The stories we tell: the supreme court of Canada and the constitution
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation is a study of the Supreme Court of Canada and the constitution. At its heart is a dissatisfaction with the assumptions about the constitution that underlie existing accounts of the Court. These assumptions fail to adequately capture structural and lived realities of Canadian constitutionalism. As a consequence, our understandings of the Supreme Court's role and significance in the constitutional life of the country are tidy, but incomplete in meaningful - indeed harmful - ways. To overcome these shortcomings, this dissertation offers a new account of the Court in Canada's constitutional order. This new account begins by disrupting the assumptions that underlie the existing narratives. Two reorientations are central. First, the analysis in this dissertation attends to structural dimensions of the constitution, which have been in the shadow of rights-based constitutionalism since patriation. Second, the analysis draws on the insights of legal pluralism, which helpfully inform much constitutional knowledge in Canada but have not been adequately accounted for in understandings of the Supreme Court. This reorientation reveals matters that play a significant role in the Court's institutional life but have been overlooked and undervalued in the existing accounts. In particular, these matters include the horizontal and shifting institutional framework within which the Court operates, the agonistic dimensions of constitutional disputes, and the multijural character of constitutionalism in Canada. Relying on a structural reading of the constitution, this dissertation tells a different story about the Supreme Court in Canada's legal order. It first considers the present, urging a shift in expectations, attitudes, and practices in relation to the Court. It then imagines the future, arguing for an approach to Court reform that is sensitive to the aspirations of institutional design, and the possibilities and limits of constitutional amendment in Canada.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.045 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.021 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".