Odd Man Out: How Stephen Harper Changed Canada's Relations with the United Nations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since coming to power in 2006, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has changed how Canada views the world, and how the world views Canada.This is evident through Canada's strained relations with the United Nations.He has shown disdain for the UN treaty process, including the Arms Trade Treaty, the Convention to Combat Desertification, and the Convention on Cluster Munitions.He used the UN umbrella to court support for his Maternal, Newborn Child Health initiatives, masking an overall cut in development spending.The UN has served as his government's main battleground to bring Canada closer to Israel than before.A combination of political ideology and domestic political necessity lies behind this new foreign policy direction.That has meant smashing the brand of past Liberal governments and crafting policies that can appeal to Harper's core base, while attempting to attract other more mainstream supporters.iii Harper's first major overseas trip -a major multilateral summit, and two stops in the capitals of Canada's two closest European allies.Harper doesn't have a lot of international experience, and there wasn't much foreign policy talk in the election campaign that brought him to power earlier in the year.Eventually Harper emerges from the front of the plane and finds his way to us, pausing in an aisle as we crane over the seats to get close to him.He has removed his contact lenses in favour of wire-rimmed glasses.He looks me in the eye, and I ask him if he thinks Israel has acted in a disproportionate manner as the leaders of France and Russia, for instance, were saying just hours earlier.He speaks for three minutes in all, gives his answers, and departs.We all drop back into our seats, don our headphones and start transcribing.Harper's words will be widely reported hours later when his plane touches down in London.These comments will represent his first line in the sand to distinguish Canada's position in the world under his leadership.Harper calls the massive Israeli bombardment after the kidnapping of its soldiers a "measured response."(Blanchfield "Harper stands") Harper's comment marks the beginning of what has been a nearly decade-long discussion about how he sees the world -and what this means for Canada's place in it.From that moment on, there develops an overwhelming sense that something has changed in Canadian foreign policy.It's not that previous Liberal and Progressive Conservative governments weren't pro-Israeli.It's just that Harper's characterization immediately struck many as taking sides in the decades-old, intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict.It also marked the beginning of a discussion -one that continues to this day -about
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 | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.042 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 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".