When Silence Isn't Golden: Constitutional Conventions, Constitutional Culture, and the Governor General
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article is a chapter in the book Parliamentary Democracy in Crisis which is a collection of essays analyzing the parliamentary crisis in Canada from the end of November 2008 to January 2009. After the October 15, 2008 election returned a minority Parliament led once again by Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the opposition parties coalesced to form a proposed coalition to defeat the government on a non-confidence vote and govern in its stead. The non-confidence vote was set for December 8, 2008 but on December 4th, the Prime Minister visited the Governor General and made the unusual request to prorogue the new Parliament until the third week of January 2009. After a meeting that lasted over two hours, the Governor General acceded to this request and the crisis was averted. The Prime Minister did not disclose what transpired between him and the Governor General and she did not provide any reasons for her decision. The authors of this article argue that while constitutional convention circumscribes the role of the Governor General, it does not extend to preventing her from justifying her decisions to the public. In a constitutional culture increasingly tied to an 'ethos of justification', we conclude that is not tenable for the Governor General to remain silent in the face of the parliamentary crisis of 2008.
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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 | 0.019 | 0.031 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.082 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 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".