Beyond Dunsmuir: Clarity on the Standard of Review from Saguenay
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Diana Ginn and Gregory Johannson The recent Supreme Court of Canada decision Mouvement laique qudbicois v. Saguenay (City) is a noteworthy administrative law case, providing meaningful guidance on applying the standard of review analysis from New Brunswick (Board of Management) v. Dunsmuir. Two aspects of Saguenay in particular contribute to the development of administrative law jurisprudence. First, Saguenay confirms that general questions of law that are "of central importance to the legal system as a whole and outside the adjudicator's specialized area of expertise" do in fact exist and are not merely a theoretical category. Second, the majority decision seems to lay to rest the notion that disaggregation of issues is never appropriate; sometimes it will be legitimate to separate out different aspects of an administrative decision and apply different standards of review. Other elements of Saguenay are useful confirmations of established administrative law principles. These include the importance accorded to the nature of the question in the determination of standard of review and the unified approach to be taken to all substantive review of administrative decision making, irrespective of whether a decision is challenged by way of judicial review or statutory appeal.
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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 | 0.153 | 0.227 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.037 | 0.020 |
| Open science | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.039 | 0.039 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".