Politics Masquerading as Principles: Representation by Population in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The author calls for a re-examination of the Supreme Court of Canada’s approach to Section 3 of the Charter. Focusing on the leading Section 3 decision in the Saskatchewan Reference, he argues that the majority of the Court erred when it chose effective representation as the guiding interpretive principle of the right to vote. Instead, he calls for a re-interpretation on a more practical and principled basis: the idea of presumptive equality adopted by the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal.The author begins by laying out the contrasting interpretive positions of the two courts. He proceeds to identify and critique the central justifications for the holding of the majority of the Supreme Court: the practical impossibility of drawing equal districts; Canada’s expansive geography; the historical interpretation of the right to vote; and the impact of communities of interest and minority representation. Finding that these concepts form an unstable and illusory basis on which to justify the continued dilution of individual votes, he proposes presumptive equality as a principled alternative. Highlighting two more recent decisions of the Supreme Court in Sauve and Figueroa, he points out that the Court has since recognized that the Section 1 stage is the more appropriate place to balance the competing values of Canadian society against the right to vote. In a plural modern society such as Canada’s the way forward should be guided by the closest possible approximation of representation by population.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 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".