Tabling and waiting: a preliminary assessment of Canada's treaty-tabling policy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
To achieve a more democratic treaty-making process, the Canadian government introduced in 2008 a policy whereby treaties are tabled before Parliament for at least 21 sitting days before ratification. The decision came many years after other democracies had already adopted mechanisms to address the democratic deficit at the legislative level. It was also preceded by domestic demands for an end to the executive dominance over treaty-making. This article explores the implementation of the policy from 2008 to 2013 to assess its relevance to the democratization of the process. The findings suggest that, even though the process became more predictable and transparent, the policy neither promoted the debate of treaties nor altered the executive pre-eminence. Moreover, treaties not requiring implementing legislation were either not debated during the 21-day period or ratified despite the will of the House. The minority status of the government until the 2011 elections may explain the influence of opposition MPs over the passage of some bills implementing treaties.
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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 | 0.018 | 0.036 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.013 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".