Civic Integration in a Multi-National Context: Examining Québec’s “Values Test” for New Immigrants
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On January 1st, 2020, the majority French-speaking Canadian province of Québec implemented a “values test” for prospective immigrants. Subject to virulent partisan debate for months prior to its introduction, the “test” is mandatory for many newcomers, and probes their views on secularism, same-sex marriage, gender (in)equality, religious symbols, and aspects of Québécois culture. The circumstances surrounding Québec’s new “values test” point to two fruitful avenues for research on civic integration policy. First, most such research focuses on policies developed by Western European nation-states. The Québec case invites new comparative questions. Whether and how the process of defining civic belonging is differing in countries — like Canada — where regional governments seeking to regulate immigrant selection and incorporation must navigate federal institutional and discursive structures? Second, although not entirely unique, the direct reference to “values” in Québec’s new policy demonstrates that, despite so often being framed by their political advocates as advancing a “liberal” commitment to “rights”, civic integration tests are becoming venues for the explicit promotion of “thick” and exclusionary notions of national identity. Based on a qualitative analysis of the parliamentary debates leading up to Québec’s “values test”, this paper unpacks the implications of this case for assessing the determinants and effects of civic integration policy in and beyond Europe.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".