‘Honey let’s just keep the doors open’: A Critical study on the abrogation of spousal privileged communication in Canada and its implications in criminology
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The doctrine of spousal privileged communication existed in the common law and the Canadian law for centuries until it was abruptly abrogated in the year 2015 by the previous conservative government in light of the victims’ rights movement, without much debate or discussion in the parliament. Communications between spouses (and now partners) were privileged on the ground that they were so closely identified with each other than an aura of bias would surround any testimonial evidence they may present before a court against their partner, due to an inherent or vested interest in the trial. Until 2015, the reason this privileged communication was protected, with some limitations, was due to the preservation of marital harmony. Why was the preservation of marital harmony no more a social value in Canada? I argue that this unfounded and abrupt abrogation was unwarranted and since the same was done without any research, it will have long term implications in criminology. Therefore, this paper has three key aims, firstly, to explore the concept, meaning and the origin of spousal privileged communication in Canada and the commonwealth including the reasons behind safeguarding and fostering spousal relationships over other relationships. Secondly, the applicability and scope of spousal privileged communication in Canada pre and post 2015, i.e. Bill C-32 that abrogated spousal privileged communication in Canada. Chapter 2 will also address some key points that contradicts the intention of the legislature behind abrogating spousal privileged communication. Thirdly, the paper argues that the spousal privileged communication should have been retained, and draws upon evidence from criminological, sociological and legal realms to define four key reasons why this is so. This paper essentially calls for further understanding of the causal mechanisms that flow from the abrogation of this spousal privilege and for monitoring future outcomes through longitudinal studies.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".