Tort, democracy and environmental governance: the case of non-enforcement
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This Article examines government liability in tort for harm resulting from environmental non-enforcement. Part II presents an overview of the problem of systemic non-enforcement of environmental laws and regulations in Canada. Part III explores the predominance of discretion in environmental legislation as a major cause of the phenomenon of non-enforcement, including an analysis of the impact of pervasive discretion on the democratic principles of transparency and the rule of law. Part IV briefly examines administrative and constitutional law remedies available to address harm caused by non-enforcement and concludes that these areas of law do not offer meaningful redress to injured citizens. Part V observes that Tort, for its part, offers a response that would be both confusing and disturbing to the average citizen. Because of the rule limiting government liability to operational decisions, isolated, aberrational incidents of non-enforcement causing harm may be actionable in tort, while systemic non-enforcement flowing from a policy decision to neglect environmental protection would likely be immune from tort liability. Part V-A examines the history of Crown liability in Canada, while Part V-B presents a brief examination of the theoretical debate surrounding the imposition of tort liability on elected governments. Part V-C introduces the development of the policy-operational distinction in Canadian law, and concludes that reliance on this dichotomy as a touchstone for liability preempts public dialogue on important questions regarding the appropriate relationship between government and the citizenry. Part V-D proposes a new analytical approach to Crown tort liability that makes explicit the substantive concerns motivating the imposition of liability or the grant of immunity. Finally, Part VI explores the application of existing tort doctrine, as well as the proposed reform, to the case of environmental non-enforcement. Part VII presents a brief conclusion.
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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 | 0.002 | 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 | 0.001 | 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".