You Say You Want an Environmental Rights Revolution?: Try Changing Canadians' Minds Instead (of the Charter)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The well-intentioned argument for constitutionalizing the right to a healthy environment in the Charter is misconceived legally, politically, and as a matter of progressive environmental strategy. Arguments for constitutionalizing environmental rights unjustifiably privilege and assign causal efficacy to the constitution’s text, and exaggerate the transformative potential of case-by-case litigation. Moreover, proposals for top-down constitutional amendment pay insufficient attention to the bottom-up normative foundations that generate effective policies. Not only do arguments in favour of establishing a Charter right to a healthy environment either grossly underestimate or ignore altogether the political price tag of such a constitutional amendment, they likewise ignore the irony inherent in the proposal itself – would that it were politically possible to reach “7/50” and entrench the right to a healthy environment in the Charter, such an amendment would hardly be necessary in the first place, for the same political will would already be reflected in progressive federal and provincial environmental laws and policies. In the short and mostly regrettable history of Canadian environmental law, however, governments have generally been unwilling to pursue environmental protection save for brief periods of exceptional public concern. As a matter of policy, scholars should concentrate on the bottom-up drivers of greater public engagement in polycentric environmental governance. An emerging body of research suggests that advocates focus on communicating the economic development and community resilience co-benefits of pursuing climate change mitigation and sustainability policies.
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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 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.038 | 0.040 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 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".