Something to Talk About: Applying the Unwritten Principle of Democracy to Secure a Constitutional Right to Access Government Information in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Something to Talk About: Applying the Unwritten Principle of Democracy \nto Secure a Constitutional Right to Access Government Information in Canada \n \nby \n \nVincent Clayton Kazmierski \n \nA thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements \n \nfor the degree of Doctor of Juridical Science \n \nFaculty of Law \n \nUniversity of Toronto \n \n2008 \n \nABSTRACT \n \nIn this thesis, I argue that the unwritten constitutional principle of democracy provides a foundation for the recognition of a constitutional right to access government information in Canada. More specifically, I argue that the principle of democracy can be used to fill the “access gap” in the written provisions of the Constitution. \nI begin by synthesizing the Supreme Court of Canada’s jurisprudence and the work of a number of academics to outline guidelines for the recognition of unwritten constitutional principles. I also attempt to construct a coherent account of the content and effect of the constitutional principle of democracy. \nI proceed to argue that recognition of a right of access to government information as part of the principle of democracy fits within the guidelines I identify as it is supported by “strong” pragmatic, historical and structural evidence. I then demonstrate how the constitutional right of access to government information may be applied to protect access to information in at least three different ways: through statutory interpretation, through the regulation of administrative discretion, and, in exceptional circumstances, through the invalidation of legislation. \n I rely on the work of a number of British scholars and on aspects of David Dyzenhaus’s conception of law as a culture of justification to help bridge the divide between the Supreme Court of Canada’s approach to the application of unwritten constitutional principles and the concerns raised by critics of that approach. I argue that the application of the principle of democracy respects the primary role of democratically elected representatives of the public, while establishing that the judiciary also has an important role to play in the identification and enforcement of fundamental values. I suggest that this judicial role can be effectively constrained through the guidelines sketched by the Supreme Court and more fully articulated in this thesis. Finally, I argue that the application of the principle of democracy to invalidate legislation can also be justified in exceptional circumstances where the legislation imposes substantial impediments on fundamental aspects of the democratic process. In such cases, the principle of parliamentary supremacy is properly counterbalanced by the principle of democracy.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".