THE "SUPREMACY OF GOD", HUMAN DIGNITY AND THE CHARTER OF RIGHTS AND FREEDOMS
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is now two decades old, and past its natural adolescence, we have yet to grapple with some of the most fundamental precepts, premises and principles which animate it. This essay is intended to explore two of these: the concept of human dignity, which does not appear in the Charter, and the concept of the supremacy of God, which are the first words to appear in the Charter.The argument I advance in this essay is as follows. The reference to the supremacy of God in the Charter's Preamble should be given meaning as an animating principle of constitutional interpretation, on par with the rule of law with which it is paired. To embrace the rule of law while abandoning the supremacy of God is to neglect the governing premise of the Charter. The supremacy of God, in turn, can only play a meaningful role in constitutional interpretation if it is taken as a general statement regarding the universal, normative aspirations of the Charter, rather than as a direction to privilege anyone particular religious or spiritual perspective over another, or over those perspectives which deny the existence of God per se. The concept of human dignity represents a key normative aspiration of Charter jurisprudence. It has rarely been justified or elaborated, however, on normative terms. Rather, the Supreme Court has tended to treat its articulation of the scope and content of human dignity as an article of faith, simply to be invoked along the way to what the Court has deemed a just outcome of a Charter challenge. I argue that if the concept of human dignity was linked with the supremacy of God in the Charter's Preamble, it would be incumbent on courts to justify their claims regarding human dignity as a leap of faith, and a more coherent and robust elaboration of the Charter's moral architecture would result.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".