A house divided: The Supreme Court of Canada’s recent jurisprudence on the standard of review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, the author examines the Supreme Court of Canada’s administrative law jurisprudence in 2016–18 to measure the level of deference that the Court afforded to administrative decision makers and to assess where the law may be headed next. The Court’s voting patterns indicate that its members have become increasingly polarized, moving away from the high level of unanimity that has historically prevailed in this area. Led by Justice Suzanne Côté, a minority of justices have frequently dissented or concurred in order to disagree on either the identification or the application of the standard of review. These justices have taken a more interventionist approach, voting to apply the correctness standard and to overturn administrative decisions at higher rates than the rest of the Court. This quantitative polarization reflects doctrinal disagreements on basic questions such as the extent to which administrative decision makers should be presumed to have expertise relative to the courts in interpreting their enabling statutes, whether there is any room in the standard of review analysis for either the concept of jurisdiction or a contextual inquiry, whether legislative supremacy or the rule of law should take precedence, and whether the standard of review analysis should be replaced with a single reasonableness standard. Looking ahead to the Court’s forthcoming reconsideration of Dunsmuir v New Brunswick, which approach prevails may be determined by Justice Michael Moldaver, whose voting pattern on the issue has been inconsistent, and the Court’s newest member, Justice Sheilah Martin, whose views on the standard of review analysis are not known.
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 | 0.029 | 0.059 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.033 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.030 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.019 | 0.022 |
| 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".