Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Supreme Court of Canada describes the equality guarantee in section 15 (1) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms as a substantive right. Attributing two defining features to substantive equality, the Court maintains it is a comparative concept that must be interpreted by the discrimination principle. The Court's approach troubles feminists who associate comparison with formal equality.However, comparison can have more than one meaning. Elisa Holmes identifies two approaches - instrumental and constitutive - to comparison, explaining they offer a basis for distinguishing discrimination analysis from equality analysis. Since instrumental comparison serves the discrimination principle (and yields formal equality), constitutive comparison must inform some other legal principle that could yield substantive equality. The search for another legal principle reveals two possibilities. One is the dignity principle and the other, the principle of status. The former should be dismissed because its structural features are indistinguishable from those of the discrimination principle. In other words, dignity and discrimination both yield formal, not substantive, equality. On the other hand, Owen Fiss identified the principle of status which is more promising, provided that the sociological concept of status is distinguished from the legal concept. Only the sociological concept is consistent with constitutive comparison because it requires the leveling down of privileged groups, hence making substantive equality more feasible.As three recent cases - Symes, Trociuk, and Law - illustrate, the Supreme Court of Canada is not willing to countenance the leveling down of privileged groups. Although the Court could have invoked the principle of status to guarantee substantive equality to women, the judges opted instead to apply instrumental comparison and the discrimination principle. In effect, the Court relied on formal equality to uphold men's privileges. What remains, therefore, is the larger question: why does the unjust status hierarchy organized around gender continue in the face of the constitutional demand for equality?
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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 | 0.002 | 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 | 0.001 |
| 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".