Promotion of Federally Appointed Judges and Appointment of Chief Justices: The Unfinished Agenda
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Much has been written in Canada over the appointment of judges by the federal government pursuant to its power under Section 96 of the Constitution Act and other sources and the shortcomings of the existing procedures. Much less however has been written about the promotion of judges from the trial level to provincial appellate courts and the Federal Court of Appeal, and the appointment of chief justices of provincial courts and the Federal Court. This paper seeks to fill the gaps. The gaps are important because, for most purposes, the provincial appellate courts and the Federal Court of Appeal are the final courts of decision in litigated matters. The paper notes that political connections appear to play a prominent role in the appointment of chief justices and a smaller role in the appointment of appellate judges. Nevertheless, the appointment of appellate judges raises important questions of transparency and accountability since judges promoted by the federal government from the trial bench to an appellate court are not subject to scrutiny by the provincially based judicial appointments advisory committees.
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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 | 0.041 | 0.070 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".