Constitutional Change Without Constitutional Amendment - A Review of Constitutional Pariah: Reference Re Senate Reform and The Future of Parliament, Emmett Macfarlane (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2021)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
If there is a better book on the challenges of constitutional change in Canada, I have yet to see it. Emmett Macfarlane’s masterwork on the constitutional politics of Senate renewal — Constitutional Pariah: Reference re Senate Reform and the Future of Parliament — exposes the great paradox of constitutional reform in Canada: the Canadian Constitution is today virtually unamendable, but it evolves constantly in both its form and content.1 Here is the puzzle: how can our constitution be simultaneously frozen and ever-changing? This outstanding book illustrates the complex and fascinating dynamics behind an essential feature of Canadian constitutionalism: the political reality of constitutional change without constitutional amendment. In this review essay prepared at the invitation of the Alberta Law Review, I identify several of Macfarlane’s major contributions in this book and then situate the importance of his study to our understanding of the Canadian Constitution and the theory of constitutional amendment. What results, I hope, is not only a strong endorsement of this excellent book but moreover an invitation to law and political science scholars in Canada to join the theoretically rich discussion of real-time practical relevance that Macfarlane has initiated to the enormous benefit of the field of public law.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.002 |
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".