On the Right(s) Path: A Study of Human Rights Law and Practice in British Columbia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canada’s anti-discrimination legal regime is among the oldest and most established in the world. In this thesis, I examine those human rights institutions in Canada that were created to enforce anti-discrimination statutes to determine which system is more accessible to people from marginalized populations. Human rights legislation works to disrupt discrimination through the administration of human rights complaints and through human rights education. Human rights institutions have, however, faced a backlash since the 1980s from the media and prominent political figures that challenge the legitimacy of the commission system. As a result, some jurisdictions have replaced the commission system that has been a cornerstone of the Canadian human rights landscape since the 1970s. Both British Columbia and Ontario have implemented the direct-access system. In this thesis, I analyze which system is more accessible to people from marginalized populations using British Columbia. British Columbia is the ideal choice for comparative research of this nature because the provincial government has switched between both systems multiple times since the 1960s. In order to determine which system is more accessible to people from marginalized groups, I analyze data from government-sponsored reports which have been produced in multiple jurisdictions in Canada. These reports contained information on how to improve the accessibility of human rights institutions. Furthermore, I examine annual reports produced by the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal from 2006 to 2016 and the British Columbia Human Rights Commission from 1996 to 2002. The statistical data derived from these reports supports the contention that the commission is more accessible than the direct-access model. In sum, based on the data from these reports as well as a detailed review of a dozen expert reports on human rights institutions in Canada, I argue that the commission system is more accessible to people from marginalized populations than the direct-access system.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.012 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.031 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
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.
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".