Freelancer or Employee? The Implications of the Canadian Revenue Agency’s Recent Decisions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There has been much discussion over the past couple of years regarding the tax status of artists in Canada. Two cases, in particular, have generated a lot of attention: one case in Winnipeg, where three different members of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet were deemed to be employees of the company, and a second, in Thunder Bay, where an actor who had appeared at Magnus Theatre on a Canadian Theatre Agreement Engagement Contract was deemed to be an employee of that company (Canadian Actors’ Equity Association). Until these rulings, there had been a widespread supposition that performing artists, especially members of Canadian Actors’ Equity Association, were freelance (Equity). Because these determinations flew in the face of past practice, alarm bells rang. Although Canadian Revenue Agency (CRA) determinations are made on a case-by-case basis, a ruling pertaining to one individual (such as one dancer from the Royal Winnipeg Ballet) can be used as precedent to rule against another individual — and indeed, all dancers in the Royal Winnipeg Ballet or any other dance company.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.017 | 0.034 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".