Bibliographic record
Abstract
When Canada’s freshly minted Parliament convened in Ottawa in 1867 to establish foundational legislation for the new country, its members set to work on drafting a statute that would become Canada’s first Act and lay the groundwork for the important task of interpreting all future federal legislation. The resulting Interpretation Act, entitled ‘An Act respecting the Statutes of Canada’, has been described as the “lamp by the light of which our Statutes must be read” and has played a key role in illuminating the meaning of federal laws that have been made ever since. At the time of writing, its provisions, and those of similar provincial and territorial statutes, have been cited nearly 10,000 times by all levels of court in the country, making interpretation statutes some of Canada’s most frequently cited laws. Although its provisions have been amended and entirely new sections have been added over the years, the Interpretation Act continues to play an important role in the legal system by supplying a package of interpretive rules that extend to all federal statutes. The Interpretation Act is accurately characterised as a ‘statutory workhorse’, with its definitions and rules of construction filtering into and underpinning all federal legislation, including statutes and regulations ranging from the criminal offences to human rights, taxation, intellectual property, immigration and banking (to name but a few). Despite the importance of the Interpretation Act to the Canadian legal system, and the call for similar federal legislation in the United States, the statute has largely escaped academic commentary, except where a particular provision has become important to the interpretation of another statute. This chapter examines the history and role of Canada’s federal Interpretation Act. First, it considers the enactment of the Interpretation Act in its historical and constitutional context. Second, it provides an overview and analysis of the contemporary Interpretation Act to better understand its role and function in federal law. Finally, it concludes by considering future directions of the statute, arguing that it is time for Parliament to give the Interpretation Act a ‘creative reboot’ by updating and expanding its provisions to strengthen the coherence of modern federal law.
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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 | 0.015 | 0.042 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.013 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.042 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.024 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.018 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.002 |
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".