Rigour Required: Recent Direction from the Supreme Court of Canada on Binding and Non-Binding Sources of International Law in Charter Interpretation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is not uncommon for parties to plead principles of international law to inform a court’s analysis of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (the “Charter”). However, commentators have long expressed concern about the Supreme Court of Canada’s lack of clarity on how it uses international human rights law and for what purpose in Charter interpretation. This paper addresses how a divided Supreme Court of Canada in Quebec (Attorney General) v. 9147-0732 Québec inc. (“9147-0732 Québec inc.”) attempted to clarify when it is appropriate for a court to use international law to interpret the scope of a Charter protection and how this should be done. The paper is set out as follows: Part II sets out the background of the case, while Part III discusses the judgments of the lower courts. Part IV of the paper explains the disagreement between the majority and concurring justices in the Supreme Court’s judgment on the role of international law in Charter interpretation, while Part V analyzes the disagreement between the majority and concurring justices and the implications of the majority’s holding in 9147 for future cases.
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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 | 0.066 | 0.092 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.041 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.030 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.017 | 0.032 |
| 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".