Statutory Immunity from Charter Damages: Ernst v. Alberta Energy Regulator
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Supreme Court of Canada recently granted leave to appeal in Ernst v. AER. Jessica Ernst, an Alberta landowner and scientist, is claiming that the conduct of the Energy Resources Conservation Board (now Alberta Energy Regulator) breached section 2(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Ernst alleges that her freedom of expression was infringed through a series of actions which prevented her from effectively communicating with the regulator. This paper argues that general statutory immunity provisions should not prevent plaintiffs from recovering public law damages for a regulator’s Charter breach when a Court “considers [it] appropriate and just in the circumstances.” The history and purpose of subs. 24(1), Canadian jurisprudence culminating in the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in Vancouver (City) v. Ward, and approaches in other jurisdictions all support this interpretation. While the Supreme Court of Canada has held that limitation provisions do apply to bar claims for personal Charter remedies, statutory immunity is not analogous to a limitation period. The Court should not pre-empt claims for damages on the basis that policy considerations justify applying statutory immunity provisions to such claims. The framework developed by the Court in Ward allows sufficient scope for the consideration of countervailing factors such as good governance or the availability of alternative remedies, which might justify denying monetary redress. A court’s discretion to provide the appropriate and just remedy for a given Charter breach would be improperly fettered by the application of a general statutory immunity provision. The state cannot dictate the range of remedies provided by the Constitution.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.014 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".