Toryism, Classical Liberalism, and Capitalism: The Politics of Taxation and the Struggle for Canadian Confederation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Within the four original Canadian provinces, the politics of taxation were a central issue in the struggle to form Confederation, as they were in Newfoundland, the tax-adverse colony that rejected it. For many participants in the Confederation debate, the key issue was the optimal size of the state as a proportion of total economic activity. Janet Ajzenstat, Peter J. Smith, and Ian McKay have argued that Confederation represented a victory for the ideology of liberal individualism that underpins capitalism. The position taken here is that these scholars are mistaken about the ideological nature of Confederation, and that Confederation, instead, was supported by many colonists who were sympathetic to a relatively interventionist, or statist, approach to capitalist development. The anti-confederate camp of the time, by contrast, included the strongest supporters of classical liberal values such as free trade and low taxes. The struggle over Confederation involved a battle between a staunchly individualist economic philosophy and a comparatively collectivist view of the state’s proper role in the economy. Consequently, it is far more accurate to describe 1867 as the birth of a Tory-interventionist economic order in Canada, rather than of a liberal one. Les politiques de taxation étaient au cœur de l’affrontement sur la Confédération dans les quatre provinces d’origine et à Terre-Neuve, la colonie anti-impôt qui a renoncé à la Confédération dans les années 1860. Pour de nombreux participants au débat sur la Confédération, l’enjeu principal était la taille optimale de l’État par rapport à l’activité économique totale. Janet Ajzenstat, Peter J. Smith et Ian McKay ont soutenu que la Confédération représenta une victoire pour l’idéologie de l’individualisme libéral qui soustend le capitalisme. Le présent article soutient que ces auteurs font fausse route quant à la nature idéologique de la Confédération, en montrant que celleci était appuyée par de nombreux colons sympathiques à une approche relativement interventioniste ou étatiste à l’égard du développement capitaliste. En revanche, le camp anti-Confédération comprenait les partisans les plus vigoureux des valeurs libérales classiques telles que le libre-échange et la faible taxation. Le débat sur la Confédération fut l’occasion d’un affrontement entre une philosophie économique résolument individualiste et une opinion relativement collectiviste du rôle que l’État doit jouer dans l’économie. Il est donc beaucoup plus exact de décrire 1867 comme la naissance d’un ordre économique interventionniste au Canada que comme celle d’un ordre libéral.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".