Equal, but only Conceptually: Explaining the Phenomenon of Religious Losses in Contemporary Canadian Constitutional Cases Involving Conflicting Rights
Bibliographic record
Abstract
If there is no hierarchy of rights in Canada, then why does freedom of religion so often seem to lose in cases of conflicts with other rights? This article discusses five recent Canadian cases (involving same-sex marriages, controversial medical practices, the wearing of a niqab, and a Christian university’s sexual conduct policy) in order to expose how the courts regularly characterize freedom of religion as being conceptually equal to other rights, before ruling against freedom of religion on the facts of the particular cases. This phenomenon within Canadian rights jurisprudence is then justified within the article by reference to a new combination of insights drawn from legal and liberal political theory. Specifically, the article suggests that religious freedom losses in the five cases can be justified because of considerations relating to (1) Rawlsian public reason, (2) third-party harms and dignitary harms, and (3) the special significance of emerging and emancipation rights. Thus, freedom of religion is only equal to other rights at a high level of abstraction; in its application, it is regularly subordinated to other rights in ways that can be defended where one or a combination of the three enumerated considerations is present.\nS’il n’existe pas de hiérarchie des droits au Canada, alors pourquoi la liberté de religion semble t-elle si souvent perdante en cas de conflit avec d’autres droits? Dans cet article, nous examinons cinq affaires canadiennes récentes (concernant des mariages entre personnes de même sexe, des pratiques médicales controversées, le port du niqab et la politique relative à la conduite sexuelle dans une université chrétienne) afin d’exposer comment les tribunaux caractérisent régulièrement la liberté de religion comme étant conceptuellement égale aux autres droits, avant de statuer contre la liberté de religion sur les faits de ces affaires particulières. Dans l’article, on justifie ce phénomène que l’on observe dans la jurisprudence canadienne en matière de droits par une nouvelle combinaison d’idées tirées de la théorie juridique et de la théorie politique libérale. Plus précisément, l’article suggère que les pertes de liberté de religion dans les cinq cas peuvent être justifiées par des considérations relatives à (1) la raison publique rawlsienne, (2) les préjudices causés aux tiers et à la dignité, et (3) la signification particulière des droits émergents et d’émancipation. Ainsi, la liberté de religion n’est égale aux autres droits qu’à un haut niveau d’abstraction; dans son application, elle est régulièrement subordonnée à d’autres droits d’une manière qui peut être défendue lorsqu’une ou une combinaison des trois considérations énumérées est présente.
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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 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.033 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 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".