Shedding Light on Canada's Foreign Policy Alignment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract. The purpose of this article is to explore the issue of alignment in Canadian foreign policy. The main research question is whether Canada's responses to foreign crises aligned with those of its allies, and if so, which allies and why. The study proceeds in two steps. First, it tests four major theoretical perspectives that could explain Canada's behaviour: continentalism, transatlantism, the Anglosphere argument and unilateralism. By performing a computer-generated content analysis, the article assesses these propositions by focusing on and comparing Canada's official declarations to those of the United States, France and Britain to six foreign crises that occurred between 2004 and 2011. Second, the analysis identifies whether there is a difference between the Harper and Martin governments' responses to foreign crises. The research provides quantitative and qualitative evidence suggesting that Canada's foreign policy alignment primarily tends toward a transatlantic orientation. It also shows that the Harper government was less in line with Washington than was the previous Liberal government of Paul Martin, which challenges the conventional wisdom of Canadian foreign policy. Résumé. Cet article explore l'enjeu de l'alignement en politique étrangère canadienne et pose la question de recherche suivante : est-ce qu'à l'égard des crises étrangère le Canada s'aligne sur les positions de ses alliés et, si oui, lesquels et pourquoi? Tout d'abord, l'article présente quatre perspectives théoriques susceptibles d'expliquer le comportement du Canada : le continentalisme, le transatlantisme, la thèse de l'anglosphère et celle de l'unilatéralisme. En ayant recours à une analyse de contenu assistée par ordinateur, cet article teste la validité de ces propositions en comparant les déclarations officielles du Canada à celles des États-Unis, de la France et de l'Angleterre à l'égard de six crises survenues entre 2004 et 2011. Ensuite, l'analyse cherche à identifier s'il y a une différence entre les réponses des gouvernements Harper et Martin à l'égard de ces crises. L'étude fournit des données empiriques de type qualitatif et quantitatif qui suggèrent que le Canada a eu une orientation transatlantique lors de la gestion de ces crises internationales. Elle montre également que le gouvernement Harper est moins aligné sur les positions de Washington que ne le fut le précédent gouvernement libéral, ce qui ébranle certaines idées communément admises en politique étrangère canadienne.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".