William Lyon Mackenzie King’s Role in the Reconstruction of National Identity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
All nations construct national identities that are important, though often ambiguous and sometimes conflicted. Ideas and policies that become part of the national identity are never fixed. They are subject to ever-changing contexts in the search for national well-being and new ways to sustain established political communities and accommodate new ones. At Confederation and in the decades that followed, the national narrative, and, by extension, the character of Canada promoted by successive prime ministers from Sir John A. Macdonald onwards, focused on Canada as a political community that had to recognize the existence of two founding settler communities, two languages, two cultures, and two different legal systems. Following the turmoil and upheaval of depression and war in the 1930s and the early 1940s, which threatened to destabilize Canada, a new national identity emerged. William Lyon Mackenzie King was at the centre of that reconstruction. Although King is often seen as a pragmatic and careful politician, he constructed a national identity for Canada that included a set of social rights, shared and available to all citizens. He hoped this would enhance a sense of community and build social cohesion as well as safeguarding the existing capitalist system. Coupled with a call for the ending of an isolationist foreign policy, the creation of new symbols, including a Citizenship Act, and the overhaul of Canada’s discriminatory immigration legislation, King believed this new approach to Canadian identity would strengthen the level of attachment of citizens to the nation and encourage them to see themselves as members of a single community, enjoying a common set of liberal ideas and values while sharing common obligations to each other and to the state.
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 | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.042 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".