“Happy-Go-Lucky Fellow”: Lone-Actor Terrorism, Masculinity, and the 1966 Bombing on Parliament Hill in Ottawa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On 18 May 1966, Paul Joseph Chartier blew himself up outside of the Canadian House of Commons in Ottawa. His target had been members of parliament, but he succeeded in killing only himself. The bombing received widespread attention at the time and prompted an investigation involving both the rcmp and fbi. Using the more than 1,300-page file compiled by the police, I stress the importance of a historical approach to the study of terrorism as the article examines Chartier’s deed in the context of lone-actor terrorism, both within Canada and internationally. Ultimately, I conclude that the reason Chartier carried out the attack is unknowable. However, I argue that a strong correlation existed between the motivation for Chartier’s act of extreme violence and masculinity, a connection often ignored in scholarship about terrorism, especially lone-actor terrorism. Chartier fell considerably short of the hegemonic masculine ideals of postwar Canada, which he blamed, in populist fashion, on a corrupt Canadian political system. In the end, he turned to a traditional response by some men, both in Canada and internationally, an act of extreme violence, to salvage something from his life by striking back against those he blamed for his failures.
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 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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 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".