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Record W4416019415 · doi:10.21991/cf29504

Is the Notwithstanding Clause an Ouster Clause?

2025· article· W4416019415 on OpenAlexaffvenueabout
Adebayo Majekolagbe

Bibliographic record

VenueConstitutional Forum / Forum constitutionnel · 2025
Typearticle
Language
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicDiscrimination and Equality Law
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Alberta
Fundersnot available
KeywordsAppealSupreme courtCharterJurisprudenceJurisdictionHigh CourtJudicial reviewOriginal jurisdictionPolitical question

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Thirty-seven years after its decision in Ford, the Supreme Court of Canada granted leave to appeal in 2025 against the Quebec Court of Appeal’s ruling in the Work Sikh Organization case. This appeal is poised to be the most significant development in the Court’s jurisprudence on section 33 since the 1988 Ford decision. The case, now known as English Montreal School Board, raises important issues and invites the Court to reconsider its stance in Ford. This article takes Ford as a starting point but addresses a question neither raised nor settled in Ford — whether the notwithstanding clause functions as an ouster clause. The Quebec Court of Appeal answered this question in the affirmative, but I argue that the Court was wrong. The notwithstanding clause does not oust the jurisdiction of a court to substantively review an impugned law or provision for Charter compatibility. This point is separate and distinct from the decision of the Supreme Court in Ford that the legislature’s use of section 33 cannot be reviewed substantively. Interpreting the notwithstanding clause as an ouster clause needlessly outlies section 33 by departing from standard principles of Charter interpretation, ignoring clear constitutional wording, and undermining the Charter’s purpose of protecting rights.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow), Science and technology studies, Scholarly communication, Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesScience and technology studies, Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.954
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0010.002
Science and technology studies0.0120.029
Scholarly communication0.0020.003
Open science0.0020.001
Research integrity0.0010.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0030.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.057
GPT teacher head0.360
Teacher spread0.303 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.

Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes3
Has abstractyes

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