Constitutional Amendment After the Senate Reference and the Prospects for Electoral Reform
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The new federal government committed that 2015 would be the last election under the first past the post (“FPTP”) system used since 1867. If the federal electoral system does change, it will be a break from the recent politics of reform. Over the last decade, numerous attempts to reform provincial electoral systems have failed. The additional potential hurdle facing the federal government, which was not relevant for the provinces, is the uncertainty relating to the rules on constitutional amendment, particularly in light of the Reference re Senate Reform. The central questions I address in this article are whether federal electoral reform requires recourse to the formal amendment rules in Part V of the Constitution Act, 1982 and, if so, whether provincial consent is required. Canada famously has one of the democratic world’s most rigid regimes for constitutional amendment. If electoral reform requires provincial consent, then it is likely dead on arrival. While it is formally possible to amend the Constitution even where federal-provincial agreement is obligatory, it is likely to be constructively unamendable in the absence of a new round of mega-constitutional negotiations.
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 | 0.023 | 0.029 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".