Nothing to Declare: A Response to Grégoire Webber, Eric Mendelsohn, Robert Leckey, and Léonid Sirota on the Effects of the Notwithstanding Clause
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the wake of the legal challenge to Quebec’s law on state secularism,1 Professor Grégoire Webber, lawyer Éric Mendelsohn, and Dean Robert Leckey jointly published a post. In that post, they argue that the invocation of the "notwithstanding clause" in section 33 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms does not preclude a court from making a declaration of "consistency." By such a declaration, a Court would declare the mere "inconsistency," not the invalidity or inoperability, of legislative provisions for which section 33 had been invoked with the constitutional rights from which they validly derogate.2 Their arguments ought to be reviewed and assessed, as they constitute creative but ultimately erroneous development in legal thought on section 33 in Canadian law. 1 Act Respecting the Laicity of the State, CQLR c L-0.3.2 Grégoire Webber, Eric Mendelsohn & Robert Leckey, “The faulty received wisdom around the notwithstanding clause” Policy Options Politiques (10 May 2019) online: <irpp.org/magazines/ may-2019/faulty-wisdom-notwithstanding-clause/>.
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.
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 | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".