The crown's powers of command-in chief: interpreting section 15 of Canada's constitution act, 1867
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Studies of Canadian constitutional law have tended to overlook section 15 of the Constitution Act, 1867, which vests the command-in-chief of Canada’s armed forces in the Crown as the executive power. This article argues that, despite being largely ignored, section 15 is a significant constitutional provision, one that grants the executive constitutionally protected powers over the armed forces. Specifically, the article demonstrates that this section provides the executive with an entrenched constitutional authority to raise, govern, command, and use Canada’s armed forces. While parliamentary statutes could limit how this authority is exercised, these powers of the executive cannot be abolished or displaced by an Act of Parliament owing to their being sourced in section 15. The article begins with an overview of the nature of executive power in Canada, in order to establish that the Crown is vested with constitutionally entrenched authorities that cannot be abolished or entirely displaced by statute. Next, the article argues that section 15 of the Constitution Act, 1867 provides the executive with a constitutionally protected authority to raise, govern, command, and use Canada’s armed forces. Drawing on comparisons with Australian and New Zealand laws, the article then demonstrates that these section 15 powers are assumed to exist by Canada’s National Defence Act, the parliamentary statute that is often presented as the source of the executive’s authority over the armed forces.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".