Piecemeal Solutions to Demonstrated Problems of Unfairness: Control of Price Terms in Common Law Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper is a chapter contribution to an edited volume comparing various national approaches to the control of price terms in consumer and other standard form contracts. This chapter deals with Canadian federal law and that of the common law provinces (i.e. all provinces other than Quebec). Common law Canada displays a marked disjunction between ex ante and ex post price control strategies. The federal government and provinces are avid price regulators, imposing explicit price controls and transparency mandates applicable to many consumer contracts. However, their legislative and regulatory strategy has been a piecemeal one, with most regulations applying to individual industry sectors, in particular those where popular pressure to crack down on deceptive practices or high prices generates political momentum. By contrast, the courts have assigned themselves a strictly limited role in regulating price terms ex post. They continue to hew to traditional notions of freedom of contract, and to invalidate price terms in exceedingly narrow circumstances derived from historically-recognized categories of unfairness—piecemeal solutions of a different kind. Neither the courts nor the legislatures have developed a general theory or policy of contractual unfairness, in standard contracts or otherwise. The overall effect is that ex ante regulation of price terms is stringent where it exists but uneven in application, while ex post control of price terms by the courts is widely available in principle but rarely if ever occurs in practice.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.007 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".