Immigration Advertising and the Canadian Government's Policy for Prairie Development, 1896 to 1918
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation examines the literature produced by the Immigration Branch of the Canadian Department of the Interior from 1896 until the First World War. Immigration agents in the United States and Great Britain distributed these brochures, pamphlets and atlases to encourage farmers to settle in the Canadian West and the themes contained within these texts illustrate the ideological positions of Canada's immigration officials. In particular, they demonstrate that the ideal society envisioned by these bureaucrats consisted of young farm families. In the early years of Wilfiid Laurier's administration immigration became a top priority. This reflected both the upward trend in the world economy as well as a desire on the part of many Canadians to fill the Prairies with prosperous white families. As the government wanted only to recruit farm families they tailored their immigration propaganda to include themes which they hoped would appeal to young farmers and their wives in the United -States and Great Britain. This dissertation is based on a close analysis of these documents. Many of the topics included in Canada's immigration propaganda suggested that the Prairie West had tremendous agricultural potential. The authors wrote that western Canada could produce record amounts of wheat and that this grain was of such high quality that a bushel could expect to sell for record prices. In addition to describing the farms of the West, Canadian immigration officials attempted to inform their readers about the social conditions of Prairie life. In particular, they wrote that western Canada had churches, good schools, social clubs, and all of the other aspects of rural social life that immigrants knew from their homes in Great Britain and the United States. This dissertation ends with the conclusion of the First World War, as it was at this point that Canadian government changed the way that it approached immigration. The conclusions drawn in this work illustrate that Canada did not have a haphazard approach to immigration, but rather an organized, systematic view as to which settlers were best suited to the West. This is clear in the government's immigration literature, which is written to specifically appeal to young, prosperous farm families.
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 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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 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".