âParliamentary sovereignty rests with the courts:â The Constitutional Foundations of J. G. Diefenbakerâs Canadian Bill of Rights
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The 1980s witnessed a judicial “rights revolution” in Canada characterized by the Supreme Court of Canada striking down both federal and provincial legislation which violated the rights guaranteed by the 1982 Charter of Rights. The lack of a similar judicial “rights revolution” in the wake of the 1960 Canadian Bill of Rights has largely been attributed to the structural difference between the two instruments with the latter – as a “mere” statute of the federal parliament – providing little more than a canon of construction and (unlike the Charter) not empowering the courts to engage in judicial review of legislation. \nYet this view contrasts starkly with how the Bill was portrayed by the Diefenbaker government, which argued that it provided for judicial review and would “prevail” over other federal legislation. Many modern scholars have dismissed the idea that the Bill could prevail over other federal statutes as being incompatible with the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty. That is, a bill of rights could only prevail over legislation if incorporated into the British North America Act. As such, they argue that the Diefenbaker government could not have intended the Bill of Rights to operate as anything more than a canon of construction.\nHowever, such a view ignores the turbulence in constitutional thinking on parliamentary sovereignty in the 1930s through 1960s provoked by the Statute of Westminster. This era produced the doctrine of “self-embracing” sovereignty – in contrast to traditional “Dicey” sovereignty – where parliament could limit itself through “ordinary” legislation. The effective author of the Canadian Bill of Rights, Elmer Driedger, was an adherent of this doctrine as well as an advocate of a “purposive” approach to statutory interpretation. Driedger, thus, drafted the Bill based upon the doctrine of self-embracing sovereignty and believed it would enjoy a “purposive” interpretation by the courts, with the Bill designed to be as effective at guaranteeing rights as the Statute of Westminster was at liberating Canada from Imperial legislation.
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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 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.035 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".