Sexual Orientation and the Charter: The Achievement of Formal Legal Equality (1985-2005) and Its Limits
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canada is one of the leading countries in the world in the strength of its legal protection against sexual orientation discrimination and in the progress it has made toward securing equal fights and opportunities for its lesbian, gay, and bisexual ("LGB") minority. The author details the achievement of formal legal equality through the courts', particularly the Supreme Court of Canada's, Charter decisions since section 15 (the equality provision) of the Charter first became effective. He focuses on the topics of criminal law, employment, unmarried same-sex couples, LGB parenting, and civil marriage for samesex couples. By canvassing the landmark cases in these areas, he examines the Charter dialogue between the courts and legislatures mid the political results of these equality decisions. The author hypothesizes that future Charter litigation will concern the limits of formal legal equality. This is so because once a group that has historically faced pervasive direct discrimination achieves formal legal equality (based on claims of "sameness"), attention immediately shifts to indirect discrimination (based on claims of "difference"). As in the case of Little Sisters, where the Supreme Court was unwilling to make exceptions to the definition of obscenity for the LGB minority, sexuality is one area that is likely to remain a focus of the struggle for substantive equality. The article concludes with the reminder that once formal legal equality has been achieved, and proves inadequate, there is a tendency among equality-seeking groups to dismiss it. While the author recognizes that formal legal equality on its own is not enough, he stresses that it has tremendous material and symbolic value. He hopes that Canada's leadership in this area of human fights law will inspire the many countries where formal legal equality for LGB individuals and same-sex couples remains a distant dream.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".