Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since Confederation in Canada and until the 39th federal general election of 23 January 2006, no fewer than 246 members of the House of Commons have changed political allegiance. This number includes only those in the federal portion of Canadian public life and only those in the Lower House of Parliament. At the time of writing, there were 16 Members of the House of Commons who, at one time or another in their careers, left one political party for another. The realities of floor‐crossing and the consequences of such an admittedly risky venture in public life must be assumed to affect parliamentarians’ views about the creation of rules, whether legal, political or mixed, in respect of changes of political allegiance. Through a close examination of the Constitution Act and other Acts of Parliament this article investigates whether such rules exist in Canada. It also provides an overview of recent attempts at codification and lessons learnt from foreign jurisdictions, such as South Africa and New Zealand. The article concludes by referring to Edmund Burke’s famous Address to the Electors of Bristol and observing that the logical consequence for current Canadian political life of Burke’s thoughts may be that a Member of Parliament must be free to vote according to their conscience and therefore may only be held to account to those who elected them until the following election.
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 | 0.006 | 0.028 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".