“Greening” the Charter: Section 7 and the Right to A Healthy Environment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canada is among one of the few remaining United Nations member states that does not have a constitutionally protected right to a healthy environment. Amid concerns about climate change and its impact on human health and well-being, the Constitution has become a focal point for advancing environmental justice in Canada. This paper explores three questions surrounding environmental rights and the Constitution. First, does the right to life, liberty, and security of the person, protected by section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, protect a right to a healthy environment? If it does, would such a right strengthen Canada’s framework for environmental protection? And lastly, what would a robust conception of the right to a healthy environment look like, given the emergence of international human rights in the environmental context? To answer these questions, this paper analyzes the jurisprudence on section 7 of the Charter in the environmental context to determine whether a right to a healthy environment is protected under the right to life, liberty and security of the person. It draws on research from other countries with constitutionally protected environmental rights to assess what benefits such a right can provide and what challenges it poses. This paper also surveys best practices that have emerged from international human rights law to understand what the content of a robust right to a healthy environment might look like. The author argues that courts have implicitly accepted that a right to a healthy environment may be protected by section 7 of the Charter, and that courts should recognize such a right as it could help Canada strengthen its approach to environmental protection.
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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
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".