Knowledge Gaps Between Canadian Public Policy and Religious Actors; a New Hurdle for Women in Agunah
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Knowledge Gaps Between Canadian Public Policy and Religious Actors; a New Hurdle for Women in Agunah This research paper seeks to highlight the harmful social consequences that arise when there are knowledge gaps in Canadian public policy in religious affairs. In order to safeguard the wellbeing of Canadians of faith, Canadian policy makers and adjudicators should operate with a working knowledge of its religious populations and consult religious actors on relevant issues. I will use the Jewish divorce phenomenon, known as agunah, the spiritual chaining of spouses, to illustrate the social consequences that arise once public policy overlooks religious affairs. The kinds of knowledge gaps in Canadian public policy that enables circumstances like agunot, worsens human right’s abuses (Greenberg-Kobrin 1999), and religious and community alienation and the weakening of Canadian institutions (“Bruker v. Marcovitz.”) I will first provide a brief explanation of the agunah phenomenon in order to capture the severity of the religious, as well as spiritual, consequences a refused Jewish divorce leaves in its wake. After an understanding of agunah has been established, I will deconstruct Section 21.2 of the Divorce Act (1990) and exemplify how a situation of agunah could occur by the manipulation of the provision in order to remove barrier to divorce. Lastly, I will employ the 1969 case of “Bruker vs. Markovitz” to explore the instances in which such knowledge gaps weaken Canadian institutions. Though steps have been made by Canadian policy makers and judicial figures in the past to prevent the proliferation of agunah abuse cases, there still lacks sufficient precedent or literature available. This egregious oversight of public policy leaves vulnerable people of faith, most commonly women, to grapple with legal incongruences and spiritual harm alone. An active effort to grasp religious law and legal nuances by public policy makers must be made in order to mitigate social maladies and protect all populations, including the religious populations, of Canada.
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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 | 0.025 | 0.036 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.077 | 0.042 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.025 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.015 |
| Research integrity | 0.016 | 0.018 |
| 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".