Feminism, Federalism and Families: Canada’s Mixed Social Policy Architecture
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2018, with a self-declared feminist prime minister, a federal commitment to gender-based budget analysis, and a Cabinet composed of ministers who are 50 percent women, Canada’s social policy architectureis being transformed. This transformation is taking place alongside the rise of a reactionary conservative populism abroad and on the heels of almost a decade of federal Conservative social policy basedon “family-values” in Canada. Despite its comparatively progressive character, Canada’s social policy architecture remains nested in a liberal welfare state model, with potentially deleterious outcomes especially for mothers, lower income, and racialized women. Further, populist discourses around families, and the social and tax policies associated with them, remain popular among many voters. Such approaches are often regressive and may entrench inequalities, yet they continue to flavour some of Canada’s policies related to families. This article explores some of the consequences of Canada’s family policy incoherence. It examines key federal family-related policies over the last decade, including the Liberal government’s recent extension of parental leaves to eighteenmonths, its income-based targeting of childcare spending, and its 2018 Gender Equality Budget. This exploration: offers a dynamic theoretical framework for understanding gender in relation to law and social policy; considers why families and federalism are complex political and policy terrain; catalogues Canada’s mixed family policy architecture; and recommends that a feminist future in Canadian social policy will require deviation from the current trajectory to include recalibration of parental leaves and an orientation to childcare as a public good.
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 | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.042 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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 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".