A Right Without a Rights-Holder Is Hollow: Introduction to OHLJ’s Special Issue on Identifying Rights-Bearing Aboriginal Peoples
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The focus of this special issue of the Osgoode Hall Law Journal is on identifying holders of rights which are recognized and affirmed by section 35(1) of the Constitution Act, 1982. While Canadian and provincial governments and industry proponents have assumed that Indian Act bands are section 35 rights-holders, Kent McNeil’s analysis of the relevant jurisprudence reveals that this issue is to be resolved with reference to Aboriginal peoples’ own laws. As such, the assumption that a section 35 rights-holder must possess an overarching governance structure is unwarranted if the relevant Aboriginal people’s own laws are not grounded in positivism. Naiomi Metallic’s incisive critique demonstrates that the reasoning in R v Bernard was captured by precisely this type of positivist assumption when the court held that smaller Migmaq collectives—as opposed to the larger Migmaq nation—must be the rights-holder because the larger Migmaq nation lacked a ‘Super Chief’. Gordon Christie identifies another form of capture within the section 35 jurisprudence: Aboriginal peoples are presumed to be socio-cultural bodies and not political bodies, and Aboriginal rights are presumed to be cultural activities and not governmental powers to exercise jurisdictional authority. Both presumptions are captured by liberalism and neither is supported by the text or by a purposive interpretation of section 35(1). Sara Mainville’s article uncovers a conflict between Canadian and Indigenous law in the context of a Kelly order, which courts characterize as a practical solution to the dilemma of how to identify the rights-holder on an interlocutory motion. Mainville demonstrates that the adversarial effects of a Kelly order contravene the Anishinaabe legal principle of consensus-building. Perhaps unsurprisingly given these various conflicts between Canadian jurisprudence and Indigenous laws, Paul Chartrand argues that the identity of rights-holders should be decided through political negotiations between political actors, and not by the courts. Similarly, Jason Madden argues that the Supreme Court of Canada’s jurisprudence entails a duty on Canadian and provincial governments to negotiate with an Aboriginal people to identify the proper rights-holder when a prima facie Aboriginal right exists. In these ways, the articles in this special issue make valuable contributions to ongoing discussions about identifying section 35 rights-holders.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| 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".