One Step Forward, Two Steps Back? Substantive Equality, Systemic Discrimination and Pay Equity at the Supreme Court of Canada
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.
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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 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.032 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.020 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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".