Continuity of Constitutional Government during a Pandemic: Considering the Concept in Canada's Emergency Management Act
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This research note examines the undefined meaning of the government's obligations to ensure “continuity of constitutional government” (CCG) as provided for in section 4(l) of the Emergency Management Act, S.C. 2007, c. 15 (Canada, 2007). Specifically, that section gives the minister of public safety and emergency preparedness the responsibility for “establishing the necessary arrangements for the continuity of constitutional government in the event of an emergency,” but the term is itself undefined. The article will canvass the origin of the term and its relationship to other so-called continuity of government (COG) concepts, along with some legal written opinion on what the term might in practice mean, should the minister ever be charged with discharging this responsibility. It will conclude with some final thoughts on the relevance of the CCG concept to the current pandemic. Given that the COVID-19 virus has infected Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, the prime minister's wife, forced a drastically reduced and possibly “virtual” federal Parliament, placed the British prime minister in intensive care and led to the self-isolation of many world leaders, the topic is relevant to Canada in 2020.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.050 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".