Interpreting Freedom of Thought in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The fundamental freedoms set out in section 2 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms encompass a longer list of freedoms than are usually referenced. Recent efforts by various actors to give content to freedom of conscience alongside freedom of religion have drawn on one of the forgotten freedoms of section 2. The present paper seeks to engage with the section 2(b) freedom of thought at a foundational level, setting out a principled approach to interpretation of the section and suggesting some of the range of its possible applications and implications. Part II briefly traces some of the historical lineage behind the freedom of thought guarantee in section 2(b) of the Charter and how that lineage may bear on an understanding of the freedom’s purposes. Part III engages with the limited philosophical writing on the purposes of a constitutionally recognized freedom of thought, notably drawing upon but also seeking to build upon an important article by Lucas Swaine. Part IV builds upon the first two parts to suggest how to frame a legal test for when freedom of thought is infringed by state action. Part V identifies briefly some applications of this test, such as to the types of controversies encountered recently in situations where people have disagreed about implications of potentially compelled expression. The paper suggests that some of the state action in such situations might actually be understood better as involving infringements of freedom of thought and/or that constitutionalists should also recognize intersectional freedom violations.
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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 | 0.010 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.074 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.021 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".