Mr Speaker: The changing nature of parliamentary debates on immigration in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We use correspondence analysis to look at the changing nature of political debates in the Canadian House of Commons concerning immigration over a five-decade period. Using data drawn from the Linked Parliamentary Data (LiPaD) project we assess the way in which immigration policy and issues are discussed by different political parties from September of 1968 to June of 2019. We look at debates in five of the longest Prime Ministers' mandates. In doing so, we trace changes in both emphasis and rhetoric by political party. We find that party political views on immigration became more polarized with the breakup of the Progressive Conservative party in the early 1990s. Liberal party views moved toward to the left of the spectrum while the Reform/Alliance/Conservative Party of Canada parties moved toward the right and became increasingly entrenched until 2015. After that, the Conservatives and the Liberals moved closer to the centre. The New Democratic Party was the most consistent in its views over time, focusing on issues of humanitarianism as well as broad policy issues.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.028 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.015 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".