Tilting the Playing Field Away from the Discharge of Debts: The Case of Consumer Proposals in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We examine the increasing prevalence of consumer proposals as a debt relief option in Canada, highlighting the shift in insolvency regulation toward creditor interests and the implications of this for debtors. Canada has two federally regulated debt relief options. One is bankruptcy, which generally offers the discharge of most debts after nine months but requires that large assets, such as homes and cars, be sold for the benefit of creditors. The other is the consumer proposal, which protects large assets (e.g., homes and vehicles) but requires monthly payments for 60 months before any debt is forgiven. Consumer proposals have become significantly more common over time, rising from 23 percent of consumer insolvencies in 2009 to 79 percent in 2024. Using the Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition and data on the universe of insolvencies in 2011 and 2019, we show that changes in the average characteristics of the debtors—debts, assets, and income—do not account for this increase. Instead, unobservable factors are at the root of the increase. We hypothesize that it is the behaviour of those who benefit financially from the increase—the licensed insolvency trustees who administer the procedures and the large creditors—that is the most likely unobserved influence.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".