Bibliographic record
Abstract
The decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in Daniels v. Canada (Indian Affairs and Northern Development), has resolved a longstanding dispute about the scope of section 91(24) of the Constitution Act, 1867. We now know with certainty that both Métis and non-status Indians fall within the constitutional category of “Indians” that is contained in this provision. However, many questions remain about the interpretation and impact of section 91(24). This article will only attempt to address a small sub-set of these questions, focusing primarily on methods of constitutional interpretation. This argument begins by noting that the Supreme Court of Canada in Daniels seems to be using both originalist and progressive techniques of constitutional interpretation. I describe and evaluate the specific evidence raised to support the originalist side of the argument, that is, the claim that the word “Indians” in section 91(24) was always understood as including the Métis. I argue that much of this evidence is not particularly strong, and that some of the arguments developed based on this evidence risk bringing racist and assimilationist beliefs and policies of the time into our contemporary constitutional practice. I then turn to the arguments Abella J. makes for a progressive interpretation of section 91(24) which are much stronger in my view. I conclude by suggesting a variety of ways by which future constitutional interpretation in this field might draw from the stronger progressive side of the Daniels decision, while considering ways to avoid the potential pitfalls of reifying 19th century racial distinctions. Such an approach might provide a stronger foundation for future efforts to achieve reconciliation.
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".