Sudden Death: Deconstructing the Justice Minister's Approach to Medical Aid in Dying Following Canada's 2015 Federal Election
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On October 19, 2015, Justin Trudeau’s Liberals won a majority of seats in the 42nd Canadian General Election. Within one week, news media were reporting that the new government would consider asking the Supreme Court of Canada to extend the amount of time it gave Parliament to pass legislation regulating physician-assisted death. Eight months earlier, the Court had ruled unanimously in Carter v. Canada that the country’s criminal prohibition on assisted suicide violated an individual’s right to life, liberty, and security of the person under Canada’s federal bill of rights, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. However, as a practical matter, the Court had suspended its declaration of invalidity for 12 months, giving Parliament one year to devise national regulations for medical aid in dying. The haste with which Trudeau’s government decided to ask the Court for more time to act suggests, first, that the government felt it had to act and, second, that the government felt it needed the Court’s blessing to take more time. Neither of these assumptions was true. Instead, they represent implicit choices that tell an observer how advisors to the Trudeau government thought about the public problem it faced (physician-assisted death) and the solutions that were available to it. At the centre of that problem-solving process was the then-Minister of Justice, Jody Wilson-Raybould. Personal, institutional, cultural, and political factors influenced the Minister’s handling of the physician-assisted death file, which stifled Parliament’s ability to pass farther-reaching reform. This suggests that the task of advising is a highly dynamic, context-specific process that often requires advisors and their principals to make difficult choices among imperfect alternatives.
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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 | 0.036 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.089 | 0.065 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.030 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.015 |
| Research integrity | 0.016 | 0.036 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".