Taking Aim at Cooperative Federalism: The Long-Gun Registry Decision by the Supreme Court of Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This short article discusses the Supreme Court’s 2015 divided decision on the abolition of the long-gun registry. The Court ruled on whether a legislative assembly could unilaterally abrogate a provision it had previously adopted for a cooperative scheme designed in collaboration with other orders of government. The article first discusses the three dimensions of cooperative federalism: interpretative doctrines resulting in legislative overlap, judicial abstention from finding technical obstacles against cooperation, and lastly norms of ‘good faith’ between collaborating governments (which the majority of the Court did not endorse). The article then discusses the relationship between cooperative federalism and gun control, outlining the majority and dissent in the 2015 case. The third section of the article notes that the majority decision invoked parliamentary supremacy at the expense of cooperative federalism. The author concludes that the majority decision was a return to a positivist dualistic conception of federalism, while the dissent espoused a more nuanced and flexible articulation of cooperative federalism.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.008 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".