Section 15(1) at the Supreme Court 2001-2002: Caution and Conflict in Defining “The Most Difficult Right”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since early 2001, the Supreme Court of Canada has considered section 15(1) in three important rulings: Dunmore v. Ontario (Attorney General), Trinity Western University v. College of Teachers (British Columbia) and Lavoie v. Canada (Public Service Commission). Both Dunmore and Trinity Western raise but do not satisfactorily address issues involving the interaction of equality and other rights or freedoms, and section 15 failed to figure prominently in either ruling. In Lavoie, on the other hand, the Court agreed that a section 15(1) analysis was required. However, its fractured approach revealed that the search for common ground on the understanding of equality rights remains elusive. The cases do not display a unifying theme. The concurring reasons in Dunmore suggest that future claims of discrimination based on the characteristics of a group of workers may get at least a lukewarm reception at the Court. The majority’s decision to avoid section 15(1) in favour of section 2(d) leaves us without much guidance in that regard. The facts of Trinity Western bring to the fore the potential clash of religious freedom and equality rights, a clash that will continue to trouble Char-
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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 | 0.037 | 0.064 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.026 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.038 | 0.043 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".