Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the past decade, the use of omnibus bills has become routine in the Parliament of Canada. Omnibus budget implementation bills have grown in size to several hundred pages and acquired their own political term with a decidedly negative connotation: “omnibudget bills”. These omnibus and omnibudget bills have been a source of controversy and, at times, political protest. In its 2015 election platform, the Liberal Party of Canada promised to change the House of Commons’ Standing Orders to end the “undemocratic practice” of using omnibus bills. This article analyses the understanding, use, and history of omnibus bills in the Parliament of Canada. It argues that such bills undermine parliamentarians’ ability to responsibly and effectively carry out their duties to examine and debate legislation. Omnibus bills reveal a tension between the doctrine of the separation of powers and the principle of democracy. Excessive deference to the doctrine of the separation of powers has allowed omnibus bills to become a threat to parliamentary democracy in Canada, and the balance needs to be recalibrated. This paper considers various ways in which omnibus bills might be restrained and the constitutional challenges that such options present. It considers the role of the House of Commons, the Senate, the Governor General, and the courts. Ultimately, this paper concludes that in the absence of action by Parliament itself, the courts may be forced to find a way to restrict the most abusive uses of omnibus bills.
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 | 0.016 | 0.033 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 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".