A convoy, an emergencies act, and a state of exception: How Canada’s Emergencies Act contradicts Carl Schmitt’s critiques of deliberative democracy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As a liberal and parliamentary democracy, Canada should be a prime target for Carl Schmitt’s critiques about determining the ‘state of exception’. Yet, Canada’s Emergencies Act, which permits ‘special temporary measures that may not be appropriate in normal times’ immediately after the declaration of an emergency, brings forth an interesting research puzzle: can a liberal or parliamentary democracy have both the practices of deliberative democracy and still fulfil Schmitt’s criteria of the sovereign both determining when and deciding on what occurs during the state of exception? By examining the events of the 2022 Freedom Convoy, we find that Canada’s use of the Emergencies Act meets Schmitt’s criteria of the -*sovereign determining when, and deciding on what occurs during the state of exception, but ultimately escapes Schmitt’s critiques of liberal and parliamentary democracies.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.040 | 0.041 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".