Canadian Politics Unplugged/Liberals at the Border: We Stand on Guard for Whom?/Canada's Military Posture: An Analysis of Recent Civilian Reports
Bibliographic record
Abstract
E. Nicol and P. Whalley, Canadian Politics Unplugged (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2004), 150pp. $19.95. ISBN 1-55002-466-3. L. Axworthy, Liberals at the Border: We Stand on Guard for Whom? (Victoria University with University of Toronto Press, 2004), viii + 52 pp. Paper. $11.95 ISBN 0- 802085938. B. Cooper, M. Stephenson and R. Szeto, Canada's Military Posture: An analysis of recent civilian reports, Critical Issues Bulletin (Vancouver: The Fraser Institute, 2004). Paper. $25 per year membership. ISSN 1480-3666. 'O goody', I thought, opening the Review Editor's parcel, 'a humorous book on Canadian politics: what a good idea. A change from jokes about snow, beer, hockey and eh?' Sadly this little book is just not very funny, despite being written by the doyen of Canadian humorous writers. Nicol has won the Stephen Leacock award three times which makes me wonder whether in fact Canada can sustain only one world-famous person in each cultural category: Cardinal, Gould, Frye, Leacock, McLuhan. The targets in this resume of politics north of the 49th parallel are all easy: Preston Manning, the Federal Government, the Senate, the Lieutenant Governors, Trudeau, the hostility between eastern and western provinces and so on, but the jokes are all rather tired, delivered in folksy throwaway style which enables the reader to see the punch line well before reading it. In case we don't see it coming there is generally that thoughtful piece of Canadian punctuation: the colon: to help us. The illustrations are equally nondescript with none of the bite we associate with Canadian newspaper cartoons. I can think of only one exception: a startled figure in Victorian garb confronts graffiti proclaiming 'Vive Le River Rouge Libre' over the title 'Western Rielism', which made me smile anyway. Oh, and a rather nice slant on bilingualism and the requirement that in Quebec French signs should precede English, and predominate as in 'MC DONALD'S/McDonald's' (p. 120). But throughout the whole book a dependence on feeble puns and over laboured asides gives it the feel of a collection of after dinner anecdotes rather than the satire which the publishers praise: for $20 I would want the dinner thrown in too. And I did try: I read it four times to see if I'd missed the joke: perhaps you have to be really cold to enjoy it. Or Canadian eh? The end of Nicol's book casts a sardonic glance at 'Americanada' and the increasingly ambivalent nature of the integration of Canada within American culture, which was the theme taken up in the next book I opened: L. Axworthy, Liberals at the Border: We Stand on Guard for Whom? Just about the only thing this transcript of the Honourable Lloyd Axworthy's lecture (the sixth in the Senator Keith Dudley memorial series) has in common with the previously reviewed volume is the size and format, but they arrived together and in a way are both 'niche publications'. Axworthy has been a passionate advocate of anti-landmine legislation for many years and in this short text he addresses this issue as well as having pertinent things to say about the inadvisability of Canadian foreign policy simply following on the coat tails of America (as it formerly hung on those of Britain). …
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.011 | 0.044 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.003 |
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".