Canadian Democracy at Risk? A Wakeup Call From the Perspective of English‐Speaking Citizens
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT At first glance, Canada is a resilient democracy. It has so far resisted international trends of democratic decline, it has not had any major populist upheavals aside from the Freedom Convoy in 2022, and no extremist parties are in parliament. However, if we look at public opinion data, we find widespread democratic disillusionment. An online representative survey of English‐speaking Canadians shows that more than 30% of the respondents indicate that they have no trust in democracy, more than 40% claim that the government controls what they can say, nearly 50% do not feel represented by government, and two thirds of the sample feel some sort of moral decay. These numbers illustrate a concerning gap between the preoccupations of large parts of English‐speaking Canadians and the institutions of representative democracy—especially since disillusionment can weaken democratic safeguards and increase the likeliness of a surge of populist politicians. Related Articles Béland, D., G. P. Marchildon, A. Medrano, and P. Rocco. (2024). “Policy Feedback, Varieties of Federalism, and the Politics of Health‐Care Funding in the United States, Mexico, and Canada.” Politics & Policy 52, no. (1): 51–69. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12575 . Denis, C. (2007). “Canadians in Trouble Abroad: Citizenship, Personal Security, and North American Regionalization.” Politics & Policy 35, no. (4): 648–663. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2007.00078.x . Stockemer, D., and S. Parent. (2014). “The Inequality Turnout Nexus: New Evidence from Presidential Elections.” Politics & Policy 42, no. (2): 221–245. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12067 .
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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 | 0.010 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.052 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 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".