One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: Gladue at Ten and in the Courts of Appeal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper provides an outline of the appellate jurisprudence interpreting and applying the Supreme Court of Canada’s jurisprudence in Gladue. The decision interpreting the instruction in s. 718.2(e) of the Criminal Code for judges to consider reasonable alternatives to imprisonment “for all offenders, with particular attention to the circumstances of aboriginal offenders” inspired both intense hope and intense controversy. The acceptance of Gladue, as well as its failure to reduce Aboriginal overrepresentation, begs the question of how Gladue is applied in courts throughout the country. The first part of this article briefly outlines how the Supreme Court interpreted s. 718.2(e) in Gladue and in the subsequent case of Wells. The second part of this paper examines reported sentence appeals taken by the Crown from the sentencing judgments in which the trial judge has applied Gladue. The third part of this article examines appeals by the accused alleging that the trial judge has erred in applying s. 718.2(e) and Gladue. The fourth part of this article examines decisions that deal with the scope of Gladue, and in particular whether it applies to non-sentencing proceedings such as bail, contempt and dangerous offender proceedings. If Gladue remains an important step forward in recognizing the failures of the justice system with respect to Aboriginal people, its implementation at a national level represents two disappointing steps back: the failure to reduce Aboriginal overrepresentation and the focus on the seriousness of the offence.
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 | 0.016 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.074 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.025 | 0.028 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.015 |
| Research integrity | 0.014 | 0.036 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".