“Land imaginaries” in Western Canada: (financial) neoliberalism, agrarianism, and the contemporary politics of agricultural land
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines contemporary political controversies over agricultural land in the prairie region of Canada. We suggest that contemporary land politics reflect elements of continuity and change in a distinctive “land imaginary” connected to the region’s history and recent restructuring. While neoliberalism, and more recently, financialization, have been the main drivers of restructuring in recent decades, certain strands of agrarianism continue to shape social relations in the agricultural sector. We present three case studies, the first of which examines the controversy over institutional investment in farmland, focusing on the Canada Pension Plan’s large-scale purchase of Saskatchewan land. The second case study examines conflicts over the deregulation of government-run community pastures, with implications for the ranching sector, environmental conservation, and the future of native prairie. Our third case study focuses on the proposed sale and land-use conversion of government-owned pasture land in Alberta, dubbed “Potatogate”. We examine the role of farmers, ranchers, governments, NGOs, and private interests in shaping debates over land ownership and use. We argue that these conflicts reveal a tension between (financial) neoliberalism and agrarian arguments and values, with significant differences across agricultural sub-sectors.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 it