CHAPTER A-7 Resisting the Siren’s Call: Emergency Powers, Federalism, and Public Policy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Virtually everyone in Canada would describe the COVID-19 pandemic as an emergency.The federal government's decisions-to close borders and order Canadians into quarantine-suggest that it shares this view.Yet it has neither declared an emergency nor triggered the federal Emergencies Act.The lack of such action has been criticized.At the same time, there has been less focus on the emergency powers available to Parliament under the "peace, order and good government" clause in s. 91 of the Constitution Act 1867.In this chapter, I explore three demands that would require emergency branch legislation: regulating long-term care; providing relief to persons under residential and commercial tenancies; and instituting nation-wide testing.Examining the emergency branch's benefits and drawbacks, I argue that emergency powers must be approached with continual caution, with due appreciation for the operational and political complexities inherent in a federal state.While a national, "top-down" approach may be effective in some situations, in others it is preferable to encourage regional responses and inter-governmental cooperation.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.003 |
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".