People with Disabilities and the Charter: Disability Rights at the Supreme Court of Canada Under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The inclusion of people with disabilities as a designated group for rights protection in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was viewed as a triumph of disability advocacy in Canada. And yet, a number of commentators look back with disappointment over the 30 years since the Charter was passed. This paper employs an empirical approach to examine an important subset of cases invoking the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to promote disability rights. Specifically, it examines 14 cases heard by the Supreme Court of Canada to uncover the types of disability issues that have been addressed, and the approach of Supreme Court justices to these issues. In order to qualify for inclusion, cases had to have an appellant with a disability, and to directly address a disability discrimination issue. The current study shows a very limited impact of the Charter, despite expectations of a discernible shift in the position of people with disabilities within Canadian society. There is still no consistently applied “disability lens” in the policy environment, and there are relatively few tangible indicators of the kinds of considerations offered to other enumerated groups, such as Ministry or oversight committees dedicated to their issues.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.035 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".