The role of parliaments in secession referendums: Canadian doctrine and consensus democracy in designing decision-making process
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article analyses the doctrine of the Supreme Court of Canada in its opinion on the secession of Quebec, as a key reference for the democratic management of territorial conflicts. Despite what some secessionist readings suggest, the referendum does not occupy the core of the Canadian model; rather, it represents just one stage within a decision-making procedure whose complexity is what ultimately proves decisive. It is within this complex framework that Parliament appears to hold a central role. Drawing on a close reading of the texts articulating this doctrine, the article assesses the role assigned to Parliament and its implications for the shaping of constitutional democracy. The article is organized into two sections: the first examines the referendum as a mechanism for resolving territorial conflicts; the second focuses on the role of parliament within the democratic balance. It concludes, on the one hand, that the legitimacy of deeply divisive decisions is linked to the procedural costs entailed in reaching them; and on the other, that this doctrine calls for qualifying the liberal fiction of a single people with a general will, and instead points toward a more complex understanding of democracy that combines majority rule with mechanisms of consensus.
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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 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 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".