Canada’s Plan to Torch St. John’s During the Second World War: Upper-Canadian Arrogance or Tabloid Journalism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
IN MAY 1998, JOURNALIST Daniel LeBlanc of the Ottawa Citizen created something of a stir when he published a series of articles exposing “Canada’s plan to torch St. John’s” during the Second World War. LeBlanc based this claim on the then newly declassified documents which supposedly revealed that, in the event of an invasion, military authorities planned to burn St. John’s to the ground rather than let the Germans occupy it. Indeed, the centrepiece of the plan was, apparently, to dump the fuel in the large tanks overlooking St. John’s into the harbour and ignite it. This would produce, “a mushroom of fire and smoke over the city,” and transform St. John’s into a “version of hell.” Even more scurrilous, according to Leblanc, neither the Newfoundland public nor their government was to be informed until the very last moment. 1 Not surprisingly, the Ottawa Citizen articles, reprinted in the St. John’s Evening Telegram, caused an uproar in Newfoundland’s capital city. 2 St. John’s mayor Andy Wells, a self-avowed anti-Confederate, considered it “Upper-
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.044 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 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".