Bibliographic record
Abstract
This research note examines prohibitionist claims about public opinion on Canadian prostitution law. It focuses on (1) the Christian Legal Fellowship, REAL Women of Canada, and the Catholic Civil Rights League (CLF) factum to the Superior Court of Ontario in Bedford v Canada (2010), which claims that most Canadians support prohibition; and (2) Prime Minister Stephen Harper's assertion that most Canadians support the prohibitionist stance underlying his government's decision to appeal the Superior Court of Ontario's decision to strike down several prostitution laws (Bedford v Canada 2010). A review of seven national public opinion polls conducted between 1984 and 2011 reveals that, contrary to the CLF and the prime minister's claims, since 2005 a small majority of Canadians favour some form of decriminalization of consensual adult prostitution. The surveys reveal marked gender differences in attitudes to prostitution law reform, with men being more likely to favour decriminalization than women. Three Angus Reid surveys (2009, 2010, 2011) suggest that there is little support for the “Nordic model” of demand-side prohibition.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".