Stuck in the Middle with You: Is the Trudeau Government Really Representative of a Central Canadian “Laurentian Elite?”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the aftermath of the 2019 election, the re-election of Justin Trudeau’s Liberals brought out a significant amount of regional tension, in particular in the West. Trudeau, it was claimed, and those in the Liberal Party more generally, represented a central Canadian “Laurentian elite,” which did not care about Western Canadian or other regional interests. This article takes stock of this claim. To do so, it will examine the history of the “Laurentian elite” concept to clarify the idea. It argues that indeed, the Trudeau Liberals have governed as classic representatives of the “Laurentian consensus” on what is “good” for Canada, a consensus that reflects a broader philosophy on how to govern the state. This philosophy focuses on protecting key central Canadian economic interests (for example, dairy farmers and manufacturers like SNC Lavalin or Bombardier), while also supporting free trade in other sectors less important to the central Canadian economy (such as defending oil exports through the new NAFTA agreement). Other examples of Trudeau’s commitment to the Laurentian consensus include a more cooperative federalism (such as in immigration and labour market policy), more money for social programs (the Canada Child Benefit, CPP enhancement, and possible Pharmacare), expanding individual rights and liberties (cannabis legalization, opposition to Quebec’s Bill 21), and the promotion of official language communities. The paper will conclude with a brief contrast with the policies of Trudeau’s predecessor Stephen Harper, to find that while the prior Conservative government did not pursue a Laurentian agenda per se, Prime Minister Stephen Harper himself must nevertheless be seen as closely aligned with the “consensus” as well.
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 | 0.036 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| 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".