A Feminist Critique of <i>Quebec v. A.</i>: Evaluating the Supreme Court's Divided Opinion on Section 15 and Common Law Support Obligations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A case comment on Quebec v. A. In Quebec v. A., the Supreme Court of Canada tackled a Charter challenge to the Civil Code of Quebec. The claimant, A., alleged that the legislation violated her section 15 equality rights by discriminating on the basis of marital status in excluding common law couples from spousal support and division of property upon separation. The Court delivered a lengthy, controversial, and divided decision with three lines of dissent. Ultimately, the exclusion was upheld. Quebec continued to exclude common law couples from the division of property and remained the sole province to deny common law couples spousal support upon separation. This paper uses feminist theories of substantive equality to evaluate each of the four major judicial opinions in Quebec v. A., highlighting the ways in which women in common law relationships are more adversely affected by exclusion from the support regime than men. It does so to argue that striking down Quebec's exclusion of common law couples from both spousal support and the division of property, as per Abella J.'s dissent, is more in keeping with feminist theories of substantive equality.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.044 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".