A Tale of Two Constitutions: Métis Nationhood and Section 35(2)’s Impact on Interpretations of <i>Daniels</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Spurious claims to “Métisness,” or those claiming a Métis identity, have been on the rise since the Daniels decision, wherein the Supreme Court determined some measure of federal responsibility to Métis people. Yet the justices in the decision neither confirmed nor denied that people making claims to Métisness (often) on the basis of distant Indigenous ancestry, are people for whom federal responsibility extends. This is due to (what appears on the surface to be) a lack of clarity around the definition of Métis as it exists in section 35 of the Canadian Constitution of 1982. In light of this, this article offers a brief discussion of the Powley case, the first major Supreme Court decision pertaining to Métis rights and the first that sought to offer a pathway for determining who is Métis in the context of section 35(2) “Aboriginal rights.” It then takes a chronological step backwards to the time of constitutional negotiations to discuss the situation of Métis within the category of Aboriginal peoples. The article then ties this discussion into the recent Supreme Court decision in Daniels v. Canada. I argue that political activists put forth a specific definition of Métis rooted in an understanding of Métis nationhood that was not formally entrenched in the 1982 Constitution; this definition should be embraced and acknowledged to appropriately narrow the meaning of Métis in section 35. This would in turn have implications for Daniels and the federal government’s responsibility to the Métis Nation.
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 | 0.003 | 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 | 0.011 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| 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".