“Patent Unreasonableness is Dead. And We Have Killed It.” A Critique of the Supreme Court of Canada’s Decision in <i>Dunsmuir</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Upon arriving back to work after a brief yet refreshing trip to Las Vegas, my colleague burst into my office lamenting, "The Supreme Court has completely changed administrative law!They have killed off patent unreasonableness as a standard of review!"I felt an ominous sinking feeling, a sense of shock, and heartache, akin to the pain and loss that I felt when Tony Soprano pinched the nostrils of his nephew Christopher and watched him drift off into the great unknown.I hurriedly printed off the 7 March 2008, Supreme Court of Canada decision in Dunsmuir v. New Brunswick, 1 and read it with bated breath, expecting the worst, yet hoping to find renewal and perhaps even a sort of rebirth into a fabulous new world of administrative law.What I discovered was that, in the words of Michael Stipe, it may be the end of the world as I know it, yet I still feel fine. I. THE FACTSMr. Dunsmuir was employed by the Department of Justice for the Province of New Brunswick as a legal officer.This position was "at pleasure" though, pursuant to the provisions of the Civil Service Act, 2 his employment was governed by the ordinary rules of contract.After multiple reprimands for unacceptable performance, Dunsmuir was dismissed without cause and given four months pay in lieu of notice.He filed a grievance under the Public Service Labour Relations Act, 3 alleging a lack of reasons for his employer's dissatisfaction, a lack of an opportunity to respond, and insufficient notice.The grievance was denied and the matter proceeded to adjudication.The adjudicator found, in a preliminary determination, that he had jurisdiction to determine the reasons for the decision to terminate and jurisdiction to reinstate the applicant.In a subsequent decision pertaining to the appropriate notice award, the adjudicator found that due to the hybrid nature of Dunsmuir's employment, he was entitled to and did not receive procedural fairness in the decision to terminate.Accordingly, the adjudicator ordered him reinstated, found that his termination was void ab initio, and provisionally found that if the reinstatement was quashed on judicial review, then the appropriate notice period would be eight months.On judicial review, the Court of Queen's Bench found that the correctness standard applied to the preliminary decision.The Court quashed this decision on the basis that the adjudicator did not have jurisdiction to look into the reasons for the applicant's dismissal, as he only had the authority to determine whether the notice given was reasonable.On the substantive decision relating to reinstatement and the appropriate notice award, the Court
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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 | 0.035 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.032 | 0.029 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".