Rights Review and the Institutional Roles in Sentencing: A Study of Harper-Era Mandatory Minimum Sentences
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During the Harper-era (2006 to 2015), the federal government actively pursued a policy agenda focused on tough on crime criminal justice policy. Much of the Harper government’s criminal justice policy focused on sentencing, including the introduction of new and increasing of existing mandatory minimum sentences (MMS). Sentencing policy is unique as it brings together Parliament’s constitutional jurisdiction over sentencing, judicial discretion in sentencing those convicted of crimes, and the standards of Charter-protected legal rights of the criminal defendant. Existing literature on MMS criticizes these sentencing provisions for being vulnerable to Charter challenges, particularly under s. 12 of the Charter. Through the analysis of the parliamentary debates and committee hearings of the policymaking process for Harper government enacted MMS, and the subsequent legal decisions of these provisions being challenged in court on Charter standards, this study examines the role that the Charter played in the policymaking process of Harper government enacted MMS, how these policies have fared in Canadian courts, and the institutional roles in sentencing. This project finds that Parliament’s role in rights review is weak due to the strength of the executive. Additionally, courts have found these laws unconstitutional at a significantly higher rate than previous decades. Finally, despite the distinctive roles each institution has in sentencing, the results indicate a lack of respect for these roles from the legislature and the judiciary.
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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 | 0.017 | 0.042 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| 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".