Judging the Judges: Judicial Independence and Reforms to the Supreme Court of Canada Appointment Process
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The most important constitutional issue facing Canadians today is the role of the judiciary in the state.The appointment of judges, their security of tenure, their administrative independence and other facets of institutional independence are all aspects of what is becoming the dominant constitutional issue of our time.Twenty years ago we talked about what the Charter of Rights and Freedoms would do.Ten years ago, we talked about where the remarkable Charter jurisprudence would go and how far it would go.Today, more and more the public debate focuses on the judges themselves.Nothing could have a greater effect on constitutional law than changes to the independence of the judiciary.It is in this context that I offer my perspective on possible reform of the appointment process for judges of the Supreme Court of Canada, and how such reform could in turn affect how other federal and provincial court appointments are made.I.
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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 | 0.013 | 0.042 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.032 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".