How Do Ideas Get in the Way of Policy Change? A Comparative Study of Homelessness Policy in Toronto and Montréal, Canada
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT While structural factors such as the allocation of resources and responsibilities have traditionally been seen as the key determinants of policy change and stability, the ideas of the people responsible for managing these resources can be just as consequential, especially in value‐laden policy areas such as combating homelessness. Building on the literature on the role of ideas in governance, the analysis of municipal, provincial and federal policy documents, and interviews with 21 municipal and provincial policymakers, community activists, service providers and users, this article compares how Toronto and Montreal implemented the federal government's At Home/Chez soi pilot program informed by housing‐first principles—a marked departure from the previous staircase model in which homeless individuals conditionally moved towards permanent housing based on responsible behavior. Conflicting ideas underpinned understandings of homelessness and intervention priorities in the two cities, while ideas institutionalized in “traditions of governance” were instrumental in Toronto aligning its policies with the federal government's housing‐first experiment and Montreal resisting it.
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.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it