Freedom of Association and the Resurrection of Effective Impossibility? A Comment on <i>Société des casinos du Québec</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In April 2024, the Supreme Court of Canada released its decision in Société des casinos du Québec , which centres on a challenge to the managerial exclusion under Quebec’s Code du travail . This case is the latest in a growing body of Supreme Court decisions that revisit the scope, content, and threshold for claims under section 2(d) of the Charter , which guarantees freedom of association, and works to enlarge the content of section 2(d) as well as its applicability in contexts outside of traditional labour relations regimes. As we discuss in this comment, Société des casinos du Québec risks undoing much of this work—especially for workers who fall outside of those regimes. We argue that this decision may have implicitly resurrected the threshold of effective impossibility for establishing infringement of section 2(d) in non-statutory contexts. In doing so, it has the potential to create a higher threshold for accessing and exercising rights for workers who are not subject to a legislative framework for labour relations, and thus risks creating a tiered approach to accessing associational rights under section 2(d).
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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 | 0.013 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.032 | 0.040 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.030 | 0.025 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".