18 From Gérin-Lajoie to USMCA: The Role of the Canadian Provinces in Trade Negotiation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In The Strategy of Conflict, Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling developed a notion that is now known as "Schelling's conjecture."According to this conjecture, the United States executive is advantaged in its negotiation of a commercial treaty with another government when it is obvious that the legislature (Congress), which must ratify the treaty, has a firm stance on certain issues.In a renegotiation such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), in which Congress will have a much larger role than in the past due to recent legislative changes, U.S. negotiators can therefore use this situation as a pretext for extracting additional concessions from their trading partners, Canada and Mexico.Canada, where the separation of powers is more theoretical than real, cannot benefit from such a conjecture unless it has a minority government.In a majority context, the "threat" of seeing a defection of deputies of the party in power is rather weak and would not be credible.In Canada other important actors in trade negotiations, the Canadian provinces, could have played the role of the U.S. Congress.But Ottawa decided not to involve them in the NAFTA/USMCA renegotiation.Federal refusal to involve the Canadian provinces has been a problem for a long time in Canada, and will become further fraught in the next fifty years since international treaties increasingly affect the fields of jurisdiction of the Canadian provinces.In this article, I explain why provinces have become increasingly important players in Canada's international and trade negotiations.I begin by examining the evolution of treaty-making in Canada in general, which goes beyond trade issues.I then focus on trade negotiation with an emphasis on the NAFTA/USMCA renegotiations.I emphasize
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.035 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 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".