Does the Supreme Court of Canada Give a “Freak” About Disability Dignity?: The Inclusion Fallacy 25 Years After Eldridge
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For almost 20 years, the Supreme Court of Canada increasingly rejected the idea of disability as an inherent impairment and progressively endorsed the social model of disability, which recognizes the disabling condition is a consequence of structural and societal factors. However, recent Supreme Court jurisprudence has resurfaced the fallacy of disability being defined by individual defects and deviance. This paper surveys the Court’s disability discrimination jurisprudence from the seminal Eldridge v. British Columbia decision to the splintered Ward v. Quebec decision, examining how the Court appears to be retreating from the social model’s understanding of disability being a product of systemic oppression and prejudicial attitudes, to a retrenchment of the antiquated notion that disabled people are freaks of nature and side-show spectacles. The paper posits that, by affırming a comedian’s freedom to ridicule and demean a child with multiple disabilities, the Court in Ward revived the so-called freak model of disability and condoned the exploitation of disability for able-bodied amusement. It concludes that Ward reveals there is still much work to do to achieve full equity and inclusion for people with disabilities in Canada.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.033 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.014 | 0.016 |
| 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".