Environmental Justice and the Charter: Do Environmental Injustices Infringe Sections 7 and 15 of the Charter?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is increasing evidence of environmental injustice in Canada, where individuals and/or communities experience disproportionate levels of harm from pollution or do not share equally in the benefits a healthy environment has to offer (such as clean air and water). This article examines the extent to which the right to life, liberty and security of the person under s. 7 and the equality guarantee in s. 15 safeguard against such injustices. The analysis suggests that there is ample scope within both sections to capture many different types of environmental justice claims. While each section has relative advantages and disadvantages, and the facts of a specific case will ultimately be determinative, the strength of s. 7 is the scope of its protections, which apply to all Canadians, as well as recent progressive and expansive judicial interpretations of s. 7. One of the stumbling blocks of s. 7 is the need for claimants to establish a sufficient causal connection between the harm they have suffered and the government action. One of s. 15’s strengths is that it focuses on discriminatory treatment rather than a causal connection, which may side-step the challenge of proving a s. 7 claim. A downside of section 15 is that it only applies to specific groups, which means those individuals experiencing environmental injustices based on income levels alone would not be captured by its protections. However, the fact that environmental cases have rarely been argued under section 15 may create an opening for progressive judicial interpretation of its protections, especially given the Supreme Court of Canada’s repeated statements about the importance of a healthy environment.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".