Carter v. Canada (Attorney General), The Constitutional Attack on Canada’s Ban on Assisted Dying: Missing an Obvious Chance to Rule on the Charter’s Disability Equality Guarantee
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Is it important only to legal scholars that the Supreme Court decided Carter v. Canada (Attorney General), — the landmark, assisted dying case — under the wrong Charter provision? In this case, when the Court struck down the Criminal Code provision that makes it a crime to assist another person to end their life (section 241(b)), it found an unjustified violation of Charter section 7. This provision guarantees that no one will be “deprived” of their “life, liberty or security of the person”, except “in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.” The Court did not consider whether the impugned law violated the principle of disability equality guaranteed by Charter section 15. This section guarantees the constitutional right to equality “before and under the law”, and to “the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination” on various grounds, including “mental or physical disability”.
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 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.015 | 0.010 |
| 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".