Charter Injunctions, Public Interest Presumption, and the Tyranny of the Majority
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Quebec’s Bill 21, which seeks to restrict employees in its public service from displaying religious symbols at work, has attracted a number of constitutional challenges. In one of those challenges, Hak v Quebec (Attorney General), the plaintiffs sought an injunction suspending the operation of parts of Bill 21 pending a decision on the merits.1 Both the Quebec Superior Court and the Quebec Court of Appeal declined to issue an injunction. The majority of the Quebec Court of Appeal found that in enacting Bill 21 the legislature must be presumed to have acted in the public interest and, as such, the third part of the injunction test — balance of convenience — could not be satisfied.
 The idea that Parliament and provincial legislatures must be presumed to be acting in the public interest — what I will call the public interest presumption — is problematic in Charter cases concerning constraints of fundamental rights and the treatment of minorities. Parliament and provincial legislatures are majoritarian institutions; they are the product of elections where the candidates and parties with the most votes win. A core objective of the Charter is to protect minorities from being oppressed by the majority. Giving too much weight to a majoritarian conception of the public interest in interlocutory injunction applications concerning minority rights undermines the Charter and negates injunctions and stays as elective remedies, particularly where an applicant establishes real harm. To fulfill the Charter’s mandate to protect minority rights it must be recognized that the government does not have a monopoly on representing the public interest and that a majoritarian conception of the public interest cannot control the outcome of the balance of convenience test in the face of evidence that other aspects of the public interest are harmed by the impugned legislation. This short article argues for a much weaker public interest presumption: one that may be rebutted by an applicant adducing evidence of harm to an identifiable group.
 1 Hak c Procureure Générale du Québec, 2019 QCCA 2145 [Hak].
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.017 |
| 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".