Sector claims and counter-claims: Joseph Elzéar Bernier, the Canadian government, and Arctic sovereignty, 1898–1934
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Many writers have presented Joseph Elzéar Bernier (1852–1934) as a hero whose key role in establishing Canada's sovereignty over the Arctic islands was unjustly downplayed by the government he served. According to this view, the sector claim that Bernier made on 1 July 1909 is the true foundation of Canada's title to the archipelago. This article draws on government files to assess civil servants’ attitude to his sovereignty-related activities. It also describes the role played by James White, whose more sophisticated and effective sector concept predated Bernier's and served as the basis for the official sector claim made in June 1925. The evidence indicates that government officials in the 1920s were well justified in their doubts about Bernier's pretensions. However, even though they rejected his version of the sector theory and resented the campaign of self-glorification on which he embarked after his retirement, their personal relations with him were good, and they took considerable trouble to ensure what they considered to be an appropriate degree of recognition for him. The article therefore clarifies the differences between Bernier's rhetoric and reality, particularly with regard to the sector principle.
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.
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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".