Breaking Ranks (and Precedent): Reference re Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act, 2020 ABCA 74
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Alberta Court of Appeal recently released its decision in Reference re Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act, Alberta’s challenge to the constitutionality of the federal government’s Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act. Writing for a majority of three judges, Chief Justice Catherine Fraser concluded that the GGPPA could not be upheld on the basis of Parliament’s residual power over matters of “peace, order, and good government” (POGG), nor any other potentially relevant federal head of power. This comment focuses on the majority opinion of the Alberta Court of Appeal, beginning with a summary and some brief commentary (Part II). Part III offers detailed commentary on the majority’s approach to section 92A, subsidiarity, the division of powers analysis generally, several aspects of the national concern doctrine, and the overall tenor of the decision. While we acknowledge that there is some uncertainty in the case law that leaves room for genuine disagreement and arguments both for and against the federal government’s reliance on POGG, in our respectful view the majority is simply incorrect on several fronts and strays far from precedent on others. The judgment is also unhelpfully burdened with rhetoric and value judgments that are hardly relevant to the process of legal reasoning.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.023 | 0.017 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.003 |
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".