The straight and narrow path: policy direction and oversight of the gay purges in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The gay purges from the late 1950s to the late 1970s were the only large-scale dismissals from the public service of Canada in its history. As this article demonstrates, this arbitrary action was taken without regard to individual circumstances and without due process or appeal, simply because of the sexuality of those targeted. Presumptions were made – and acted upon – about a supposed link between homosexuality and disloyalty, with a consequently imagined threat to national security. Although the implementation of the purges by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Security Service (RCMPSS) was undoubtedly zealous and harsh, that conduct took place within a framework that was constructed by policy-makers in the Privy Council Office, overseen by senior public servants and ultimately sanctioned by successive Canadian cabinets. As this examination shows, the RCMPSS acted, however severely, with authority granted to it by others who would later try to distance themselves from responsibility and pose as sympathetic to those purged. In fact, this was not the drastic misapplication of a measured policy, as sometimes contended, but a deliberate, malevolent, and ultimately mistaken attempt to deal with an imagined threat.
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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 | 0.022 | 0.047 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.035 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.013 |
| 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".