How to Deal with a Fickle Friend? Alberta's Troubles with the Doctrine of Federal Paramountcy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Alberta energy law and policy rarely generates consensus between the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, the United Farmers of Alberta, other landowners, Indigenous peoples, environmental groups, the Alberta Energy Regulator (“AER”), Alberta Energy, and Alberta’s Freehold Owners Association. However, none of these groups are happy with the fallout from the Alberta Court of Appeal’s (“ABCA”) decision in Orphan Well Association v Grant Thornton Limited (“Redwater”). The reason for concern is that Redwater has punched a hole in the AER’s strategy to help ensure upstream operators provide for proper abandonment of old oil and gas wells. The Supreme Court of Canada (“SCC”) heard the AER’s appeal in February 2018. Some believe that Justice Martin’s dissenting opinion in the ABCA judgment in Redwater may provide a better path, but even those individuals who sympathize with its conclusion believe her reasoning “may be reaching too far”. This detailed article offers an alternative path, which is based on the proper application of the doctrine of federal paramountcy in this context. The doctrine of federal paramountcy states that if there is a conflict between two pieces of legitimately legislated law, and if one is provincial and the other is federal, the provincial law is inoperative to the extent that the two laws are incompatible. A classic example of such incompatibility is when a citizen must violate one of the two laws to comply with the other. “Co-operative federalism” guides the courts’ application of this doctrine. This constitutional principle asks courts to adopt a “strict definition” of “conflict”, allowing each level of government the flexibility to engage in pragmatic alignments. Courts are supposed to allow room for modern governance, which often requires multilevel governmental function. In other words, co-operative federalism is a constitutional principle that adds flexibility to the “watertight compartments” view of federal and provincial powers, which has been an essential part of Canada’s constitutional structure since its inception. Part II will explain the federal paramountcy test and the key precedents for its application to Redwater. Part III will apply the federal paramountcy test to Redwater. Part IV will conclude, offering some final reflections on the doctrine of federal paramountcy.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.038 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.020 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".