A Corrective Justice Account of Building Authority Liability in Canadian Negligence Law
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In its decisions in Kamloops v Neilsen and Rothfield v Manolakos, the Supreme Court of Canada adopted a policy-driven justification for imposing liability on building authorities whenever the negligent exercise of their building regulation mandate led to any member of the public suffering any form of foreseeable loss. From its beginnings, this legal doctrine was incoherent and unjustified. It has also become an aberration within Canadian law as, beginning with the decision in Cooper v Hobart, the Supreme Court of Canada resiled from its earlier policy-based approach to imposing liability. What is required is a repudiation of the current legal doctrine, and its replacement by a new understanding of building authority liability. This new understanding is based on corrective justice, at a theoretical level, and a rights-based understanding of negligence law, at the doctrinal level. The current basis of building authority liability, with liability arising from the ability to foresee possible future losses, should be replaced by an inquiry into whether a building authority acted in such a way that it assumed responsibility to a particular person and caused that person to shift their behavior in detrimental reliance on that assumption. This new basis for building authority liability is assisted by the recent development within Canadian law of a rights-based understanding of claims for negligent misrepresentation and negligent performance of a service, an understanding that specifically employs the concept of an assumption of responsibility. Adapting this approach to building authority liability will allow it to be coherent both internally and with the wider field of Canadian negligence law.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".