Selling off the Crown Jewels: Socialization of Costs and Privatization of Profits in the Canadian Isotopes Industry
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores the privatization process of a nuclear Crown corporation, the Radiochemical Company (rcc), under Brian Mulroney’s two Progressive Conservative governments. The rcc specialized in processing and commercializing radioactive isotopes for the medical market, an industry in which it was a major global player. Between 1984 and 1991, several stakeholders, including the rcc’s parent company Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, the Ministry of Energy, Mines and Resources, the Ministry of Finance, and the Canada Development and Investment Corporation, tried to define and shape the terms of the privatization. As a result, the process did not follow a straightforward path since it triggered conflicting political and strategic interests. Through the rcc’s case, this article provides a comprehensive account of the institutional mechanisms that were at play during the application of the Conservatives’ divestiture policy. Contrary to what the government’s rhetoric suggested, privatizing the rcc did not put an end to public spending in the medical isotopes business. The opposite actually happened as the rcc’s sale resulted in socializing the costs and privatizing the profits of this lucrative branch of the Canadian nuclear industry.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".