Consideration of culture in Canadian courtrooms: Before and after the Divorce Act amendments
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In Canada, the federal Divorce Act was revised in 2021 to include enumerated best interests factors which include a child's linguistic, religious, cultural, and spiritual heritage and upbringing, including Indigenous heritage. In this study, the authors examine how Canadian courtrooms engaged in the consideration of cultural factors prior to the recent Divorce Act amendments and compare these findings to decisions published following the amendments that mandated this specific consideration. Specific manners in which the courts have considered culture are identified, and the resulting three ‘clusters’ of decisions—including those cases (a) prioritizing a child's established culture, (b) weighing the child's greater involvement with one culture versus increased bicultural competence, and (c) considering the effect on the child of the cultural interaction—are compared pre‐ and post‐ the recent Divorce Act amendments. Implications for family court professionals are discussed.
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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 | 0.014 | 0.042 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".