Indigenous Peoples’ Transboundary Claims, Access to Justice, and the Canadian Constitutional Structure: The Uashaunnuat Case
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article analyses the tightly split decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in Newfoundland and Labrador (Attorney General) v. Uashaunnuat (Innu of Uashat and of Mani-Utenam), in which the Court was tasked with determining whether the Superior Court of Quebec had jurisdiction to hear a claim of Aboriginal title and rights extending to lands situated in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador. It argues that behind the Supreme Court’s divergences regarding the interpretation and application of the Civil Code of Quebec’s rules pertaining to the jurisdiction of Quebec authorities, reside competing conceptions of the place of Indigenous peoples’ rights in relation to the Canadian constitutional order, including with respect to federalism. Part 2 maps out the different sets of constitutional principles that guided the majority and dissenting judges in the adjudication of the jurisdictional issues at stake. Part 3 then shows how the majority and minority judges’ chosen constitutional lens infused their respective approaches to the characterization of Aboriginal title and rights under the civil law categories of rights and legal actions. Finally, Part 4 concludes that the Uashaunnuat decision does not offer a comprehensive, predictable, and constitutionally sound solution for the adjudication of Indigenous peoples’ transboundary land claims. Looking forward, and building on potential solutions advanced by the dissenting judges and Indigenous interveners, the article proposes that there is room in the Canadian constitutional framework to provide for accessible and effıcient remedies for the adjudication of Indigenous transboundary claims while also respecting the Canadian federal structure and the principle of comity between provincial courts.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.049 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".