The End of Administrative Supremacy in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For forty years, from the Supreme Court’s 1979 decision in CUPE to the 2019 one in Vavilov, Canadian administrative law has been characterized by a strong belief in the value of administrative power and a distrust of its supervision by the judiciary. This article charts the development of this approach to administrative law, which it refers to as “administrative supremacy”, and explains its fundamental commitments. It then argues that administrative supremacy is fundamentally misguided, and that its rejection by the Vavilov majority is a significant improvement for Canadian law. Administrative supremacy rests on distinctive and, as the article argues, misconceived views about three key issues in constitutional theory. First, it rejects the separation of powers in favour of an embrace of allegedly expert administrative institutions. Second, it either rejects the Rule of Law or, more recently, redefines it to negate its central commitments to legal certainty. Third, it also redefines democracy as participation in administrative rule-making. On each of these issues, the article contends that the more orthodox understanding of the relevant principles is preferable to that put forward by administrative supremacy. Administrative expertise does not live up to its promise and is not worth the abandonment of the safeguards against abuse of power. And while administrative reasons and participation may enhance the quality of administrative decision-making, it is no substitute for independent judicial review of administrative action. To a large degree, Vavilov repudiates key aspects of administrative supremacy. While the repudiation is incomplete, it is to be warmly welcomed.
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 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.032 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".