Making Sense of a Complex Notion: Debates on State Religious Neutrality in Canada — A View from Quebec
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Under Canadian constitutional law, state neutrality acts as an implicit organizing principle for the relations between the state and religions. Neutrality, however, is a polysemic word: conceptions of neutrality vary. Competing versions of neutrality feature in the decisions of Canadian courts. This is starkly evident in decisions that originate from Quebec, where judges have harboured divergent views of neutrality on matters such as the reciting of prayers in town hall meetings or the teaching of religious diversity in schools. This article analyses how the Canadian Supreme Court has manoeuvred through competing conceptions of state religious neutrality. Initially divided, the Court seems to have eventually opted for a type of neutrality that allows the state to recognize the existence of religions in laws and policies, but that also prevents it from indoctrination and from arbitrating between competing viewpoints within religions. This view of neutrality, I argue, is consistent with the principle of multiculturalism and with the Court’s characterization of a ‘free and democratic society’, as this notion is understood in Canada.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".