A Narrowing Field of View: An Investigation into the Relationship Between the Principles of Treaty Interpretation and the Conceptual Framework of Canadian Federalism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In its recent decisions in Tsilhqot’in Nation and Grassy Narrows, the Supreme Court of Canada has significantly altered the position of Indigenous peoples within the structure of Canadian federalism. This article sets out to investigate the basis for the Court’s jurisdiction to change this structure. Its approach is historical, as it covers judicial treaty interpretation from St Catherine’s Milling to Grassy Narrows. By contextualizing the most recent change in light of the last 250 years of treaty making, we can see how the notion of Crown sovereignty has become entangled with the Westphalian model of the state (i.e., the state as a politically self-contained and legally autonomous unit for a single “people” or “nation”) and how this entanglement has served to set the boundaries of treaty interpretation. By drawing out how these legal fictions continue to inform the way in which the courts have interpreted treaties, we can begin to explore the possibilities that have been hiding in plain sight. Namely, that the treaties (as documents of inter-societal law) present a conceptual challenge to the Westphalian model and its coupling together of the terms “nation” and “state.” More specifically, the treaties challenge this coupling by pluralizing the idea of the nation, which, in turn, requires us to reimagine the structure of the state. This decoupling of nation and state brings us back to a deeper engagement with the idea of federalism in Canada. This means that the treaties are constitutional documents that offer us a way to reimagine both what Canadian federalism could be and how this particular case could assist in reimagining a post-Westphalian international order.
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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 | 0.022 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.039 | 0.082 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.024 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".