Family Status Discrimination: Caregiving and the Prima Facie Case
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The growing number of dual-income families with young children and ageing parents has led to a corresponding increase in the number of accommodation requests relating to childcare and eldercare. Determining whether an employer’s denial of such a request constitutes prima facie discrimination on the basis of family status has bedeviled adjudicators, resulting in various “tests” being enunciated across Canada. While some scholars and adjudicators have suggested that these “tests” are inconsistent with the test set out by the Supreme Court of Canada in Moore v. British Columbia and place a uniquely high burden on claimants to establish prima facie discrimination, the authors suggest that is not necessarily correct. The existing tests for family status discrimination can be reconciled with the Moore test, through an acknowledgment that they simply inform the necessary analysis to consider at the third stage of the Moore test. All of these tests recognize that there is always a conflict between spending time with family members and spending time at work, which therefore requires a more nuanced approach to determine whether the third stage of the Moore test is met. The authors propose that these tests boil down to a simple question or issue—whether a claimant has the “meaningful choice,” or is “reasonably able,” to comply with both family and work obligations, given the claimant’s unique circumstances and workplace obligations. Finally, the authors argue that the common objections to considering this issue do not provide persuasive reasons for departing from the overall adjudicative consensus.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.009 |
| 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".