Does Canada Need a Political Questions Doctrine
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The challenging and compelling character of the claims made before the Supreme Court, and the breadth of possible judicial responses, has made the search for limiting institutional principles both timely and controversial. The debate over the proper reach of the Court's jurisdiction is an important and a delicate task.While the Court has in different contexts expressly recognized the importance of staying within the judicial role contemplated under the Canadian Constitution, we will argue that it has not yet established clear and transparent principles either in the expression of that role or its application. In this paper, we divide our analysis into the following three sections. First, we offer a definition of a political questions doctrine and summarize the experience in the United States dealing with a similar exercise in seeking to develop a political questions doctrine. The body of case law in the United States concerning political questions is potentially valuable as an example of how a similarly situated judiciary has come to grips with the judicial response to political controversies. In the second section, we seek to extract from the American experience lessons which might be applicable to Canada, with appropriate accommodation for our distinctive jurisprudential traditions and Constitution. Finally, in the third section, we examine the Canadian experience and review the Court's position with respect to political questions as evidenced in its recent judicial work.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".