“Freedom not Fear, truckers not Trudeau” : Antagonism as Populism: Against the Liberal Consensus in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis is investigating the rise of populism in Canada, and how the Freedom Convoy 2022 changed the political landscape allowing for populism to be mainstreamed. Populism as a political force is reshaping liberal democracies, and by analysing how populism as a counter movement against the liberal hegemony is constructed, this thesis, while focused on Canada, will show how societal polarization and the construction of political frontiers is expanding the populist zeitgeist. Through utilizing a post-structuralist methodology, building on Laclau & Mouffe’s conceptualisation of hegemony and Mudde’s understanding of populism as a ‘thin-centred ideology’, this thesis investigates how the Freedom Convoy was discursively constructed by Justin Trudeau’s liberal Government, as well co-opted by the Conservative Opposition and the Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre. The theoretical framework understands populism as an illiberal response to undemocratic liberalism, and a reaction towards progressive neoliberalism, which together with my conceptualisation of populism as the antagonism between the ‘people’ and the ’elite’ will steer my analysis. The analysis found that populism as a political force is being mainstreamed by Poilievre and the Conservative Party as a response towards changing social relations, argued detrimental to the working class, which the Freedom Convoy was a manifestation of. The expression of discontent is constructed as antagonism between the ‘people’ against the ‘elites’, where globalization is argued responsible for the economic decline in Canada. The main contention is however with the progressive values the globalist ‘elite’ are argued to harbour, and the battle line drawn between progressive neoliberalism and reactionary populism. The findings contribute to the field of International Relations, as the rise of populism is argued to be to be result of changing social relations due to the workings of the global political economy. Thus, populism is inherently a local issue within global structures.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.039 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".