Canada: tobacco companies must pay C$16bn to Quebec smokers, appeal court rules
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Quebec’s Court of Appeal has upheld a landmark 2015 judgment ordering three tobacco companies to pay C$16bn (£9.1bn; €10.6bn; US$12bn) in damages to Quebec smokers.12 Imperial Tobacco, JTI-Macdonald, and Rothmans-Benson & Hedges won some minor procedural arguments but lost their appeal on all substantive grounds before Quebec’s highest court. Interest that has accrued during the appeal process will add more than a billion dollars to the payout in Canada’s biggest ever class action suit, which was first filed 21 years ago. The three companies are expected to launch one final appeal, to Canada’s Supreme Court, which the plaintiffs’ lawyers hope could be completed in about a year. The companies also face several lawsuits from provinces looking to recoup decades of smoking related health expenditure. The Quebec class action was notable not just for the size of the claims but for the novel arguments deployed …
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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 | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.018 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.026 | 0.004 |
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".