The Turn: The Bank of Canada and the Strategic Communications Revolution
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Beginning in the 1980s, governments began to embrace practices associated with the New Public Management (NPM) aimed at making government systems more service-oriented, a disposition that typically translated into more external communication. This trend spread to the central banks in developed countries, which began to embrace openness and transparency in the late 1980s and 1990s. A core tenet of NPM is the establishing of clear policy objectives that can anchor public communications. In monetary policy, the clear policy objective became, almost universally, the achievement of a targeted inflation rate. The Bank of Canada was early to embrace this trend. In targeting this objective, the Bank of Canada gradually, over time, established a communication infrastructure that shaped every aspect of the Bank’s outward communication and became seen as integral to attaining its policy goals. Until the unfolding of the COVID-19 crisis, the Bank’s success in achieving its policy target shielded it from critical, political-level scrutiny. In the aftermath, however, the Bank policies and its communications practices have come under tremendous scrutiny politically, in the media, and within academia. To better understand this current debate, I trace how communications, as a monetary policy instrument, evolved at the Bank of Canada along six lines: the formulation of communication policies, changes to the institutional infrastructure, the hiring, training, and deployment of communication personnel, the shifting structure of central bank texts, the use of outside communication consultants, and the application of communications training. I conclude that, from the beginning, the Bank of Canada viewed its strategic communications function as a key monetary policy tool, inseparable from its inflation target objective. From something that did not exist 30 years ago, strategic communication has become an irreplaceable tool and integral part of the Bank’s operations, especially during crises such as the recent Covid-19 pandemic.
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 | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.024 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.002 |
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".