Patrick: Protecting Canadians' Privacy Interest in Garbage; 'A Step Too Far' for the Supreme Court
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Patrick, the Supreme Court of Canada had an opportunity to provide additional protections for Canadians against the prying eyes of the state. Instead of making a conscientious choice among several limitative options, the Court has preferred an outcome which will embolden the investigative ardour of the police. While emphasizing their concern "about the long-term consequences of government action for the protection of privacy," the case has actually reduced its residuum. This is all the more troubling as Binnie J., writing for six justices, and Abella J., concurring in the result, both acknowledged that, in the main, "the circumstances in this case favour the appellant. " In the former instance, the intrusion is justified based upon "the key issue of abandonment, while the latter judgment upholds the search and seizure based upon "ample evidence on which to base a reasonable suspicion." Neither of these underpinnings is thoroughly analyzed despite the need to address such issues in the first decision by the Supreme Court to canvas the justifiability of state agents "rummaging through household waste" in a country where "It]he protection of privacy is a central feature. "\nIn this comment, the modern social and juridical nature of garbage will first be explored, arguing that the nation disposes of its trash in a highly regulated environment where the apparently free rein given to police by Patrick seems contradictory. The bases for recognizing a reasonable expectation of privacy in what the decision portrays as mere cast-offs will be presented. The majority's lynchpin notion of abandonment in Patrick will be scrutinized, with the contention being that the Court ignored factors which downplay its suitability in this context. The unwillingness of the Court to impose restrictions on police encroachments on citizens' privacy interests in garbage will be lamented as the long-term effect of Patrick. The decision marks a further stage in the creation of what seems to be emerging as "the new dimension of search and seizure” in Canada, which many will rightfully deplore as corrosive of our basic values.
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 | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.047 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.020 | 0.016 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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".