Justice Bastarache, the Charter and Judging: Principled Pragmatism and the Centrality of Equality
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The legacy of Justice Bastarache in respect to the evolution of the Charter of Rights and in particular the concept of equality, is an impressive one. Assessing this legacy is both an opportunity and a challenge. It is an opportunity to view the evolution of the Charter through a human and personal lens and to reflect on the role of an individual judge in shaping the law. It is also a challenge to evaluate Justice Bastarache’s conception of equality because it is pervasive in his Charter analysis and multi-faceted in nature. This challenge is heightened by the fact that other contributors are dealing with criminal law, Aboriginal rights, language rights and even section 15 itself — the core equality guarantee. I shall explore the role that equality plays in Justice Bastarache’s decisions outside the above mentioned areas and through selected cases identify some trends and contributions and ultimately come to some conclusions about his equality legacy and judicial style. This paper was co-authored with Victoria Young, Dalhousie University.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".