The Canadian Government’s Litigation Strategy in Sexual Orientation Cases
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canadian politics was thrown into turmoil this summer when the highest courts of two provinces, British Columbia and Ontario, declared the traditional heterosexual definition of marriage unconstitutional under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The ensuing praise and condemnation of the courts was as expected given the highly-contentious subject matter, but what was not expected was that the Canadian federal government, which has jurisdiction over marriage (s.91.26, Constitution Act, 1867) would appeal neither ruling to the Supreme Court of Canada. The paper argues that the Attorney General of Canada’s decision is consistent with a pattern of avoiding the SCC when rights claims are based on sexual orientation. While there is ample evidence that the government is ideologically sympathetic to rights claims by gays and lesbians, this does not explain the repeated decisions to concede losses sustained in the lower courts, rather than challenge them via appeals to the SCC. Rather, analysis of the SCC’s jurisprudence in this area, and of the broader institutional factors motivating government appeals, supports the more nuanced conclusion that the AGs Canada acted strategically to minimize losses and, accordingly, to protect the government’s discretion to craft a response.
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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 | 0.014 | 0.033 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.055 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.021 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.013 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".