Comparing Canada’s role on the United Nations Security Council and the Arctic Council: finding several roles
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The main objective of this thesis is to compare Canada’s role on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) and on the Artic Council in order to critically examine the “middle power” theory – the idea that Canada, as a western ally, has influence in the world to play the role of the “helpful fixer”. The UNSC and Arctic Council are chosen as they include all of the great powers in both organizations, but Canada serves different roles on both. On the UNSC, Canada is a non-permanent (some prefer elected) member for a two-year term with a vote, but not a deciding one like the veto given to the five Permanent Members (P5) whereas Canada is a lead decision-maker as an Arctic state with a veto on the Arctic Council. Ultimately, this thesis seeks to answer the question does Canada’s role change when it is a member of an international organization in which it has the same decision-making powers as at least some of the P5 members? By comparing these two organizations, this thesis seeks to determine if Canada plays a placeholder, bridge-builder, or lead role thus providing evidence to the ongoing and contentious middle power debate. This thesis found that Canada does not always play the role of a middle power because it has different roles on the UNSC and the Arctic Council. Canada is best described as a middle power on the UNSC but a leader on the Arctic Council. Canada’s behaviour and role changes based on the organization’s mandate and the voting parity Canada has with great powers.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".