Fundamentally Flawed: The Arbitrariness of the Corporal Punishment Defence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Canadian Foundation for Children, Youth and the Law v Canada (Attorney General), the Supreme Court of Canada upheld the corporal punishment defence contained in s. 43 of the Criminal Code in the face of arguments that it is an unreasonable infringement of children’s rights under ss. 7, 12, and 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In the process of giving precision to the terms of s. 43 as a prelude to its s. 7 vagueness analysis, the majority indicated that the purpose of the section is to allow only the kind of force against children that has “corrective value” as determined primarily by the weight of expert evidence. The author argues that the Supreme Court’s subsequent recognition of arbitrariness as a distinct fundamental justice concern under s. 7 in Bedford v Canada (Attorney General) meets the “new legal issue” standard for reconsidering previous declarations of validity established in Bedford. The author also argues that since 2004, changes in global attitudes and expert opinion in relation to corporal punishment have “fundamentally shift[ed] the parameters of the debate” which is the second Bedford test for reconsidering previous declarations of validity. Engaging the new arbitrariness framework and the importance that it places on the purposes of laws, the author argues that s. 43 is unconstitutionally arbitrary. Contemporary expert opinion recognizes no corrective value associated with corporal punishment. Because s. 43’s objective is unachievable, there is no rational connection between it and the limit that it imposes on the children’s security interests.
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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 | 0.039 | 0.065 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.077 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.023 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.024 | 0.026 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".