One Step Forward, Two Steps Back? Substantive Equality, Systemic Discrimination and Pay Equity at the Supreme Court of Canada
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2018, 31 years after the equality rights guarantee in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms took effect, women won their first Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) appeal based on sex discrimination under section 15 of the Charter. This historical “first” was delivered in Quebec (Attorney General) v. Alliance du personnel professionnel et technique de la santé et des services sociaux. The Court vindicated women’s long-standing entitlement to non-discriminatory pay at work by striking down provisions of Quebec’s Pay Equity Act (PEA) which allowed identified sex discrimination in pay to go unrectified. The SCC had ruled previously on five section 15 appeals alleging sex discrimination against women. All five claims failed. In only one did the Court even find a section 15 violation before dismissing it as justifiable under section 1 of the Charter. Until 2018, the only successful section 15 sex discrimination cases at the SCC had been brought by men. Alliance thus marks a watershed. An unsuccessful companion pay equity appeal, Centrale des syndicats du Quebec v. Quebec (Attorney General), was released the same day. Together the rulings plant seeds from which a more rigorous substantive equality analysis could grow to confront systemic discrimination. But celebration should remain tempered because the two cases simultaneously blaze as warning signs of the unrelentingly unresolved fractures that lie at the foundation of section 15 jurisprudence.
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.
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 | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 it