Throwing Caution to the Wind: The Precautionary Principle, NAFTA and Environmental Protection in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
According to the precautionary principle, the lack of full scientific certainty should not preclude measures to prevent environment degradation. This principle has been incorporated into numerous international instruments and is approaching the status of customary international law. Moreover, the Canadian government has embraced the principle and the Supreme Court of Canada recently confirmed it as a basis of environmental policy in 114957 Canada Ltée (Spraytech, Société dʼ’arrosage) v. Hudson (Town). This paper examines the ability of the precautionary principle to actually function as a guide for environmental policy in light of Canadaʼs international trade obligations. In particular, it considers Canadaʼs commitments under NAFTA. Under NAFTA a wide array of possible government activity can be deemed a “trade barrier” and, under the Chapter 11 investment provisions, governments who enact such barriers are subject to binding commercial arbitration. The author critically analyzes the reasoning and implications that follow from two recent Chapter 11 cases: Ethyl Corporation v. Canada and Metalclad Corporation v. Mexico. Overall, the author concludes that despite its embrace by the international community, the Canadian government and the Supreme Court, Canada’s commitments under NAFTA effectively undercut the ability of the precautionary principle to serve as a basis of environmental policy.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".