Reflections of a Supervisory Order Sceptic: Ten Years after Doucet-Boudreau
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ten years after Doucet-Boudreau was decided, we remain supervisory order skeptics, for both policy and practical reasons. As a matter of policy, we adopt the view that recourse to supervisory orders threatens the mutually respectful paradigm of “dialogue” between courts and legislatures. As a matter of practice, we believe these kinds of orders are fundamentally unnecessary in Canada; that they do not reflect the institutional competence of our courts and executives and legislatures; and that they threaten to waste valuable resources on the part of applicants (whose rights will be vindicated, as experience suggests, regardless of the court’s supervision) as well as governments and the courts. In our view, all of this was true when the case was decided. Canadian governments have always complied with court orders. (It appears to remain true: in the ten years since the Court was so firmly divided on these issues, the remedy has not been used again in the manner that was upheld in Doucet-Boudreau.) The superior alternative to the supervisory order remains the “Eldridge-type order”: a suspended declaration of invalidity effectively requiring the government to remedy a constitutional defect in its policies or legislation by a particular date, according to its own best judgment. These kinds of orders are made on the understanding that either party may return to the Court to seek to vary the order, bearing the onus of proof that a variance is merited. The remedy has proven to be effective where vindicating Charter rights requires complex decisions to be made among competing policy choices.
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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 | 0.021 | 0.047 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.039 | 0.050 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.023 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.032 | 0.065 |
| 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".