Bibliographic record
Abstract
The restrictive covenant must be clear in its restrictions. Given the public policy concern, the courts do not start out favourably disposed to these clauses, and if they are ambiguous, the courts may be inclined to rule them unenforceable. One common example is the use of the word "radius" in the context that the employee is not to work within the radius of X kilometres. A radius requires an identifiable point from which to "radiate" the territory. This might be a local landmark or the front door of the employer. The corporate limits of a large municipality are not a finite point from which to draw a radius. The reasonableness of activity, time, or geographic restrictions cannot be determined if they are ambiguous. An ambiguous restrictive covenant is, on its face, unreasonable and unenforceable. The question was then whether the Court could interpret it in such as way to render it reasonable. The Supreme Court of Canada said that "notional severance," reading down a clause to make it legal and enforceable, is inappropriate to cure an ambiguous restrictive covenant. Courts will not simply rewrite a covenant to what it subjectively considers reasonable, or employers would draft overly broad restrictive covenants and invite the court to sever any unreasonable parts or read down the covenant to what is reasonable. The Supreme Court said this would alter the risks assumed by the parties and increase the chances that employees will face unreasonable restrictions. The Court also considered "blue.pencil severance" which involves deleting part of the clause. The expression came from a 1920 English case which said, "the part severed can be removed by running a blue pencil through it." In Shafron, could the word "Metropolitan" be simply deleted? The Court said that "Metropolitan," while technically meaningless here, was a part of the bargain the parties struck going to the essence of this restriction, and it could not be removed in this way. Nor could the doctrine of rectification be invoked to rewrite the bargain between the parties. In the result, the whole restrictive covenant was struck out as unenforceable because of the ambiguity created by the generic word "Metropolitan."
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 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 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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".