Thirty Years with Section 15 of the “Charter”: A Report on Legislative Terminology in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The article summarizes the results of an audit of every statute in Canada (other than Quebec) for evidence of discriminatory language that could be contrary to s. 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It is a revisit of audits that were completed in the three-year holiday granted to s. 15 until April 1985, which generally concluded that governments did not systematically address the wide-ranging instances of direct discrimination in Canadian legislation as promised. Over thirty years later, the article shows that the problem still persists. Wide disparities in legislative attempts to comply with s. 15 remain — with the ground of “sex” remaining the most concerning. The article also reviews other grounds of direct discrimination that can be found in legislative provisions, although these are generally less problematic.\nIn terms of gendered language, Canadian laws now contain a random admixture of neutral and non-neutral language, some discriminatory and some likely justified. Piecemeal reform continues to be the norm. The audit reveals such continuing problems in statutes as gendered job titles, assumed male officials and professionals, outdated terms, archaic language in older statutes and incorporated laws. Relatively simple solutions, such as comprehensive neutral drafting reforms are examined. The article concludes with a call for comprehensive review and reform by federal, provincial and territorial governments.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".