The Governor General’s Decision to Prorogue Parliament: A Chronology & Assessment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We are fortunate that real crises are few and far between in Canadian politics. We have a fundamentally stable system of government, and most political leaders both understand and play by the rules most of the time. As a result, it is something of a shock when a real crisis erupts and fundamental differences unfold over basic constitutional rules. Canada’s parliamentary system has been under increasing strain for several years, but matters came to a head in late 2008. While Governor General Michaëlle Jean’s controversial decision to grant Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s request to prorogue Parlia- ment was the high point of this crisis, there is so much more about this episode that needs to be understood. And it is crucial for us to really understand this affair because the ramifications of the 2008 crisis are profound and enduring. One reason the events erupted so quickly into a crisis is that they dealt with the unwritten rules of the constitution, which are seldom discussed in depth even at the best of times and, as a re- sult, are subject to misinterpretation and mis- representation in times of conflict. The tension was compounded by the unprecedented nature of much of what transpired. Without clear and easy parallels to similar crises in the past, the public and their advisors in the media were left confused as to what was or was not the proper course of action. Nevertheless, there were clear constitutional principles at play that would have been able to give better direction to the Gover- nor General and the Prime Minister if they had been heeded.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.015 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.003 |
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".