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: .
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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 | 0.009 | 0.027 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.047 | 0.055 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.005 |
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".