The Trans-Mountain Pipeline Expansion Project: Path Dependency in the Crown’s Reasoning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the production and reproduction of the same arguments made by the Crown in consultations with Indigenous peoples over a controversial resource development project in Canada. To explain the stability of the Crown’s reasoning in consultations with Indigenous communities on Trans-Mountain Pipeline Expansion project (TM), I integrate the path dependence concept with the theory of motivated reasoning while keeping the analytical perspective of historical institutionalism. The context of TM consultations is instrumental in explaining argumentative stability: it demonstrates how the interplay of the dominance of the Crown and its reliance on formal authority rules and government findings produce increasing returns turning reasoning for TM into a self-reinforcing and path-dependent sequence of behavioral steps (biased argument production for TM and biased evaluation of arguments against TM). This sequence undermines the ability of the Crown to value arguments against TM equally with arguments for TM.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.000 |
| 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".