The Framing of Temporary Foreign Workers in Canadian Parliamentary Debates
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the framing of the temporary foreign worker program (TFWP) in Canadian political discourse using a qualitative content analysis of parliamentary speeches. It uncovers shifts and continuities in framing by three major federal political parties between 2006 and 2022. The study examines the impact of ideology, proximity to government, and events on framing of the TFWP. The findings show that while all are to some extent relevant, ideology had the biggest impact on framing. The Conservatives and Liberals were reasonably consistent in framing the TFWP as an economic resource, while the New Democratic Party (NDP) was more likely to frame it as an economic threat while also advocating for enhanced rights for temporary workers. Occasional shifts were prompted by events such as the 2013–14 scandal when all three parties made more use of the economic threat frame, but once this subsided, all three reverted to their previous positions. Overall, this research reveals the exclusionary nature of the TFWP and a political discourse that focuses on the economic utility of temporary foreign workers.
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 | 0.013 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".