Climate Change, Constitutions, and Courts: The Reference re Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act and Beyond
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The aim of this article is to critically assess the Court of Appeal for Saskatchewan’s advisory opinion in the Reference re Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act, not merely in terms of constitutional law doctrine, but in terms of the Canadian climate policy politics and priorities of which the Court’s opinion is inescapably a part. This raises the following question: What if Canadian federalism, particularly Canadian courts’ interpretation of federalism, were to pose a true obstacle to effective climate action? Or, to frame the question in an even more pointed way: What good is federalism, or even the Canadian constitutional order, if we are all dead? I argue that the provincial challenges to the constitutional validity of the federal government’s climate-change legislation — dubbed the “Saskatchewan Strategy” — have very little to do with constitutional law doctrine. These challenges, rather, are a continuation of climate politics by other means, and serve only to delay and distract Canadians from the difficult public policy choices that the country must make to effectively contribute to climate change mitigation. I further argue that the advisory opinions of the Courts of Appeal for both Saskatchewan and Ontario in respect of the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act are similarly only ostensibly about jurisdiction and the division of federal and provincial powers. Their opinions, rather, reflect and reinforce the country’s ambivalence about climate change, and its assurance — notwithstanding the cascading conclusions of climate science demonstrating otherwise — that business as usual is a rational and responsible path forward. Finally, I argue that federalism is neither timeless, nor fixed in form, nor truly an obstacle to effective climate policymaking in Canada (were Canada ever to genuinely commit to effective climate policy action). If federalism were ever to truly conflict with Canada’s genuine public policy commitments, it would soon fall into desuetude.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".