Some Initial Thoughts on Wilson v. Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd and Edmonton (City) v. Edmonton East (Capilano) Shopping Centres Ltd
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Administrative law focusses on the way in which, and the extent to which, courts should oversee the exercise of administrative authority. The law on substantive review of administrative decision-making has changed drastically over the last several decades, particularly around choice of standard of review. In the words of the Honorable John M Evans, courts have returned to this issue “with almost monotonous regularity over the last 30 years”. Two Supreme Court of Canada decisions from 2016, Wilson v Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd and Edmonton (City) v Edmonton East (Capilano) Shopping Centres Ltd, have regenerated discussion about standard of review in relation to questions of law. No less an authority than the Honourable Justice David Stratas has suggested that the Court may be “about to embark on one of its once-a-decade, wholesale revisions to the law of judicial review”. To assess how Wilson and Capilano relate to the Supreme Court’s last wholesale revision of the law on substantive review in Dunsmuir v New Brunswick, this article: a) considers Justice Abella’s suggestion in Wilson that a separate standard of correctness review is no longer needed; b) assesses the trend, developing pre-Capilano and implicitly accepted by the majority in that decision, of limiting correctness review to the four categories of legal questions identified in Dunsmuir; and c) discusses the difficulties of applying the Dunsmuir understanding of reasonableness where there are only two possible interpretations of the legislative provision in dispute (Wilson and Capilano), or where the administrative decision-maker has not provided reasons on an issue under review (Capilano).
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 | 0.005 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.016 | 0.017 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.002 |
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".