Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1889, in response to growing concern about the role of cartels and other combines in the economy, the Canadian parliament passed the Anti-Combines Act, the world’s first modern competition statute. A tentative first step, the Act made it a misdemeanour to enter into agreements that were previously unenforceable under the contract law restraint of trade doctrine. The Act, however, was not a success, with only a single prosecution (which resulted in acquittal) brought under it prior to its amendment in 1900. Since that time, it has been broadly criticized in the academic literature, with critics alleging three reasons for its failure: that it extended only to conduct already unlawful under the restraint of trade doctrine; that it criminalized only conduct already indictable under the crime of conspiracy; and that it was an intentional failure, a political sham. Each of these critiques, however, is built on a flawed understanding of the restraint of trade doctrine, reading back into the law in 1889 two House of Lords’ decisions from the 1890s, Mogul Steamship v McGregor, Gow (1892) and Nordenfelt v Maxim Nordenfelt Guns & Ammunition (1894), which made it substantially more difficult to prove agreements were unreasonable vis-a-vis the public interest. Though the Act would not have been the panacea intended by its chief sponsor, Nathaniel Clarke Wallace, it would have been a useful tool against the most pernicious of combine agreements, had the law remained as it was at the time of enactment. The Anti-Combines Act should thus be remembered not for its failure, but as a Canadian legislative innovation hampered by judicial decisions rendered in Westminster.
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 | 0.006 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.013 |
| 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".