Answering in Emergency: The Law and Accountability in Canada’s Pandemic Response
Bibliographic record
Abstract
To achieve and protect public health, collective action is essential, especially through government intervention. In combating the COVID-19 pandemic, societies across the globe have allowed governments to exercise extensive emergency powers, which has led to unprecedented measures and responses, including significant restrictions on citizens' rights. These measures have often been taken swiftly, with little (and sometimes no) input from the electorate or from civil society. This paper describes the breadth of Canadian public authorities’ emergency powers to manage a pandemic, and provides an overview of emergency powers included in public health legislation. It then assesses avenues for accountability through law – specifically through private, criminal and constitutional law. It argues that accountability through private law litigation is the wrong avenue to pursue in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and that criminal law safeguards and constitutional rights litigation only offer limited accountability. Finally, it presents an argument in favour of enhancing public accountability to parliaments and citizens through public health legislation.
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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 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.043 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".