The Entrenchment of Discretion: Prospects for Judicial Appointment Reform after a Trio of References
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper describes the recent history of procedures used for appointments to the Supreme Court of Canada, including the milestone appearance of Justice Rothstein before a committee of parliamentarians. It considers what further reforms are permissible in the absence of constitutional amendments necessitating provincial agreement. It similarly describes the current role played by judicial appointment advisory committees in appointments by the federal government to the superior courts. In light of the recent trilogy of Supreme Court references touching on executive appointments – the Supreme Court Act Reference, the Senate Reference, and the Justice Mainville Reference – we consider what reforms are available for the lower court appointments as well, with reference to the procedures used in other common law jurisdictions and at the provincial level in Canada. Ultimately, we conclude that the principal features of Canada’s current model of discretionary Executive appointment can only be changed by use of the constitutional amending formulae that require provincial consent. The federal government can, however, unilaterally adopt a more independent, transparent, merit-based method of Executive appointment by giving non-binding independent appointments commissions a greater role in the process.
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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 | 0.028 | 0.066 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".