Commentary: A User Charge or a Tax by Another Name and the Consequences of Breaching the 'No Taxation Without Representation' Principle
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This commentary discusses the Supreme Court decision in Kingstreet Investments Ltd v New Brunswick (Department of Finance), and reviews the relevant constitutional principles that apply to imposing a tax or user charge. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the plaintiff bar owners could recover user charges paid to the province on alcohol purchased for resale, despite that the bars had passed the tax on to consumers. The Court unanimously found there is no general immunity against recovery of illegal taxes. The court based its award of restitution on fundamental constitutional principles, rather than the framework of restitution applicable in private law. The Supreme Court found the passing-on defense inapplicable as it is inconsistent with the law of restitution, which focuses on the defendant restoring what was unjustly taken (as opposed to compensating the plaintiff). The Province of New Brunswick responded by retroactively establishing a constitutionally-sound tax, in order to avoid double-taxing citizens. The Supreme Court’s decision in Kingstreet affirms the Court’s role in guaranteeing respect by the state for constitutional principles underlying taxation, and the availability of restitution based on constitutional principles when taxes are paid pursuant to ultra vires legislation. However, it is of little assistance to payers of such illegally collected taxes, given the approved use of retroactive ameliorating legislation, which erodes the constitutional limits of the state’s power to tax.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.034 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.071 | 0.050 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.005 |
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".