Case Comment: Missing the Forest for the Trees in Canada (Attorney General) v Bedford
Bibliographic record
Abstract
EnglishThis case comment on Canada (Attorney General) v Bedford examines the doctrinal developments of section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Specifically, Bedford discussed three critical aspects of section 7: 1) the role of stare decisis, 2) the issue of causation, and 3) the substantive principles of procedural fairness analysis. The author identifies access to section 7 as the Supreme Court of Canada’s predominant concern in the development of section 7 doctrine in Bedford. Unfortunately, this concern has not made for a necessarily more workable or more coherent doctrine. This paper attempts to show how the doctrinal developments in Bedford, especially those relating to the substantive principles of fundamental justice analysis, may 1) do little to benefit a marginalized claimant’s opportunity to succeed, and 2) be inappropriate to resolve the complex systemic issues that section 7 readily attracts. francaisCe commentaire sur la cause Canada (Procureur general) c. Bedford examine l’evolution de la doctrine de l’article 7 de la Charte canadienne des droits et libertes. Plus particulierement, dans Bedford, on discuta trois aspects cruciaux de l’article 7 : 1) le role de stare decisis, 2) la question de la causalite et 3) les principes de fond lies a l’analyse de l’equite procedurale. L’auteur identifie l’acces a l’article 7 comme etant la preoccupation predominante de la Cour supreme du Canada par rapport a l’evolution de la doctrine de l’article 7 dans Bedford. Malheureusement, cette preoccupation n’a pas mene a une doctrine forcement plus viable ou plus coherente. L’auteur de cet article tente de montrer comment les developpements de la doctrine dans Bedford, notamment ceux qui se rapportent aux principes de fond lies a l’analyse de la justice fondamentale, peuvent 1) faire tres peu pour avantager la possibilite de reussite d’un plaignant marginalise et 2) etre mal adaptes pour resoudre les problemes systemiques complexes qu’attire facilement l’article 7.
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 | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.031 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.026 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 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".