“We’d Lose Our Shirt!”: How Canada’s Cultural Policy Has Shaped the Canadian Literary Canon
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Most scholars consider the 1951 issue of a report by the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences to be a pivotal moment in the development of Canadian literature. Later known as the Massey Report, the commission’s document outlined a number of policy recommendations and advocated for a federally supported system of arts patronage. Today, literature is one of Canada’s most mature and respected cultural industries. Writing and publishing this body of literature has also translated into profits and employment for many Canadians. According to Statistics Canada, written media contributes nearly half of the percentage share of the nation’s GDP generated from the cultural sector. As a result, the federal government has a vested interest in supporting the writing and publishing industry; the business of books not only generates wealth, but also contributes to the construction of a strong sense of national identity. \n \nThis paper explores the relationship between the Canadian literary canon and the country’s cultural policy framework. How has this framework, bolstered by the Massey Report, contributed to the development of literature as a cultural industry? Does cultural policy impact the types of books that are published in Canada? While it is neither appropriate nor possible within the scope of this paper to explore the history of Canada’s national literature in depth, it includes a brief examination of the emergence of CanLit during the 1950s, as well as review the introduction of cultural policy. A critical discussion about the impact of this relationship follows. The paper concludes with a critical review of current funding for the publishing industry.
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 teacher head, 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".