Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis explores the meaning and content of s. 41 of the Official Languages Act of Canada, which imposes certain duties on all federal institutions towards French- and English-language minority communities. While vitally important as a component of Canada’s language rights archictecture, the nature and content of s. 41 as a legal norm remain woefully unclear. The immediate aim is to determine: (1) whether s. 41 confers a right to specific measures in particular cases; (2) whether such rights are individual or collective; and (3) if collective, what sort of interests are protected. Section 41 presents a number of interpretive challenges. First, it uses terminology which is undefined in the Act and yet has no self-evident meaning. Thus, the nature of the primary legal subject, 'linguistic minority communities' (LMCs), is unclear, as are the nature of the protected interests, 'vitality' and 'development'. Second, the interpretive principles developed by the case-law for official language rights rely on a conceptual framework that is vague and under-theorized. Key components of that framework, like the concept of a necessary link between language and culture, have yet to be fully explored, either in the case-law or in legal scholarship. This presents an acute problem in the case of s. 41, where the content of these concepts will likely prove dispositive. In order to grapple with these challenges, this thesis develops an account of language rights as collective rights. Drawing on the philosophical literature and existing case-law, I argue that LMCs should be conceived of as collectivities rather than mere aggregates of individuals, and that a number of language rights, such as s. 41 of the OLA, and ss. 16.1 and 23 of the Charter, aim to protect the collective interests of these collectivities. I then define some of these interests from both an empirical and a normative perspective. I conclude by arguing that s. 41 of the OLA protects an 'autonomy interest', which both prohibits federal institutions from interfering with existing LMC autonomy, and provides a basis for claiming enhancements to that autonomy, within the confines of the statutory mandate of the institution in question.
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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| 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".