Multilayer Access to Environmental Justice: A Critical Policy Analysis of Ontario's Class Action Regime, 1992-2017
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study is an access to justice analysis of class actions in Ontario from 1992 to 2017, with a focus on environmental claims. Its central argument is that the primary policy objective of the Class Proceedings Act, 1992 of increasing access to justice, a fundamental human right, has largely not been fulfilled during this period for environmental claims, particularly those involving historical contamination and human health-impairment. This is a striking discovery given that environmental class actions were originally posited as paradigmatic class actions in Ontario since such actions typically involve negative value claims with diffuse harms across vast spatial and temporal contexts with acute power imbalances between victims and perpetrators in light of the negligible public enforcement of environmental regulations. The findings of this study uncover and explain the gap between this traditional perspective and the bleak reality of the floundering of environmental class actions in Ontario, with resultant negative implications for the capacities of residents to access justice in environmental matters. \n\tDeparting from the proceduralistic and individualistic emphases of traditional class action and access to justice research, this study critically explores Ontario's class action regime for environmental claims by considering various contextual variables that are not commonly addressed in the established literature. By examining the exclusionary dynamics that operate to impede multilayer access to environmental justice in light of the power, production, and social reproduction associated with toxic exposures, this study expands the ambit of environmental class actions beyond the traditional confines to the broader political economy of pollution. In so doing, this study incorporates descriptive and normative aspects of classical access to justice research with explanatory argumentation for an integrated approach to evaluating multilayer access to environmental justice in Ontario. This contextual approach reveals a more complicated and socially reflective picture of environmental class actions than has heretofore been available in extant scholarship. By uncovering the exclusionary dynamics of class actions in the political economy of pollution, this study provides greater clarity about the type of environmental justice that is presently achieved and achievable in Ontario's class action regime.
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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 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".