Understanding Alienation in Western Canada: Is “Western Alienation” the Problem? Is Senate Reform the Cure?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay investigates the conceptual foundations of “western alienation" and evaluates whether Senate reform is the appropriate cure for alienation in western Canada. It disputes the thesis, put forward most persuasively by political scientist Roger Gibbins which argues “western alienation" is both an exceptional type of regional alienation and is more salient for many western Canadians than other types of alienation. Two main problems with this conceptualization of western alienation and, by extension, its claim about how we ought to understand alienation in western Canada are identified and explained: a failure to acknowledge the wide variation and complexity of regional alienation within the West; and the marginalization of political alienation. The essay argues that the problem of political alienation is central to understanding the alienation of many citizens in western Canada. Because “political alienation" is rooted in discontent with political representatives, institutions, and procedures for decision-making associated with representative government in Canada, the essay concludes that the curative benefits attributed to regionally biased institutional reform of the federal government (e.g., Senate reform) by proponents of the western alienation thesis are more limited than otherwise suggested.
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 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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 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".