Un-Democratizing the City? Unwritten Constitutional Principles and Ontario’sStrong Mayor Powers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As both governments and administrative bodies, municipalities are complicated legal entities under Canadian law. The result is a contradictory medley of legislation and case law that has tried to make sense of this dual role of cities. This complex characterization of municipalities was acutely felt in 2022, when the Province of Ontario introduced legislation that allowed some mayors to exercise power with a one-third vote of city council. I suggest that this legislation sought to frame municipal legal status more squarely to that of an administrative body rather than a government. This paper examines the backdrop to this legislative change, and options for municipalities and their citizens, including an action on the basis of the unwritten constitutional principle of democracy. I argue that municipalities must challenge these actions forcefully and directly by strongly asserting their status as democratic governments — not through the courts, but in their city council chambers.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| 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".