The Supreme Court Appointment Process: Improved Federal-Provincial Relations vs. Democratic Renewal?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There are two distinct institutional reform agendas underway in Canada which are being pursued independently of each other: the so-called democratic renewal agenda, and the improvement of intergovernmental relations (IGR) principally between the federal government and the provinces. These two agendas are deeply in tension because they point in opposite directions with respect to the relationship between executives and legislatures. I explore the tension between these two agendas in the context of the politics of Supreme Court appointments. The Supreme Court became known as the umpire of federalism because of its role in settling federal-provincial disputes over jurisdiction. However, the power of appointment rests with the federal executive. Historically, this has given rise to demands for the involvement of provincial executives in Supreme Court appointments – i.e., the enhancement of executive federalism. But the constitutional politics of Supreme Court of Canada appointments have changed dramatically. They now fall squarely within the democratic renewal agenda, and have led to proposals for greater Parliamentary involvement in Supreme Court appointments, and to diminished powers for the federal executive, and by extension, provincial executives. The reform of the Supreme Court appointments process illustrates how the institutional implications of the IGR and democratic renewal agendas pull in opposite directions. The challenge for political actors is to think creatively, outside of traditional categories, to design new institutions which advance both the democratic renewal and IGR agendas simultaneously. Proposals for reform should focus on blended institutions, which allow for input by legislatures and provinces.
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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 | 0.013 | 0.032 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".