The Charter of Whiteness: Twenty-Five Years of Maintaining Racial Injustice in the Canadian Criminal Justice System
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the impact of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms on racial injustice in the Canadian criminal justice system. While there have been modest gains, we have seen very little systemic change over the Charter’s 25-year life. We continue to incarcerate Aboriginals and African Canadians at alarming rates, racial profiling at our borders and in our streets continues to flourish, and the federal government continues to propose legislation that will further entrench the problem. Why is this happening? is there any hope for the future? these are some of the fundamental questions explored. of course, some might say that it is simply naive to think that constitutional litigation can make a difference when dealing with structural and systemic problems. This larger philosophical question is addressed in Part II. Part III sets out and defends the the sis that it is not so much the Charter that is the problem but rather those who apply and interpret it. Racial justice has not had a chance to grow over the last 25 years because there has been a significant failure of trial and appellate lawyers to engage in race talk in the courts and a failure of the judiciary to adopt appropriate critical race standards when invited to do so. Engaging in race talk and developing critical race standards are critical because colourblind due process standards are working disproportionately to the disadvantage of racialized groups. There is reason though to be optimistic. Criminal lawyers and judges are committed to the pursuit of justice and with a greater understanding of what needs to be done and commitment to getting it done, we may begin to see some significant change.
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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 | 0.018 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.070 | 0.039 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 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".