Crown Immunity in Class Proceedings: The Injustice of Barring Institutional Historical Abuse Claims
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: This paper argues that class proceedings are an inappropriate mechanism to right institutional historical wrongs perpetrated by the Crown because the Crown is not in the same legal position as private defendants. The Crown is immune from tort liability unless legislation expressly creates such liability. As a consequence, institutional historical abuse claims arising prior to the enactment of such statutes are often barred. Barring historical abuse claims prevents class proceedings from achieving any of the legislation’s objectives: access to justice, judicial economy, and behaviour modification. Class members are denied access to justice because claims arising before the enactment of Crown liability legislation are barred; judicial economy is not achieved because class members’ claims must be divided by the year they arise, the statute under which they are brought, and the cause of action alleged; and governments are not deterred because present and future taxpayers act as government insurers. Part B of this paper discusses the nature of historical abuse class proceedings against the Crown. Part C examines the law of federal Crown immunity in the context of class proceedings. Part D considers the similar trajectory of provincial Crown immunity and its impact on class proceedings. Part E consists of a case study that begins with a brief history of Indian Hospitals in Canada and then analyzes how both federal and provincial Crown immunity would likely affect the proposed Indian Hospital class proceedings. Finally, Part F proposes out-of-court redress programs as an alternate dispute resolution mechanism for institutional historical abuse.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".