A Consistent Inconsistency—An Interpretationof Sections 23 and 56(1) of the Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms of Québec
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The writer advocates the view that courts interpret statutes so as to achieve their aim; that being justice in the case: as between the parties and in respect of the law. This is identified as the common thread that explains the apparent erratic behaviour of the courts in their use of the various methods or rules of interpretation. The Supreme Court decision, Attorney General of Québec v. 2747-3174 Québec Inc., is analysed against the background of this theory and is seen to give support to it. The court is shown to use various rules of interpretation, which lead the majority to a wide, and the minority to a narrow, interpretation of the Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms of Québec. Yet it is clear that in both cases the rules are merely a means to an end: justice as between the parties and in respect of the law. In context of the case, this means establishing a balance between the competing interests of the State and the citizen that conforms to the law relating to fundamental rights and in particular, the Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms of Québec. As far as the State is concerned, it has a vested interest in confirming the constitutionality of its many administrative tribunals, which play an essential role in enabling the State to discharge its responsibility to govern. Citizens, on the other hand, need to be protected from the violation of their rights, in particular the right to an independent and impartial tribunal in matters relating to the determination of their rights and obligations, or charges brought against them. The Charter must be interpreted so that, in its scope and content, it gives real protection, but, consistent with the separation of powers doctrine, the interpretation must not amount to a usurpation by the courts of the role of the government to govern. The writer concludes that the opposing conclusions of the majority and minority are more a consequence of the difference in the opinion of the judges as to the manner in which the balance should be struck, as opposed to the rules of interpretation used by them.
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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 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".