Public safety in private hands revisited: The case of Ontario's Technical Standards and Safety Authority
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Delegated Administrative Authorities (DAAs) are widely employed for delivering public safety and consumer protection regulatory functions at the provincial level in Canada. Although strongly supported by governments, the model has been subject to considerable criticism from legislative committees and officers, non‐governmental organizations, and the media. This paper examines Ontario's DAA experience through the case of the Technical Standards and Safety Authority (TSSA). It finds that, like other jurisdictions pursuing similar new public management (NPM) reforms, the Ontario government adopted legislation significantly strengthening its oversight and control, indicating substantial concerns about the structure and performance of the TSSA and by implication Ontario's other DAAs. Even with these changes, significant gaps are identified in the TSSA's governance and accountability structures.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.038 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".