Democratizing the Ontario Legislature: Change, but Change Enough?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Ontario Legislative Assembly sits at the centre of the many currents of political change in the province. Over the last few decades the three main political parties, the Progressive Conservative Party, the Liberal Party, and the New Democratic Party (NDP), has each formed a majority government at least once. In the 2011 provincial election, Ontarians voted for change again, albeit of a different kind: Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals were left one seat short of a majority, and Ontarians had elected their first minority government in a generation. In two by-elections in September 2012, Ontarians denied Premier McGuinty the opportunity to return to majority government. Just one month later, the Premier announced his resignation and prorogued (suspended) the legislature. These events raise questions about the democratic quality and evolving role of the Ontario Legislature. Amidst these changes, we ask: is Ontario’s legislature as democratic as it could be? This paper is organized around three key themes: the institutional features of the Ontario legislature, legislative processes, and political representation. We canvass various reforms and proposed changes in each thematic area and conclude with a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of Ontario’s legislature as an instrument of democracy. We suggest that despite some reforms, the processes of making it more democratic remain unfinished. To this end, we also make several recommendations for improving the democratic quality of this central symbol of democracy in Ontario.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".