Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and Section 2(c) of the Charter: Report for the Public Order Emergency Commission
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Those who participated in the 2022 protest convoy were exercising their rights under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms when the federal government declared an emergency, creating a large secure zone and dispersing the truckers’ demonstration. These rights, including and especially freedom of peaceful assembly, form the backdrop to consideration of the federal government’s decision to declare an emergency under the Emergencies Act and enact regulations for bringing the demonstrations to an end.\nThough it is one of the Charter’s fundamental freedoms, s.2(c)’s freedom of peaceful assembly received little or no attention in the first 40 years of Charter interpretation and jurisprudence. The circumstances of the protect convoy and its dispersal under the Emergencies Act bring s.2(c) into the spotlight and call for a discussion of the guarantee.\nThis background paper was commissioned and prepared for the Public Order Emergency Commission. Its purpose was to propose a conception of peaceful assembly under the Charter that could guide and inform the work of the POE Commission. Specifically, the paper examines s.2(c)’s underlying values and purposes to create a foundation for peaceful assembly. In addition, it considers how s.2(c) should be interpreted, proposing a definition of peaceful assembly and standard of breach. Finally, it considers justifiable limits on assembly under s.1 of the Charter, identifying principles that guide the determination of reasonable limits. In developing this proposal, the analysis relies on the Charter jurisprudence, and draws additionally on other sources, including the First Amendment of the US Constitution, and international human rights guarantees.
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 | 0.017 | 0.040 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.019 | 0.021 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.003 |
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".