JUDICIAL INTERPRETATION, FORMAL AMENDMENT OR THE BALLOT BOX: RECOGNIZING CIVIC DEMOCRACY IN THE CONSTITUTION OF CANADA
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As a result of the mid-election interference that occurred during the Toronto Civic Election in 2018, commentators have raised various ways of interpreting the Constitution of Canada, through unwritten constitutional principles or otherwise, to protect democratic civic elections. Other commentators have suggested amending provincial constitutions, as opposed to the Constitution of Canada. In this Thesis, I argue that a formal amendment to the Constitution of Canada is required to adequately protect democratic civic elections. Additionally, I take the position that truly protecting civic democracy requires constitutional protection of civic legislative and revenue raising powers on top of democratic civic elections. In doing so, I discuss living constitutionalism, the prevailing theory of constitutional interpretation in Canada, and the constraints thereon. I then discuss how the various creative interpretations of the Constitution ignore the constraints on constitutional interpretation and create uncertainty within the text of the Constitution and for the future of civic democracy. \n\nWhile I am critical of alternative approaches to a formal amendment, I agree that city councils of large Canadian cities play a significant legislative role and are an important level of government in Canada. For this and other reasons, such as the majority of the population of Canada living in cities, the legislative role of large Canadian cities ought to be protected by the Constitution. I argue that the constraints on constitutional interpretation cannot be ignored, rendering a formal amendment to the Constitution of Canada the ideal method to adequately protect civic democracy within the Constitution. Although I acknowledge a formal amendment of this nature is unlikely, I continue to discuss the potential benefits of advocating for a formal constitutional amendment such as addressing these issues through the ballot box or influencing constitutional interpretation through proposed, partially complete of failed constitutional amendment proposals. Again, although I am critical of the alternative approaches to a formal amendment of the Constitution of Canada, I accept that constitutional interpretation may be the only realistic method of protecting civic elections within the Constitution of Canada.
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 teacher head, 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".