The Charlottetown Conference and the Birth of Canada by Deirdre Kessler, Douglas Baldwin, and: Three Weeks in Quebec City: The Meeting That Made Canada by Christopher Moore (review)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Deirdre Kessler and Douglas Baldwin, The Charlottetown Conference and the Birth of Canada (Halifax: Nimbus, 2015), 123 pp. Paper. $15.95. ISBN 978-1-77108-320-1.Christopher Moore, Three Weeks in Quebec City: The Meeting That Made Canada (Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2015), 262pp. Cased. $35. ISBN 978-0-670-06525-7.The early 1960s saw the publication of a series of major historical publications to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Confederation. So far only two popular studies have been published to mark the 150th anniversary. The volume on The Charlottetown Conference and the Birth of Canada is obviously aimed at young readers and has nothing new to say about the Charlottetown Conference. Indeed, the authors seem more interested in the social activities that accompanied the Conference and in the nature of the hoop skirts worn by the 'Mothers of Confederation' (p. 82) than in the details of the political agreement that was worked out at Charlottetown. Three Weeks in Quebec City by one of Canada's most important popular historians is a far more substantial study. Christopher Moore sets out to write 'a day-by-day, debate-by-debate, dinner-and-dance-by-dinner-and-dance exploration of the meeting in Quebec city' (p. 253) and he has succeeded in producing an engaging narrative full of interesting detail. Specialists will find little to surprise them in Moore's account since the book covers much the same ground as his earlier study, 1867: How the Fathers Made a Deal (1997). Moore has kept up with the recent Canadian literature and incorporates it into his text, but his interpretation of events has not changed much. He also has the annoying habit of going beyond the evidence, ascribing motive to both individuals and groups when all the historical record shows is silence. He also uses hypothetical questions to create a dubious interpretation of events. On 13 October the delegates at Quebec passed a motion declaring the desire of the delegates to perpetuate the connection with the mother country. Moore asks, Was there 'a hinting of independence in the motion that was passed (p. 83)?' The obvious answer is no. But Moore wishes to downplay the importance of the British connection to the delegates at Quebec. He even claims that only three of the 33 men around the table had been born in Britain and that most of the delegates 'were generations away from British or French roots' (p. 84). This may have been true of the Francophones. But it was certainly not true of the Anglophones. …
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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 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.005 |
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".