Judicializing Foreign Affairs: The Canada-Saudi Arms Deal and the Implications of Transnational Tort Litigation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the recent past, the ability to challenge Canadian government action with foreign relations elements has spilled over from administrative law into tort law. At the same time, tort actions against multinational corporations for human rights violations abroad have also seen a surge in Canadian courts, culminating in the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Nevsun Resources Ltd. v. Araya. This article addresses some doctrinal elements of a potential transnational tort claim against the Canadian government and a Canadian arms manufacturer pursuant to human rights violations arising from the 2014 Canada-Saudi Arms Deal [CSAD]. It also explores consequential effects that Canada’s burgeoning transnational tort laws can have on Canada-Saudi relations as well as the Canadian defence industry. Overall, this article uses the CSAD as one real-life scenario in which private law litigation can have broader effects on a country’s foreign relations and domestic economy. In this instance, the judiciary’s power to exact extra-judicial consequences illustrates how tort litigation can curtail the behaviour of governmental and commercial actors.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".