Is Password Compulsion Constitutional in Canada? Two Views
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The recent Ontario Court of Justice decision in R v Shergill is the first case in Canada to deal directly with the constitutionality of password compulsion. The Crown sought to use the 'assistance order' power in section 487.02 of the Criminal Code to obtain an order compelling the accused to open his locked phone. The defence argued that this would violate the accused's right to silence and right against self-incrimination. Justice Downes agreed with the accused, setting out a detailed set of reasons password or plaintext compulsion violates the Charter. We provide an overview and brief critique of these reasons, then turn in part II to a summary of the argument in favour of constitutionality set out by Steven Penney and Dylan Gibbs, along with a brief critique. We conclude with suggestions for reform of the Code to address concerns about lawful access to encrypted data.
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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 | 0.028 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.037 | 0.039 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.016 | 0.022 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.001 |
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".