Four Stories about Canada's Separation of Powers Doctrine
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Canada, as in other Westminster states, there are good reasons to question the salience of the separation of powers as a constitutional principle. After all, there is no “strict” separation of powers between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, and, until recently, the concept attracted relatively little attention from the Supreme Court of Canada. In the past several years, however, there has been a noticeable uptick in references to the separation of powers in the Supreme Court&s;s jurisprudence. This raises the question of what is driving increased resort to the principle, and what value(s) the Supreme Court is upholding when it invokes the separation of powers in its jurisprudence. This chapter employs systematic doctrinal analysis to examine Canada&s;s separation of powers doctrine. Four stories emerge from the analysis: first, that references to the separation of powers seem to be on the rise; second, that this trend is being led by specific judges; third, that, contrary to what might be assumed, the principle has been invoked to protect the sphere of action of the legislature, the executive, and the courts; and finally, that while the justices of the Supreme Court appear to largely agree on the meaning of the separation of powers as a concept, members of the Court are far less likely to agree on how the principle applies in practice. This has produced several cases in which the separation of powers forms the basis of a dissent.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.047 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| 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".