Ronald Gostick, the <i>Canadian Intelligence Service</i> , and the “Paranoid Style” in Postwar Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the activities of Ronald Gostick who, in the 1950s and 1960s, was Canada’s leading far-right conspiracy theorist. While active for more than half a century, Gostick rose to prominence in the postwar period, years of great changes in Canadian politics, government, society, and culture. At the far right of political opinion, Gostick had much to say and write about these developments, which he traced to a vast Jewish-led conspiracy to destroy Canadians’ individual freedom and, ultimately, Canada’s supposed Christian heritage. Gostick’s views epitomized what American historian Richard Hofstadter labeled a “paranoid style,” an outlook rooted in conspiracism. What is evident from this study of Gostick’s ideas and activism is that in several areas his extremism differed little from more respectable viewpoints, signifying that the separation between fringe and mainstream opinion is often only a few degrees of difference.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".