Bibliographic record
Abstract
Critics of Canadian equality jurisprudence complain that the test in Law v. Canada for a breach of Charter section 15 improperly requires claimants to argue that the statutory criteria for allocating a benefit or burden are not relevant to the purposes of the legislation. They maintain that arguments about whether the criteria are relevant to the legislative purpose should be confined to section 1, and that the burden should be on the government to make out those arguments.This paper argues that some forms of relevance argument should be part of the section 15 analysis. The author distinguishes three types of relevance argument: formal, instrumental and constitutive. Formal relevance arguments claim that the criteria for allocating a benefit are relevant to a statute's purpose because the legislature says they are. This form of argument has no place in section 15 analysis because it is circular and too deferential to the legislature. Instrumental relevance arguments claim that the allocative criteria are instrumental in achieving the legislative objective. If these criteria are not relevant, or are a bad proxy for other appropriate criteria, revealing such defects is properly part of the section 15 analysis. Finally, constitutive relevance arguments claim that the allocative criteria constitute part of the legislative objective. That is, the criteria used to allocate a benefit partly constitute the benefit itself. The author argues that these arguments are always relevant to section 15 analysis, though they pose special dangers to which we must be alert. Constitutive relevance arguments should always redirect our attention to the constitutional acceptability of the legislative objective itself. Thus, contrary to what some critics claim, relevance arguments cannot be entirely eliminated from section 15. Further, the effort to do so risks producing an equality analysis that fails to demonstrate the wrong of discrimination, without which justification under section 1 is likely to succeed too easily. The use of relevance arguments in section 15 will also require adaptation of the Oakes test.
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 | 0.015 | 0.038 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.083 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 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".