The Limits of Canada’s Commitment to State Neutrality in Religious Matters
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Canadian courts initially described section 2(a) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms [ Charter ], freedom of conscience and religion, as the liberty to hold, and live in accordance with, spiritual or other fundamental beliefs without state interference [ Big M 1985]. 1 Freedom of religion, understood as a liberty, precludes the state from compelling an individual to engage in a religious practice and from restricting his/her religious practice without a legitimate public reason. In later judgments, however, there has been a shift in the courts’ description of the interest protected by the freedom, from liberty to equality. According to the courts, the freedom does not simply prohibit state coercion in matters of religion or conscience; it requires also that the state treat religious belief-systems or communities in an equal or even-handed manner. The state must not support or prefer the religious practices of one religious group over those of another (religion or religious contest should be excluded from politics), and it must not restrict the practices of a religious group, unless this is necessary to protect a compelling public interest (religion should be insulated from politics). The requirement of state neutrality was most recently and clearly affirmed in the unanimous judgment of the Supreme Court of Canada in Mouvement laïque v. Saguenay : “[A] duty of religious neutrality on the state… results from an evolving interpretation of freedom of conscience and religion” [ Mouvement laïque 2015: para. 71]. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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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 | 0.013 | 0.040 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".