Jurisdictional imaginaries as contested geographies: A metaphor analysis of reference cases about Canada's Impact Assessment Act
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Jurisdictional imaginaries, defined as constitutive and productive fictions with real world effects, serve a distinct purpose in the context of debates over Canadian environmental impact assessment. Metaphors are one way in which jurisdictional imaginaries are maintained and contested. In creating associations between entities, metaphors mark storytelling about jurisdiction with the imprints of history and place, and shape thinking about arrangements of authority within contested geographies. In Canadian reference cases (questions posed by governments to courts to seek advice on legislation), the judiciary settle conflicts over jurisdiction through case-by-case assessments based on interpretations of the Canadian constitution in which debates about federalism loom large. Our analysis of two reference cases on Canada's Impact Assessment Act (IAA) evidenced disagreements in court decisions about the scope and significance of provincial and federal authority, which hinged on metaphors of separation and conflict, and drew on two competing imaginaries: a classical imaginary which envisions dualist, hierarchical, and exclusionary orders of authority between provincial and federal governments; and a modern imaginary which emphasizes jurisdictional overlap and flexibility in constitutional interpretation. Reading these divergent imaginaries against a backdrop of legal pluralism and ongoing settler colonialism, we argue that both imaginaries normalize, rather than unsettle, colonial political logics predicated on the replacement of Indigenous sovereignty by European legal orders. The IAA reference cases, far from mere technical assessments of the constitutionality of legislation, highlight political questions about what kind of society Canada is and could become.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| 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".