Book Note: The End of the Charter Revolution: Looking Back from the New Normal by Peter J McCormick
Bibliographic record
Abstract
CANADA’S CONSTITUTIONALIZED BILL OF RIGHTS, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms,2 unified the country under a set of principles that were designed to encapsulate liberty and equality, and safeguard an expansive set of rights and freedoms. Entrenched in 1982, the Charter fundamentally changed the Canadian legal landscape and allowed the Supreme Court of Canada to take center stage as the “best show in town,”3 generously sketching out rights for all in a golden age of Canadian law. But, as Peter McCormick argues in his new book The End of the Charter Revolution, that golden age may be finished. The Charter revolution is over, McCormick argues, and the cases before the SCC are now “detail shufflers rather than groundbreakers.”4 The bulk of support for McCormick’s bold theory is a narrative of each Court since the Charter’s birth. Chief Justice of Canada Brian Dickson’s court framed Charter rights, Antonio Lamer’s court expanded them, Beverly McLachlin’s court contained them—these narratives all support McCormick’s one simple thesis: the “forward motion of Charter interpretation is at an end.”5 We have returned to a ‘new normal.’
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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 | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.002 |
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".