“What huge influence they could have !” : Consumer empowerment in and around Quebec’s first Consumer Protection Act
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores the figure of the empowered, and enlightened consumer, who is capable of inflecting the production and commercial processes to reflect his ideals, as it appears in the debates surrounding the adoption of Quebec’s first Consumer Protection Act in 1971. It shows that this ideal was defended strongly by groups who were, paradoxically, quick to criticize consumers’ inability to distinguish their wants from their needs. These groups also advocated many protection measures that were seemingly identical to those put forward by groups who imagined the consumer to be a much humbler figure. After reviewing the socioeconomic changes that led to the adoption of the law, I explore these paradoxes in light of the history and objectives of two consumer advocacy groups, the CAC and the FACEF. I suggest that the latter, the boldest of the two, had a coherent view of the consumer. However, the figure of the greater-than-life consumer was only one part of a much larger project of emancipation ; in the FACEF’s view, it could never have effectiveness as a mere legal concept.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.037 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".