Consumption and Commodities: The Political Economy of Canada’s Growth Model
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation investigates Canada’s contemporary growth model in the context of the broader growth crisis affecting advanced capitalist democracies. Drawing on the Growth Model Perspective (GMP), it identifies Canada’s hybrid growth model (GM) and develops an explanatory narrative emphasizing the interplay between structural-institutional characteristics – resource abundance, geography, federalism, majoritarianism – and global economic forces such as commodity prices, financialization, and liberalization. Canada’s GM shares similarities with other Anglo economies, including the United States and United Kingdom, relying heavily on household consumption driven by household debt and house price appreciation. Drawing on macroeconomic data and policy documents, the dissertation shows how house-price-driven consumption growth has been facilitated by global interest rate dynamics, majoritarian political institutions, and policies subsidizing demand for homeownership. Politically, the growth strategy underpinning house price appreciation enjoys broad partisan consensus, sustained by a ‘housing bloc’ of homeowning voters, aspiring homeowners, and financial institutions. However, Canada’s GM diverges from typical consumption-led models through its dependence on commodity-driven investment. Investment in Alberta’s oil sands has become a crucial source of growth (and stagnation), driven by global commodity prices, Canada’s resource wealth, and provincial autonomy. Supported by a ‘commodity bloc’ of resource-rich provinces, the oil and gas industry, and major banks, the federal growth strategy focuses on expanding production and export capacity in the sector. Simultaneously, Canada experienced unusually severe deindustrialization, characterized by declines in manufacturing employment and output. This reflects the combined impacts of currency appreciation (Dutch disease), extreme trade dependence on the US (Canadian disease), and neoliberal reforms that curtailed federal industrial policy capacity. Politically, diminished manufacturing interests in Ontario and Quebec, coupled with resource-producing provinces’ growing influence, reshaped federal priorities away from protecting manufacturing. This dissertation contributes to comparative political economy by presenting Canada as a hybrid GM, highlighting that national models are more diverse and dynamic than traditional classifications suggest. It underscores the role of specific sectors, notably oil and gas, and the institutional dimension of federalism in shaping national economic trajectories. Finally, it speaks directly to Canadian political economy debates by affirming Canada’s ‘core’ position within global capitalism while illustrating its continued vulnerability to the ‘staples trap.’
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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".