Breaking the Law's Grip On Equality: A New Paradigm For Section 15
Bibliographic record
Abstract
section 15 jurisprudence is entangled in an overly-complicated analysis which produces a high degree of uncertainty.It is not without cause that the Chief Justice of Canada has termed equality "the most difficult right." 4 In this paper, we argue for a revised approach to the interpretation of section 15.We argue that section 15 has become overly "contextualized" which has two effects, both negative.First, the emphasis on context in section 15 has made interpreting equality more elusive than ever, losing the sort of certainty and predictability that is an important element of the rule of law under our Constitution.Second, Law's penchant for context has essentially eviscerated any role for section 1, which is the proper place where the balancing of interests should take place.This paper has five parts in addition to this introduction.In Part II, we trace the evolution of the Supreme Court's equality jurisprudence up until Law.In Part III, we analyze and critique the Law decision and its aftermath. 5 In Part IV, we identify four key principles relevant to the analysis of equality.We then apply these principles in Part V where we propose a simplified, less contextual approach to section 15 which is more akin to the test the Supreme Court originally articulated in Andrews.More particularly, we argue that in analyzing a claim brought under section 15, the Court should apply the following framework: first, the inquiry under section 15 should be confined to two questions: (i) does the law have either the purpose or effect of disadvantaging the claimant; and (ii) is the disadvantage drawn on the basis of one or more enumerated or analogous grounds; and second, if a prima facie violation of section 15(1) is found, the inquiry should move to section 1 where the government bears the burden of justifying the reasonableness of the restriction on equality.In articulating this test, we argue that all considerations of reasonableness are properly considered under section 1 and not under section 4 The Rt. Hon.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| 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".