The Canadian Reference Power: Delegation to the Courts and the Navigation of Federalism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The Canadian reference power allows governments to ask appellate courts for an advisory opinion without a live dispute. Reference cases have been an important element of Canadian federalism since their creation in 1875 but have not been subject to a comprehensive analysis. Shifting the focus to understanding government decisions to rely on the courts to navigate federalism, this article has two objectives. First, through analysis of an original dataset of Canadian appellate reference cases from 1875 to 2017, the article provides an examination of how references have been used by governments, with particular attention to issues related to federalism. Second, the article considers how the reference power can be employed as a political strategy by governments. The reference power demonstrates clear support for the blame avoidance and credit-claiming thesis and provides compelling evidence on how the dynamics of intergovernmental relations can shape a government’s decision to delegate decision-making to the courts.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.043 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.013 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".