The Great Depression and Canada's Major Originalist Decade
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Few periods of Canadian history have been as momentous or terrible as the Great Depression. The Dominion and provincial governments’ inability to combat financial and environmental catastrophe led many Canadians to openly question the appropriateness of their constitutional framework. As legal historians have since documented, many leading jurists of the time believed that a strong central government could, through the institution of national programs, contain the Great Depression; in the eyes of these 1930s jurists, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council—then Canada’s apex court—had sapped the federal government of its powers by misinterpreting the British North America Act, 1867.Although scholars have correctly identified the Great Depression as a period of intellectual ferment and even revolution, none has fully accounted for the prevalence of originalist thought in the legal debates of the time. In response to the Great Depression, the major legal thinkers and reformers of the 1930s deployed originalist arguments. They criticized the Privy Council for having departed from the original intentions of the Fathers of Confederation and the original meaning of the Constitution. While the leading jurists of the period all tended to employ originalist reasoning, they often disagreed on interpretive outcomes. Thus, while many jurists used originalist reasoning to argue in favour of a strong central government, some argued that the original intentions of the Framers and the original public meaning of constitutional provisions favoured a federalist interpretation of the British North America Act. I conclude that the dominance of originalism during the legal debates of the 1930s bears several lessons for modern constitutional theorists. The fact, for example, that jurists of all ideological backgrounds employed originalist logic demonstrates that the characterization of originalism as inherently conservative makes little sense in the Canadian context.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".