Equality before the Charter: Reflections on Fraser v. Canada (Attorney General)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since Andrews v. Law Society of BC, the Supreme Court’s section 15 jurisprudence has been marked by inconsistency, judicial disagreement, and scholarly criticism. In Fraser v. Canada, female RCMP offıcers challenged a policy that prevented access to full-time pension benefits. Refining the concept of adverse impact discrimination and drawing on evidence of women’s economic disadvantage, the majority found that the policy constituted sex discrimination. While Justice Abella’s majority judgment has been hailed as a major victory, Justices Brown and Rowe’s dissent sharply criticized the concept of ‘substantive equality’, confirming longstanding divisions. This paper uses Fraser to reflect on the narrative of substantive equality. First, it re-examines the oft-maligned cases decided under the Canadian Bill of Rights. The prevailing story – that the Bill of Rights jurisprudence relied on a narrow, ‘formal equality’ model which was then remedied by the Charter’s section 15 – is incomplete. A closer examination reveals a complex conceptualization of ‘equality before the law’ in pre-Charter jurisprudence. Second, the paper proposes that the principle of ‘equality before the law’, with its focus on identical standards and equal treatment, remains a powerful and necessary concept. Unsettling the strict dichotomy between substantive and formal equality, the paper concludes, can help to reveal the true nature of the Court’s continuing division on how to apply section 15’s guarantee of equality.
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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 | 0.011 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.076 | 0.047 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.027 | 0.028 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".