Settling on Words: Sovereignties, Borders, and Transformative Constitutionalism in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article analyzes Canada’s Constitution as a contested “borderland,” a site where competing claims to sovereignty, identity, and moral legitimacy intersect and often clash. While the Charter of Rights and Freedoms promises inclusivity and equality, I argue it remains fundamentally embedded within a settler-colonial order that persistently marginalizes Indigenous peoples. Treaties, when understood as dynamic and relational borders, challenge the Crown’s assertion of absolute authority and underscore the need for constitutional transformation grounded in justice and what Dwayne Donald calls “ethical relationality,” drawn from the Cree concept of wâhkôhtowin. At the same time, immigrant communities access the Charter as a gateway to rights, even as they enter a legal system built upon the dispossession of Indigenous nations – raising moral questions about legal obligation and inclusion. Drawing on Joseph Raz’s “service conception” of authority, this article offers a philosophical audit of Canada’s constitutional legitimacy. Through a structured application of Raz’s three theses – normal justification, dependence, and pre-emptive force – I show how current legal directives frequently fail to align with the moral reasons of Indigenous and minority communities. Engaging with Indigenous legal theorists such as John Borrows and Dwayne Donald, I advocate for transformative constitutionalism, culminating in a renewed constitutional compact rooted in Willie Ermine’s notion of ethical space. Such a framework, I argue, offers the conceptual and normative tools to reimagine sovereignty and legal authority in genuinely pluralistic terms.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".