Conservatives, the Supreme Court of Canada, and the Constitution: Judicial-Government Relations, 2006–2015
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Three high-profile government losses in the Supreme Court of Canada in late 2013 and early 2014, combined with the government’s response to those losses, generated a narrative of an especially fractious relationship between Stephen Harper’s Conservative government and the Court. This article analyzes this narrative more rigorously by going beyond a mere tallying of government wins and losses in the Court. Specifically, it examines Charter-based invalidations of federal legislation since 2006, three critical reference opinions rendered at the government’s own request, and two key judgments delivered in the spring of 2015 concerning Aboriginal rights and the elimination of the long-gun registry. The article argues that the relationship between the Conservative government and the Court from 2006 to 2015 was much more complicated than the “fractious relationship” narrative would suggest. However, the Conservative government did adopt a more consistently confrontational approach in its legislative responses than its predecessors.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.049 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".