments, particularly to public inquiries. In recent years, inquiries such as Walkerton, Somalia, Gomery, Arar, Cornwall, Goudge, the Computer Leasing Scandal and the Oliphant Inquiry have occupied not only the headlines, but also considerable time and energy of sitting Canadian judges.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 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".