Return to <i>Smith</i>? Harper-Era Mandatory Minimum Sentences in Canadian Courts (2008–2023)
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Following the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in R v Smith (1987), which struck down a mandatory minimum sentence (MMS) for drug trafficking, it took nearly three decades before the Court would nullify another MMS. This 28-year span saw the Court exhibit judicial restraint and deference to the government regarding the constitutionality of MMS. However, in 2015, the Court invalidated an MMS enacted by the Harper government in R v Nur . The MMS in Nur was one of over 40 MMS provisions introduced by the Harper government between 2006 and 2015. As sentencing policy engages Parliament’s exclusive jurisdiction to legislate criminal law, judicial discretion in sentencing, and section 12 of the Charter , these Harper-era sentencing provisions provide a unique opportunity to study the institutional roles in sentencing and the constitutionality of such provisions. This article offers a comprehensive overview of the MMS enacted by the Harper government and examines how these provisions have been treated by Canadian courts, particularly focusing on the constitutional test for section 12 of the Charter . By analyzing appellate-level and Supreme Court cases featuring Charter challenges to Harper-era MMS, the article found that these provisions are being struck down at a high rate (76%). The findings indicate a loosening of judicial restraint and deference to government in this area and highlight significant issues with the reasonable hypothetical aspect of the section 12 test. Ultimately, the article argues for a better understanding of the complementary roles of the legislature and judiciary in sentencing.
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.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 it