Bibliographic record
Abstract
During the last decade, in Quebec and elsewhere in Canada, the media have competed to be the first to declare on election nights who will form the next government. Irrespective of whether they predicted that any political party would be able to obtain a majority of seats, these announcements have been made within only a few hours of the polls closing. These announcements have systematically preceded any public statement by the leaders of the political parties involved. Indeed, the media have developed the unfortunate habit of substituting an entire set of constitutional rules and principles leading to the formation of government by a simplistic heuristic: “the political party that wins the largest number of seats wins the election and has the right to form the next government.” The media present the issue as automatic, merely a matter of arithmetic. Even if this heuristic works well when a party has won a majority of seats, it is completely inadequate as a statement of the constitutional law and conventions related to the formation of government in our parliamentary system. This article thus aims to flesh out the Canadian constitutional rules and principles applicable to government formation and illustrate how constitutional considerations come into play in the variety of possible scenarios. A quick reference tool is appended to the text to facilitate consultation of the applicable rules and principles to those different situations.
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 | 0.011 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.049 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 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".