The architectural metaphor and the decline of political conventions in the Supreme Court of Canada’s <i>Senate Reform Reference</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2014, the Supreme Court of Canada rejected the federal government’s Senate reform agenda. This article focuses on the Court’s response to the government’s proposal for consultative (non-binding) elections, which would have had the prime minister consider recommending an electorate’s preferred candidate for nomination by the governor general. The Court rejected the government’s argument that the proposal was consistent with the legally unenforceable parliamentary conventions of responsible government. The Court characterized the proposal as a break in Canada’s ‘constitutional architecture.’ I ask: how is it that Canada’s constitutional architecture has become unconventional? My answer lies in the Court’s theorization of what the Constitution is and how it may be amended. I trace a shift in the Court’s metaphorical reasoning, from the 1981 Patriation Reference’s Constitution as dynamic machine where conventions are its ‘operative force’ to the 1998 Secession and 2014 Senate Reform References, where a static and aesthetically coherent Constitution as architecture emerges. I argue that, in its architectural understanding, the Court understates the role of conventions in constitutional amendment and finally casts conventions as the saboteurs of a unified constitutional design.
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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.040 | 0.051 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".