The Committee Process: Platform for Participation or Political Theatre?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Canada’s parliamentary democracy, the government controls the legislative agenda. At least in the case of a majority government, government bills tabled in the House of Commons will ultimately become the law of the land. While the passage of legislation emanating from the government may appear inevitable, the system is structured to provide multiple opportunities to debate and discuss legislative proposals. The process of making law provides some avenues to test and question legislative initiatives, particularly those that may appear inconsistent with Canada’s Constitution; lawmaking may also provide opportunities to ensure that the voices of Canadians — not all of whom feel represented by the government or their Members of Parliament (MPs) — are heard.Unfortunately, while some of these changes and many others are worthy of study and consideration, there is little evidence of any political will to reform the way our committees function. As a result, we are likely to continue to see political and partisan dramas play out before our committees and will have to look to different venues for meaningful participation and debate.
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 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 | 0.021 | 0.047 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.025 | 0.020 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.035 | 0.009 |
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".