Subnational Sabotage or National Paramountcy? Examining the Dynamics of Subnational Acceptance of International Agreements
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Federal states, such as Canada and the United States, face unique problems in implementing international agreements because they require the acceptance by subnational governments of these treaties even when the negotiations (i) do not involve them and (ii) may be impeding the rights of those subnational governments. Ever since the "watertight compartments" decision of Lord Atkin in the 1937 Labour Standards case, provincial autonomy within its sphere of influence has been a primary foci of Canadian jurisprudence. The primacy of provincial legislatures in the respective realms means that international obligations cannot be forced on them without their consent. On the other hand, both the interstate commerce clause of the US Constitution and the federal power to make treaties has been interpreted broadly to prohibit state interference in US government-signed international treaties. Even non-federal states such as the People's Republic of China have had to deal with this problem given the Special Administrative Regions of Hong Kong and Macau and the SARs' ability to sign international agreements without PRC involvement. This issue even affects sovereign states such as Jamaica when they are part of a common market superstructure, such as the proposed Caribbean Common Market (CARICOM). This paper examines, using examples drawn from Canada, the United States, Hong Kong, and the Caribbean, the influence subnational governments (and sovereign governments that are part of a common market) have on the viability of international agreements and uses game theory to suggest ways to balance the need to avoid subnational sabotage of such agreements without invoking a national paramountcy argument that could destroy a country's federal structure and create irreparable harm to the rights of subnational governments.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".