Addressing atrocity in the Canadian state: The discourse of ‘legacy’ and the comprehension of historical injustices
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As coming to terms with historical injustices have become a pressing concern for contemporary Canadian politics, a variety of discourses are engaging with what sorts of reparative responsibilities and accountabilities are necessary for harms inherited in the present. Since the late 1980s, reparative efforts in the Canadian state have focused on political recognition, compensation and official apologies for those harmed or otherwise impacted by injustices. Dominant discourse, however, has demonstrated a tendency to frame injustices as sad chapters, isolated moments of poor discretion, or the actions of imperfect individuals in their historical context. Today, monuments celebrating Canadian nation-building legacies are being confronted by their associated legacies of harm, exclusion, and white supremacy. As critical studies of the construction of Canadian identity have argued, narratives of ‘Canada’ and what it means to be Canadian have centred tenets of whiteness, settler colonialism, masculinity and Britishness. Reminders of these cornerstones of nation, and the figures and events that advanced them, populate everyday existence through monuments, place-naming of streets and public parks, architecture, and other heritage sites. In these contexts, nation-building figures and events are often framed as persisting, bearing on our present conditions and beneficial circumstances, while legacies of injustice associated with these figures and events are often framed as an event, a footnote, reduced through sanitized narratives, or not presented at all. The distinction between what endures, and what does not, seems perplexing. \nUnderstanding the continued dominance of these discourses and framings as an obstacle to promoting historical dialogue and accountability, I examine how the concept of political legacies operate in Canadian political discourse—a concept central to what representations of the world are inherited and seen as foundational and valued for the present and future, yet which has been conceptually overlooked as the subject of critical analysis. Advancing this premise through the political thought of Hannah Arendt and Foucauldian genealogy, I suggest that political legacy narratives have the ability to reinforce sanitized narratives of historical injustices in the Canadian state. Through an investigation of recent initiatives and contention surrounding revising, rewriting and rethinking the celebration of problematic pasts in the present, this research aims to develop paths forward for critically analyzing oppressive legacies and rethinking reparative responsibilities for enduring injustices.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".