Canada’s Foreign Enlistment Act : Mackenzie King’s expedient response to the Spanish Civil War
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Twelve-hundred Canadians volunteered for the republican cause during the Spanish Civil War. Along with the large number of recruits, committees were formed, fund raising begun, rallies organized, and parliament petitioned. Interest was widespread in Canada, and tended to become emotional as the conflict became a battlefield of ideals. Whether communist labourers, socialist intellectuals, or simply champions of democracy, English speaking Canadians were inclined to support the beleaguered Republic in its battle against Franco and his fascist allies. Though English speaking Canada tended to be sympathetic toward the Republic, Mackenzie King's Liberal government passed the Foreign Enlistment Act nine months into the war, which forbad any Canadian from volunteering for either side in the conflict. Why did the Prime Minister, usually so careful in his dealings with public opinion, pass legislation that seemed to go against the wishes of the electorate? This thesis will attempt to prove that King was, in fact, paying scrupulous attention to popular sentiments, and passed the Act after a thorough analysis of his government's situation. It will be shown that opinion in Quebec, a federal Liberal stronghold, had become increasingly reactionary, and by 1936 was indeed sympathetic to Franco. King believed, quite rightly, that the vehement anti-republicanism in Quebec was simply much stronger than the pro voice from the rest of Canada. The Foreign Enlistment Act was shrewdly designed to placate Quebec voters without alienating too many English speaking Canadians. To facilitate this study it will first be necessary to examine public opinion, and the role of the media in English Canada. An analysis of the Quebec situation will then be made. Finally, a chapter will be devoted to Mackenzie King and how he dealt with the rift in public opinion .exacerbated by the Spanish Civil War. This chapter will show the Prime Minister as a political animal par excellence, who in this case, put political survival before moral principles.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.034 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".