The Death of Whiggery: Lower-Canadian British Constitutionalism and the tentation de l’histoire parallèle
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Constitutional Act of 1791 was sought to create in Lower Canada a community whose social and political values reflected the basic assumptions of late-eighteenth-century Whiggery. These included representation of interest rather than of individuals, the importance of the "due" weight of property, and the organic nature of the British constitution. These values of "Liberty and Property" constituted the focus of the emotional and cultural image of the British Constitution. For the British Lower Canadians of the 1830s, these values were not fossilised remnants. Rather, they formed a coherent framework that made legitimate their conflict with the French-Canadian majority for control over politics. The influence of organised Constitutionalism did not disappear with the Act of Union of 1841. In the opening years of the union, anglophones identified with the Constitutionalist party which dominated both opposition and government in Canada East. They remained an influence until midcentury. Indeed, the final disintegration of Constitutionalism as a defensible basis for British Lower-Canadian politics was not the result of the inevitable triumph of La Fontaine's Responsible Government. Because they strongly identified, not simply with Britain, but with specific elements of British society, English-speaking Lower Canadians responded to changes in British political society. “La tentation de l'histoire parallèle” ensured that the Irish Repeal agitation and the Free Trade campaign would disrupt the assumption of a united British "interest." After the 1840s, the disproportionate power of British-Canadian élites in Lower Canada was based on their influence among the leaders of political parties rather than a collective identity rooted in the values of ''Whiggery.''
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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 | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.041 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".