The Biopolitics of Genetically Modified Organisms in Canada
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In recent years we have witnessed the rise of considerable resistance to genetically modified (GM) food and crops around the world. This has led to a moratorium on the planting of new GM crops in Europe, and regimes for the mandatory labelling of GM foods in more than 30 countries, including Japan and Australia. By contrast, the Canadian regulatory system has approved 51 “plants with novel traits” and “novel foods” since 1995, almost all of which are GM, and any demands to require labelling of these products have been resisted by the federal government. Working with theoretical concepts developed by Michel Foucault, this essay examines this situation in Canada. The author traces the way in which facts and values have together given shape to a biopolitical struggle between those scientists who would frame genetically modified organisms (GMOs) as a manageable risk and those who have adopted a more precautionary framing. Three specific terms used in Canadian “science-based” regulation - “novelty,” “familiarity” and “substantial equivalence” - can be seen to represent ambiguous compromises in these ongoing struggles at the international level. In Canada these concepts have been mobilized to narrow the horizon of what can be expected to be risky about genetic engineering, allowing swift approval of many GM crops. High-level scientific critiques of this system, however, buoyed by public concern, point towards the need for a more open-ended regulatory process in Canada, one that would acknowledge that decision making in this field is inevitably both technical and political.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 it