Enforcing the Canadian Prohibition of Overcrowding Livestock in Transit Without Resorting to Science
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Administrative law is about articulating norms and promoting adoption and enforcement of human behaviour practices in areas where individual choice conflicts with the public good. Administrative law often has quazi-criminal features characterized by the prohibition and penalty duality of criminal law. Importantly violations of administrative law are penalized but not punished. Criminal law is sanctioning human behaviour of a type that calls for punishment to achieve proportional condemnation and retribution on behalf of civil society. Violation of administrative statutes results in a penalty, often a small monetary fine. Administrative penalties, resolved within the primary judicial system, are characterized by identifying specific undesirable behaviour amenable to simple and direct corrective action by a policing entity, such as the offence created when one exceeds the posted speed limit. Other simple violations with more indirect measurements such as the offence of driving under the influence of alcohol are manifested by “blowing” above 0.08% alcohol in expired respiratory air. These types of minor indiscretions, are addressed by Common Offence prosecution (tickets). Administrative penalties are used to respond to minor human misbehavior by accountable citizens, that can be measured with little room for contention. It allows for immediate response by the regulatory authority while respecting human rights and natural justice (pay or choose trial). In Canada, the welfare of livestock in transit is an administrative issue, livestock hauling is a legitimate behaviour within a fair regulatory frame. Livestock hauling is extra provincial and international and is regulated by the Health of Animals (Act) Regulations Part XII and enforced by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. Violations have been addressed since 1985 via the Administrative Monetary Penalties Act, SC 1995, c 40. This Act creates a parallel administrative justice system to the Provincial Courts and is bound by standard Rule of Law with the right of appeal (but no right of trial). After over 30 years of failed industry consultation initiatives, a major revision to the humane transport provisions was proclaimed in 2020. A violative numerical threshold of overcrowding had not been articulated in the pre-2020 Regulations. Surprisingly, the new 2020 revision also failed to articulate numerical thresholds that clearly indicate an overcrowding violation for livestock transport in Canada. However, the International Animal Transporters Association maximal stocking density provisions were included by reference, making those standards enforceable law in Canada. This paper reviews the 20 cases from 2004 to 2024 where transporters appealed a sanction for overcrowding livestock transported by land. From the published appeal adjudication, this paper describes the narrative character of rational review of enforcement of the prohibition of overcrowding where there is no bright line definition of an offence. The paper postulates why both regulator and regulated may prefer to work in an intentionally inefficient institutional arrangement, preferring opacity to clarity in what constitutes an overcrowding violation in Law.
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.
How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".