In the Name of Humanitarianism: The Interim Federal Health Program and the Irregularization of Refugee Claimants
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since 1957 Canada’s Interim Federal Health Program (IFHP) has provided health-care coverage to refugee populations. However, from June 2012 to April 2016 the program was drastically revised in ways that restricted or denied access to health-care coverage, specifically to refugee claimants—persons who have fed their country and made an asylum claim in another country. One of the main intentions of the revision was to protect the integrity of Canada’s humanitarian refugee determination system. However, this had a major unintended consequence: within everyday healthcare places like walk-in clinics, doctor’s offices, and hospitals, IFHP recipients were denied access to services, regardless of actual levels of coverage. In this article I analyze how these program restrictions were experienced within Toronto’s everyday health-care places through the concept of irregularization. I discuss how the IFHP, as a humanitarian health-care program, problematizes the presence of refugee claimants in ways that created experiences of vulnerability, insecurity, and anxiety. Building on this view, I conclude with a discussion of how activists who sought to draw attention to the experiences of refugee claimants in the aftermath of the IFHP revisions closed of truly transformative pathways toward social justice.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.037 | 0.045 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".