Kahkewistahaw First Nation v. Taypotat – Whither Section 25 of the Charter?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the Supreme Court of Canada’s most recent equality rights decision, Kahkewistahaw First Nation v Taypotat, the Court unanimously dismissed a section 15(1) Charter challenge to a community election code requirement that members of the First Nation running for Chief or Band Councillor have a Grade 12 education or its equivalent. Rejecting Taypotat’s argument that the election code was discriminatory, the Court focused on the objectives of adopting the education requirement. The requirement could have been seen as a matter to be shielded by section 25 of the Charter, which requires Charter rights to be interpreted so as not to derogate from Aboriginal, treaty or other rights. However, section 25 was not argued before nor addressed by the Supreme Court in Taypotat. The Court has not considered section 25 since its 2008 decision in R v Kapp, and only the concurring judgment of Justice Bastarache in Kapp fully explored its implications. We argue that the failure to consider section 25 in Taypotat was a missed opportunity, especially because it is the only Supreme Court section 15(1) decision to date with an Aboriginal government as respondent (out of a total of eight Charter equality rights decisions in an Aboriginal context). Our paper reviews the potential application of section 25 in Taypotat, and concludes with a plea to litigators and the courts to move section 25 jurisprudence forward.
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 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 | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".