Bill C-7 Shatters Illusions Regarding Canada’s Commitments to Persons with Disabilities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On December 3, the International Day of Persons with Disabilities, the NDP and Liberals voted to move Bill C-7, which offers assisted suicide to people with disabilities, to third reading. The Bill is framed as a mere “extension” of medical assistance in dying (MAiD), consistent with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and compelled by a Quebec Superior Court decision. It is none of these things.\nThe Bill would introduce assisted suicide not for those who are dying or other Canadians, but only for people with disabilities who experience “intolerable suffering”. It thereby directly violates s 15 of our Charter because it denies people with disabilities equal protection of the law by removing an important safeguard—the reasonable foreseeability of death—provided to everyone else in this country. It falls embarrassingly short of Canada’s international obligations regarding the rights of people with disabilities.\nIt is a cruel charade to pretend that a trial court decision by a single judge requires an emergency response by federal legislation. This government has actively fought multiple rulings by the Canadian Human Rights Commission and even the United Nations regarding findings of discrimination against Indigenous children and women. Yet it has immediately capitulated to a lower court ruling that people with disabilities are entitled to access to assisted suicide. Given that the current regime of MAiD has already saved the federal government $87M in health care costs, one might be forgiven for wondering whether the federal response here is driven by crass economic calculations.
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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 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.031 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.015 | 0.015 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.002 |
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".