The Pigeons Coming Home to Roost: The Continuing Perils of Contracting Out in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article explores the growing trend of contracting‐out public services in Canada, highlighting its increasing impact on government activities as governments have expanded outsourcing from traditional goods like office supplies to complex infrastructure management and professional services. Recent cases, including federal government spending on consulting and high‐profile failures of Public Private Partnership (P3) projects, underscore the need for critical reassessment. Two major areas—professional services and large‐scale infrastructure management through P3s—are analyzed to understand the challenges and consequences of contracting out. The discussion highlights issues including inefficiencies, governance challenges, and risks associated with outsourcing, emphasizing the blurred lines and complications often existing between public, private, and non‐profit sectors in service delivery. The article calls for reforms to enhance accountability, transparency, and efficiency, while also reconsidering the role of private and non‐profit actors in public service delivery if sustainable effective outcomes are to be achieved.
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 | 0.009 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.032 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".