Prime Minister and Cabinet in Canada: An Autocracy in Need of Reform?
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It has been suggested that the Canadian prime minister tends to enjoy powers to a degree that is unhealthy in a democratic society. This article evaluates the "prime minister as autocrat" argument that has gained currency, if not in the academic literature, certainly in the popular media. It is suggested that while there has been a relative increase in the concentration of power in the centre — the centre defined as the prime minister, his entourage and key central agencies — the portrait of prime ministerial autocracy has been overdrawn. None the less, reforms are desirable. Particularly ones that create or enhance counterweights to prime ministerial power will likely improve Canadian democracy. These reforms should focus not so much on strengthening the role of individual MPs but on reinforcing the position of cabinet, the parliamentary caucus and senate vis-à-vis the prime minister. In this respect, five possible reforms are discussed, and their prospects of being adopted assessed: proportional representation for the House of Commons, an elected senate, strengthened parliamentary caucuses, a fixed time-table for elections and the New Zealand approach to the appointment of senior officials.
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.
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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 | 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 it