Canadian Public Opinion on Official Bilingualism: Ambivalent Consensus and its Limits
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With the 50th anniversary of the passage of the Official Languages Act celebrated in 2019, the question of its degree of acceptance by the Canadian public is in order for review. When the national policy on official bilingualism was first advocated by the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, it frankly acknowledged that it was highly controversial and opposed by substantial portions of the Anglophone public. Nevertheless, they insisted that the policy was necessary for the survival of the country and maintained that the firm resolve of united political elites at federal and provincial levels eventually would generate political success for the policy. While elite unity was elusive and only partially realized, the essential elements of official bilingualism were adopted, expanded and have survived to celebrate its 50th anniversary. The evolving pattern of public opinion over the past three decades demonstrates that official bilingualism is accepted as an essential component of Canadian political life, but that acceptance is hedged by some important qualifications, and indications that any further expansion would not enjoy public support. Nevertheless, it is firmly established as a core operating principle of Canadian public policy.
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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 | 0.026 | 0.059 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| 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".