“A Hot Day in Iqaluit”? Environmental Rights in Canada’s Constitutional Cul-de-Sac
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Proposals to include an explicit right to a healthy environment in Canada’s constitution have been advanced since the early 1970s, but Canada is stuck in a decades-long impasse that precludes substantial constitutional amendment. This article uses the metaphor of the cul-de-sac to explore the prospects for legal recognition of environmental rights in this situation. It canvasses past efforts to entrench general and Indigenous environmental rights in Canada’s constitution, introduces culs-de-sac metaphorical and real, and highlights the irony of one commentator’s 2005 quip that it will be “a hot day in Iqaluit” when Canada’s constitution undergoes significant amendment. It then surveys current efforts to find a right to a healthy environment in ss 7 and 15 of the Charter; recent developments in the recognition of Indigenous environmental rights via section 35 of the Constitution and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP); incorporation of a right to a healthy environment into federal environmental legislation; and initiatives to recognize the rights of rivers. It concludes that, like a real-world cul-de-sac, Canada’s constitutional one requires advocates of a legally enforceable right to a healthy environment to take longer and more circuitous routes to elusive destinations, and pushes them onto crowded arterial roads of existing constitutional rights and environmental statutes. That said, recent developments suggest some hope that the residents of this cul-de-sac might yet achieve a sense of community (with all beings), neighbourly interaction (of settler-colonial and Indigenous legal orders) and a safer and stabler environment for young people (and future generations).
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 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 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".