A Question They Can't Refuse? Canadian Reference Questions and Judicial Independence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper addresses one aspect of the very important but understudied Canadian reference power. More specifically, it examines the frequency at which Canadian appellate courts refuse to answer all questions submitted in a reference case and under what conditions courts refuse to answer through analysis of an original dataset of all Canadian appellate court reference cases from 1949 to 2017. Addressing this question of how often and under what conditions courts refuse to answer reference questions is central to understanding how reference power operates, as the statutory foundation for the power does not provide courts any discretion to refuse questions submitted by the executive. This lack of discretion and the reference power itself, raise several concerns for judicial independence. This paper considers the implications for judicial independence brought on by the reference power. This paper argues that courts should have the power to refuse to answer questions that are considered inappropriate to safeguard the independence of the judiciary when participating in the extrajudicial function of reference cases.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| 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; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".