Canada’s foreign policy and bureaucratic (un)responsiveness: public diplomacy in the digital domain
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Trudeau government’s foreign policy seeks to return Canada to its liberal internationalist roots. Executing this agenda falls upon the foreign affairs bureaucracy, particularly the missions and diplomats abroad. Recognizing this, Trudeau “ungagged” bureaucrats, thereby empowering them to engage in public diplomacy that promotes his stated agenda. How responsive have the bureaucratic agents been to the new political directive? We examine available evidence from digital diplomacy to assess whether the new foreign policy agenda and the change in communication policy have altered the public diplomacy of the foreign affairs bureaucracy. Analysis of over 400,000 tweets from the 296 major Twitter accounts associated with Global Affairs Canada points to few signs of a significant shift in levels of engagement, content of diplomatic outreach, independence of missions, or user interaction with tweets. We argue that despite the key policy change and global visibility of Trudeau’s professed agenda, institutional stickiness has inhibited a concomitant shift in the bureaucracy, thereby limiting the impact of the political directives.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".