‘Free to Deal as He May Choose’: The Displacement of ‘Freedom of Commerce’ as a Necessary Condition to the Creation of Canadian Multiculturalism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the 1940s the Canadian legal system was one which seemed incapable of recognizing racial discrimination as a problem worthy of jurisprudential attention. The 1939 Supreme Court of Canada decision in Christie v York Corporation confirmed that the owners of a tavern were entitled to refuse to serve a black man; in the infamous case of Viola Desmond, the courts held that a theatre owner was within its rights to segregate seating on the basis of skin colour. Excepting marginal voices expressing concern, no significant protest was raised against the court decisions. Sixty years later, facts virtually identical to those found in the Christie case resulted in a large monetary penalty being levied against the offending bar owner—like an inversion of Christie before it, the decision was so congruent with contemporary sensibilities that it occasioned virtually no comment. Using the Christie and Desmond cases and the introduction of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms as focal points, this paper traces the linguistic and legal changes which help explain such radically different responses from the legal system.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| 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".