Reconciling Shared Rule: Liberal Theory, Electoral-Districting Law and “National Group” Representation in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Canada, like all representative democracies, apportions representation to individuals; also, like all federal states, it accords polity-based representation to federal subunits. But Canada is additionally a consociational state, comprising three constitutionally recognized “national groups”: anglophones, francophones and Indigenous peoples. These groups share power and bear rights beyond the bounds of the federal system. In recent decades, Indigenous peoples and francophones have appealed for representation as “national groups,” leading to constitutional challenges. Courts have either failed to address the constitutionality of “national group” representation or have rejected it as irreconcilable with individual voting rights. I suggest the former is unnecessary and the latter procedurally illogical. Drawing on the liberal principles of individualism, egalitarianism and universalism, I develop a framework contextualizing such representation within liberal theory. I then deploy this framework to analyze recent Canadian case law. I show that appeals for “national group” representation should be approached not through the lens of individual rights, but rather through the “constitutionally prior” lens of universalism.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".