Stepping into Canada's Shoes: Tsilhqot'In, Grassy Narrows and the Division of Powers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The 2014 Tsilhqot’in and Grassy Narrows decisions represent an about-face in the Supreme Court’s approach to the constitutional division of powers. Contrary to long-standing judicial authority, the Court concluded in both cases that provinces now have the right to pass laws or take actions that infringe Aboriginal and Treaty rights without the involvement of the federal government. This paper provides an analysis of the law on the division of powers as it relates to the protection of Aboriginal and Treaty rights, with a focus on the implications of the province’s significantly expanded jurisdiction since Tsilhqot’in and Grassy Narrows. Decisions of the Supreme Court prior to 2014 consistently confirmed the continuing relevance and importance of the principle of interjurisdictional immunity in regards to section 91(24) and the federal Crown’s responsibilities with respect to Aboriginal and Treaty rights. However, in Tsilhqot’in and Grassy Narrows the Court disregarded existing law and held that there is no role for the federal government when a province proposes to undertake activity that could negatively affect Aboriginal and Treaty rights. Instead, the Court held that it is now open to provinces to attempt to justify infringements of those rights pursuant to the Sparrow/ Badger analysis.The potential ramifications of the Court’s departure from established case law are considerable. The decisions call into question the Supreme Court’s approach to the division of powers by removing an established aspect of constitutional protection formerly guaranteed to Aboriginal peoples. As a result, provinces are now apparently free to make decisions that impact Aboriginal and Treaty rights subject only to obligations under section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".