The Canadian Courts’ Approach to the ‘Duty to Consult’ Indigenous Peoples: A Comparative Overview
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Articles 18, 19 and 23 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples 2008 and Articles 6 and 15 of the ILO Convention Concerning Indigenous and Tribal People No 169 of 1989, generated a concept of the ‘duty to consult’ indigenous peoples in matters that adversely affect their interests. The question as to whether this ‘duty to consult’ had not developed into a rule of customary international law, was raised at the International Law Association’s meeting in Sofia in 2012. To answer this question a survey of state practice needs to be undertaken. This article focusses on the state practice of Canada regarding the ‘duty to consult’ as illustrated by decisions of that country’s courts. It can be implied that Canadian courts see the ‘duty to consult’ as an obligation which must be adhered to. Canadian courts have recognised the ‘duty to consult’ since the judgment in R v Sparrow in 1990, but the elaboration of the concept came strongly to the fore in a trilogy of cases in 2004 and 2005 in the Haida Nation, Taku River Tlingit First Nation and Mikisew Cree First Nation cases. Since then, the concept has been incisively discussed and applied in the Canadian Supreme Court in the Rio Tinto, Little Salmon, Moses and the Behn/Moulton Contracting cases from 2010 to 2013. The above developments are encapsulated in the 2017 Ontario Superior Court case of Saugeen First Nation. The example of Canadian courts accepting ‘the duty to consult’ its indigenous peoples has manifested itself in other jurisdictions, particularly in Australia and recently in South Africa; and indicates an evolving international customary law norm.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.021 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.040 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".