Race to the Bottom? : A Critical Analysis of Canada's Modern Slavery in Supply Chain Legislation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study critically examines the Government of Canada's conceptualization of transnational corporate accountability and exploitative labour in its legislative response to modern slavery in global supply chains. With a primary focus on the government's recently proposed Bill S-216: Modern Slavery Act - which would mandate companies to report on their activities to reduce modern slavery in their supply chains - empirical data is drawn from parliamentary debates about this bill and its earlier iterations as well as a report produced by the House of Commons committee originally charged with studying the issue. Informed by the corporate crime and business management literature as well as a neo-Marxist theoretical lens that employs such concepts as Antonio Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony and global capitalism, the dominant views taken up in conversations hosted by the Canadian state are captured using critical discourse analysis. Overall, dominant voices accepted into the federal government's approach reinforce neoliberal assumptions of wealth accumulation, profit maximization, and free-market economies, thereby trusting transnational corporations to self-regulate and use their financial capital to curb the conditions that engender exploitative labour. The findings of this interdisciplinary study reveal that the legislative proposal culminating from the policy-making discourse defers to measures that prioritize the social benefits of corporate social responsibility, which ultimately eclipse the need for criminal sanctions against Canadian corporations with operations that employ modern slavery. This research helps to expose the reproduction of corporate impunity as a result of the inability/unwillingness to address the status quo of global capitalism.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.056 | 0.044 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".