Elaborate imaginings: Rethinking environmental obligations in Canadian insolvency law
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Environmental obligations fit uncomfortably into the framework of federal insolvency law. Canadian courts have struggled to articulate which environmental obligations should be stayed, compromised, and discharged in insolvency proceedings and which should remain fully enforceable. In its 2019 decision, Orphan Well Association v Grant Thornton Ltd, the Supreme Court of Canada drew a distinction between two types of environmental obligations: debts and public duties. Debts are subject to being stayed, compromised, and discharged, whereas public duties remain enforceable notwithstanding the obligor’s insolvency proceedings. This article elaborates the distinction drawn by the Supreme Court of Canada between debts and public duties by considering who constitutes the public. It offers three answers. The public could include existing members of the human community, future generations of humanity, or non-human environmental entities. The article synthesizes the legal precedents supporting the different conceptions of the public and traces their implications for insolvency practice. Critics charge that the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in Orphan Well has improperly given environmental obligations a super-priority in insolvency proceedings and that such a reordering of insolvency priorities should have been left to Parliament. Yet careful attention to the ‘public’ character of environmental obligations justifies judicial interventions like the Court’s decision in Orphan Well. As humanity faces the existential threat of climate change, the common law provides scope for reimagining legal concepts to better serve the needs of our communities.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.034 | 0.061 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.014 |
| 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".