The Canadian Override: Constitutional Model or Bête Noire of Constitutional Politics?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the fall of 2014, Member of Knesset (MK) Ayelet Shaked of Israel’s Bayit Yehudi party proposed a bill to amend the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty by inserting a provision that would allow the Knesset to “override” a decision of the Supreme Court of Israel striking down a law as violating that Basic Law. Previously, proposals to create a new Basic Law: Legislation included a provision which would enable the Knesset to override any Basic Law. Such provisions are about who should have the final word in constitutional adjudication – the Supreme Court of Israel or the Knesset. Time and again, MK Shaked cited Canada (as well as the U.K.) as having similar legislation. As a Canadian public law scholar familiar with the Israeli legal and political system, my interest lies in the Israeli invocation of “the Canadian override” as a model. In this paper, I examine whether “the Canadian override” is adaptable to the Israeli constitutional and political environment. To this end, I briefly explain what “the Canadian override” is and how it came to be. I analyze the positive attraction of the Canadian override as a constitutional model. I end by discussing the Canadian experience with its override, which has been called “the bete noire of Canadian constitutional politics” because of the manner in which it was adopted and the circumstances in which it was first used. I end with some concluding thoughts about legal transplants, legitimacy and lessons for Israel from the Canadian experience.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.045 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 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".