Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canada is developing a progressive trade agenda (PTA) in response to the global rise of anti-globalization populism. This Commentary reviews the PTA concept, its motivation, the specific elements that comprise it, the likely efficacy of these measures in addressing the factors thought to be driving populism, and the extent to which the PTA can shape Canada’s trade agreements in general and the renegotiated NAFTA in particular. It concludes the following: • The PTA closely parallels the concept of “inclusive trade, ” which has received much attention internationally, including in the World Trade Organization (WTO), the G20, and the World Economic Forum. It also closely parallels the concept of “trade sustainability” that has been developed by the European Union. It is, accordingly, part of a mainstream, progressive vision, rather than an idiosyncratic Canadian initiative. • The PTA responds to a widely accepted view that the gains from globalization have not been fairly shared, that there have been losers as well as winners, and that this reality has been a factor fuelling the populist reaction against globalization. In particular, it responds, along with similar agendas elsewhere, to the declining middle class share of income in industrialized societies. • While the policy is coherently framed and it goes without saying that trade policy should, indeed, help redress the distributional inequities to which it contributes, the role that trade policy has played in generating the current backlash against globalization was arguably relatively small. • At the same time, the measures that have been developed to advance the PTA have limited traction in affecting economic structure and income distribution. Expectations concerning the PTA’s potential efficacy should be calibrated accordingly. • The PTA faces modality issues: the norm-setting aspect is most effectively pursued at the multilateral level; in bilateral negotiations, policy coherence issues arise with both new and existing FTA partners, depending on the progressive credentials of partner governments (and changing administrations); and limiting the PTA’s substantive content in negotiations with less progressive trade partners may result in Canada facing competitive disadvantages and cause difficulties in mobilizing support for any trade agreement. • A failure to achieve strong PTA outcomes as part of the NAFTA renegotiation would signal that the move to deeper integration on the North American continent in the sense of harmonization of policy is both unlikely and ill-advised.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.015 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".