Ontario’s Water Policy Reform Examined through a Groundwater Lens: An Analysis of Provincial Policy Measures and Newspaper Media Framing Around Groundwater 2000- 2019
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Groundwater is often neglected in water resources governance and management initiatives which is due in part to groundwater’s rural and out of sight nature. In Ontario, 20 years ago, the Walkerton tragedy served as a wake-up call to address the lack of knowledge and long-term health of water resources in the province. This focusing event caused a punctuated equilibrium in the policy arena of Ontario allowing for significant water policy reform in the province. This paper argues that despite Ontario leading in many aspects of water governance, groundwater still faces governance and public awareness challenges in the province. In this two-phase study, a longitudinal content analysis of provincial legislative initiatives and newspaper media framing on groundwater are undertaken through the period of May 2000 to June 2019. Results show that Ontario’s groundwater initiatives have focused on the criteria of land-use control on potentially polluting activities, groundwater based urban/industrial planning, and public participation in groundwater management. Newspaper media across the province employ predominantly neutral framing of issues around groundwater and a varying mix of both thematic and episodic framing elements are found. Provincial leadership towards groundwater initiatives and a wide-ranging strategy around groundwater policy and communications to elevate consciousness around the resource are recommended.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".