Examining the Social Security Tribunal’s Navigator Service: Access to Administrative Justice for Marginalized Communities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
An accessible MS Word version of this document is available for download at the bottom of this screen under "Additional files."\nThis report provides the findings, analysis and recommendations of a research study conducted on the federal Social Security Tribunal’s Navigator Service (SST Navigator Service). The SST Navigator Service was established in 2019 for tribunal users without a professional representative. The study examines the use of the Navigator Service for Canada Pension Plan–Disability (CPP–Disability) appeals heard by the Income Security - General Division of the Social Security Tribunal.\nThis research study focuses on access to administrative justice on the ground. It examines how the innovative SST Navigator Service facilitates access to CPP disability benefit decision-making as well as the ways that the Navigator Service could be improved. As part of its focus, the study examined how well the Navigator Service supports users from marginalized communities. The SST serves users who are often at the intersections of being people with disabilities and people who live with low income. Statistically, a significant proportion of people who live with low income in Canada are also women, immigrants and/or visible minorities. The SST Navigator Service therefore presents an opportunity to consider how individuals from these and other marginalized communities are experiencing the system and how the service may be helpfully improved.\nThrough 36 semi-structured interviews and documentary analysis, the researchers considered the perspectives of former appellants who used the Navigator Service and received at least one tribunal decision between the Service’s inception in November, 2019 and April, 2021. They also spoke with the navigators and, for context, gathered information from relevant government officials involved in the design, implementation and running of the Navigator Service.\nIn addition to findings about user experiences and navigator roles, the report provides recommendations to maintain and strengthen the SST Navigator Service. It concludes that the SST Navigator Service is an innovation that enhances access to justice. Navigator services may be beneficially adopted by other administrative tribunals at the federal level in Canada, and in the administrative justice systems of the provinces and territories. Navigator services may also be beneficial in jurisdictions beyond Canada.\nCe rapport est également disponible en francais.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| 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".