Health, Education and Social Services in Canada: The Impact of the GATS
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) came into force, one of the issues that has attracted considerable public attention in Canada is the extent to which the agreement applies to health, education and social services. The Canadian government has consistently assured Canadians that the delivery of these is not threatened by Canada's GATS commitments. The government relies on a number of aspects of the agreement. A general exclusion for services supplied in the exercise of governmental carves some Canadian health, education and social out of the GATS completely. To the extent that an aspect of health, education or social is found to be subject to the agreement, the government's position is that the GATS obligations Canada has undertaken do not impair Canada's ability to maintain its current regime in these areas. Canada has not committed to GATS higher tier of obligations, which includes national treatment, for health, education and social services. In other services, sectors where Canada has undertaken these higher obligations, Canada negotiated some limitations that the government asserts provide additional safeguards. The government also relies on Canada's freedom to withdraw from its commitments in these sectors. This study interprets the scope of the governmental authority exclusion to define the criteria for its application, and then applies these criteria to the existing structures of regulation and methods of delivery in the areas of health, education and social to ascertain the extent to which these are subject to the GATS. For the aspects of health, education and social to which the GATS does apply, the effect of Canada's current GATS obligations is analyzed. The study concludes that the governmental authority exclusion does not exclude all aspects of Canadian health, education and social services, though few programs for the public provision of these would be construed as subject to the GATS. A strong case can be made that public funding for health care, hospitals, public schools and major social programs, like Employment Insurance and social assistance, are all excluded. To the extent that the GATS has application to some health, education and social services, most of the concerns expressed regarding the threats that GATS obligations represent to the effective provision by Canadian governments of these and to the regulatory structures governing them appear unfounded. However, GATS obligations will have to be taken into account in relation to some kinds of policy initiatives. For example, expanding public funding to cover additional health that are insured by private firms is one important area where Canada's GATS obligations may have an impact. Also, where foreign suppliers are permitted to enter the market, the GATS will impose some constraints on the ability of Canadian governments to treat suppliers from one WTO Member less favorably than those from another country.
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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".