The Space Between Rule 20 and 21: The Evidentiary Burden on Certification
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper attempts to develop the meaning of the “some basis in fact” evidentiary requirement on certification. Since the Supreme Court of Canada articulated this concept as the appropriate evidentiary test in Hollick v. Toronto (City), courts have struggled to provide a specific factual threshold to satisfy this inquiry. The paper canvasses the jurisprudence to this effect and attempts to provide some answers to this elusive evidentiary component, particularly as it relates to each statutory criteria of the certification test, and which party bears this evidentiary burden in what circumstances. The courts’ treatment of the precarious balance for plaintiffs’ counsel in striking a sufficient evidentiary basis, without tendering superfluous merits based evidence is also examined, as is the treatment of evidence to either support or refute the propriety of an aggregate assessment of damages. Ultimately, the article concludes that satisfying the malleable concept of “some basis in fact” often lies someplace between Rule 20 and Rule 21: while there is no genuine issue for trial test on certification, something more than the plain and obvious test is clearly required. Where this line is drawn on certification continues to evolve, dependent always on the specific facts of each certification motion.
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".