Squaring the Circle of Multiculturalism? Religious Freedom and Gender Equality in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is globally unique in that it includes explicit commitments to the values of multiculturalism and gender equality. Section 27 of the Charter provides that: “[It] shall be interpreted in a manner consistent with the preservation and enhancement of the multicultural heritage of Canadians,” whereas section 28 states that: “Notwithstanding anything in this Charter, the rights and freedoms referred to in it are guaranteed equally to male and female persons.” The Canadian experiment (as I will call it) offers us a rare, living laboratory in which a thriving constitutional system searches for legal and institutional pathways to addressing seemingly incongruous demands, obligations, rights, and protections. This article identifies a range of concrete legal responses developed and articulated by Canadian judges and other policymakers in response to claims for fair inclusion raised by members of religious minority communities. Contributing to ongoing theoretical and legal debates, I will conceptualize three variants of such fair inclusion claims. I will then assess what the Canadian multicultural experiment can teach other comparable countries about principled and pragmatic responses to the challenge of “living together” in shared spaces such as workplaces, schools, courthouses, and during citizenship ceremonies. The discussion will then explore the promises and pitfalls of a jurisprudential approach that resists the hierarchy of rights formulas, and tries instead to cover all grounds so as to neither erase diversity nor sacrifice equality.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".