Why We Need A Constitutional Right To Healthy Environment In Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The increasing demand for constitutional recognition of the right to a healthy environment (‘RTHE’) has been a matter of public concern and debate in many countries, including Canada.2 This paper asks, will a constitutional RTHE within the Canadian Constitution add any value when statutes already exist to protect the environment (and thereby health)? The present environmental statutes work towards protecting the environment, and by protecting the environment, public health can be protected.3 Together, both of them form a ‘healthy environment’, ie., an environment that fosters a healthy life.4 This paper will argue that there is additional value in recognizing a RTHE in the constitution despite these statutes being in force. To be able to understand this question, this paper will investigate the efficiency of present statutes in dealing with current environmental problems and if there are any benefits of recognizing a constitutional right. The paper will begin with examining the development of international RTHE, and how it impacts Canada (and vice versa) in protecting a healthy environment in Part I of the paper. In this section, this paper will also look at current international law trends and how Canada draws from the international RTHE. Subsequently, in Part II of this paper, various statutes and domestic developments regarding the RTHE will be evaluated. The purpose of this section is to see how people can protect a healthy environment in Canada currently as there is no expressed RTHE in the Constitution. The narrower question dealt with in this section is if the statutes are enough to protect a healthy environment. The gaps in this structure will be pointed out to form a basic understanding of the risks that a constitutional right will most likely eliminate. In Part III, this paper will also look at the RTHE as a constitutional right and how it functions as an expressed as well as an implied right in other jurisdictions after mapping out some advantages of a constitutional right over a statutory right. This paper will also touch upon the Constitutions of various countries like Brazil, Pakistan, India and the USA. This comparative analysis is being undertaken to evaluate how the same RTHE exists in different characters, i.e., as a constitutional right, as a statutory right and as an international right. This will show us how this right is recognized in different jurisdictions owing to different factor that influence the decision of which character should this right adopt. Moreover, this analysis will help in figuring out which is the best model for Canada. It will also help in identifying any lessons from constitutions that do recognize this right as a constitutional right that could be productive in contemplating a constitutional RTHE in Canada in Part IV.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 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".