Constitutional Inconsistency in Legislation – Interpretation, Remedies and the Ambiguous Role of Ambiguity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Supreme Court of Canada has recognized and repeatedly affirmed a rule of legislative interpretation that limits the consideration of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and other constitutional norms. The rule requires that before a court interpreting legislation can consider them, it must consider other contextual features and conclude that they do not resolve an ambiguity in the legislation. It thus privileges other contextual features of legislation and creates a secondary role for the Charter and constitutional norms that cannot come into play without ambiguity. However, the concept of ambiguity is itself ambiguous and this rule is at odds with the fundamental principle of constitutional supremacy. It also conflicts with a recent development in administrative law recognizing that administrative tribunals exercising discretionary powers involving the interpretation of legislation are entitled to consider the Charter and other constitutional norms without a finding of ambiguity. This article exposes these problems and argues that the Charter and other constitutional norms should not be excluded at the outset. Rather, they should be considered along with other relevant contextual factors and be given the interpretive weight they deserve. Using the ambiguity threshold to categorically exclude their consideration blunts the role of legislative interpretation in assuring the supremacy of the Constitution.
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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 | 0.036 | 0.060 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.118 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
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".