Biased Neutrality: The Supreme Court of Canada’s Unbalanced Attempt at Arbitration
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Supreme Court of Canada, with its judicial review powers, has been a central actor in interpreting and assigning certain powers to different levels of government and settling many constitutional debates. Although it is supposed to be a neutral and impartial party in the complex governance system, this article argues that the Supreme Court has constantly favoured the federal government’s interests and has not been a ‘balanced federal arbiter’. This has been exemplified by its tendencies to decide in the government’s favour, continued expansion of federal power, and instances of repressing minority and provincial interests. A statistical analysis of the government’s interventions in matters of constitutional significance and instances of overriding legislative boundaries to further federal interests demonstrates the unbalanced nature of the Court’s arbitration. These findings are concerning as they reveal an underlying preference for a Pan-Canadian vision of the Canadian federation rather than the multinational model sought by the Quebecois and Indigenous peoples.
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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 | 0.027 | 0.054 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".