The Turmoil Surrounding the Prorogation of Canada’s 40th Parliament & the Crown
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The prorogation of the first session of Can- ada’s fortieth Parliament awakened Canadians to the intricacies of their political system and it brought the Canadian Crown to the fore of our history once more. Acceding to her Prime Min- ister’s advice on that cold, dreary, snow-covered morning of 4 December 2008, the Governor General, Michaëlle Jean, sparked the interest of Canadians in their monarchical institutions. A docile and politically bored population refused in large numbers to cast their ballots in a general election in October. Less than two months later, the prorogation of the first session of their new Parliament sparked a new-fired enthusiasm for politics, and throughout the country Canadians became constitutional experts overnight. They voiced their opinions on talk shows, at work and at leisure, in bars and over formal dinners, sud- denly manifesting astonishing skill at discuss- ing the strengths and weaknesses of their sys- tem of government with particular emphasis on the Maple Crown. Many based their opinions about the Crown on whether or not they liked the Prime Minister. Only a handful focused on the essential issue of the prorogation: was Prime Minister Stephen Harper abusing the preroga- tive and reserve powers of the Crown for parti- san political advantage? This issue was raised by David Smith over a decade ago in his book The Invisible Crown1 and it remains an unresolved question for constitutional observers today.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.029 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".