THE SUPREME COURT OF CANADA IN THE AGE OF RIGHTS: CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRACY, THE RULE OF LAW AND FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS UNDER CANADA'S CONSTITUTION
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the aftermath of the Second World War, democratic nations have embraced judicial protection of individual autonomy, equality and respect for human dignity. While each nation's arrangements have distinctive features, there is a discernible model of postwar rights protection. This essay traces the role of the Supreme Court in Canada's transformation into such a postwar, rights-protecting polity both before and after the adoption of the Charter in 1982. Just after the war, the Supreme Court took the initiative to protect rights just as Canada reached political independence and the Court became Canada's highest appellate court. Facing challenges to the most basic assumptions of liberal democracy, some of the judges inferred protection for fundamental freedoms from the structure of Canada's parliamentary democracy, the federal-provincial division of powers and the heritage of the flexible, unwritten British constitution. Although the Court ultimately abandoned this approach, it recently returned to this legacy in important reference cases that deliberated upon the place of direct democracy and the independence of the courts in our constitutional order. This essay compares the Court's understanding of its role in protecting rights under this traditional approach as well as under the Charter, to the postwar model of rights protection. It notes that the Court has on occasion departed from this model to resolve a perceived tension between vigilant judicial protection of rights and the prerogatives of the executive and the legislature in our system of government. The author argues that Canada's adaptation of the postwar model to the Canadian context resolves that tension without prompting such departures. Support for this argument rests on a number of considerations. These include the conceptual substructure of unwritten constitutional norms, the institutional structure and remedial purposes of the Charter, and the common law's affinity to the postwar model of rights-protection.
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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 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.033 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| 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".