'Mentally Defectives' Not Welcome: Mental Disability in Canadian Immigration Law, 1859-1927
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the history and language of Canadian immigration statues and House of Commons debates regarding immigrants with mental disabilities from the time of Confederation to the 1920s. This paper posits that a study of the historical language and legal frameworks regarding immigrants with mental "disorders" illuminates the myriad of social prejudices about mental disability that have persisted in Canada. The early 20th century laws and House of Commons debates indicate that the exclusion of immigrants with mental disabilities was a deliberate decision on the part of legislators to ensure the proper "character" of immigrants coming to Canada. This paper argues that the representation of mental disability in early immigration legislation, particularly in the context of the growing influence of the field of psychiatry, reveals the historical pervasiveness of social misunderstandings of mental disability.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.039 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| 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".