The Murky Circumstances of Consent in Canada: A Commentary on <i>R. v Kirkpatrick</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Supreme Court of Canada recently ruled on R. v Kirkpatrick, a case that raises many complex questions regarding consent and sexual violence in Canada. Despite the complainant stating that she would only have sexual intercourse with Ross Kirkpatrick with a condom, Kirkpatrick chose not to wear one, and he was charged with sexual assault. While at trial, it was found that the complainant consented to the sexual activity, and the BC Court of Appeal subsequently disagreed with that finding. Ultimately, the Supreme Court of Canada held that, when both parties agree to use a condom, the removal of the condom by one party is not consensual and constitutes sexual assault. In this commentary, we discuss how this case highlights the murky circumstances of consent in Canada, with particular attention to the growing phenomenon of “stealthing.” We lay out the key jurisprudence leading up to Kirkpatrick—namely, R. v Hutchinson and R. v Mabior. Then, we outline the state of the framework on consent in Canada, and we critique the legal tests for vitiating consent through fraud. We conclude that the definition of sexual activity to which an individual consents must consider essential conditions such as condom use.
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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 | 0.012 | 0.042 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.040 | 0.040 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".