The Power Politics of Regional Deindustrialization: The Cape Breton Development Corporation, State Ownership, and Pit Closure in Canada’s Coal Industry 1967-2001
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Cape Breton Development Corporation (DEVCO) was an ambitious attempt by the Canadian federal government to manage the deindustrialization of coal mining on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. Created in 1967 by nationalizing the unprofitable collieries, DEVCO’s original mission was to incrementally close them, while fostering an alternative economic base in the area. The mines operated until 2001 when they finally closed. DEVCO has primarily been studied as an example of federal regional development policy, as it experimented with many projects to stimulate economic growth. However, DEVCO’s Coal Division has remained almost entirely unstudied, despite much more money, and outliving the regional development programs. Not only that, managed wind-down was quickly abandoned, and from 1973 the Coal Division expanded, a process that continued into the 1980s. In this thesis I argue that the Coal Division’s history significantly modifies our understanding of DEVCO, as regional development was only one factor in the crown corporation’s trajectory. Those other factors mostly related to coal, which the Canadian state was deeply entangled with through energy policy, labour relations, and political patronage. Furthermore, as a state-owned enterprise, DEVCO had key differences from private sector deindustrialization, as this formally politicized pit closure and made governments vulnerable to pressure from those most impacted. DEVCO was a unique response to deindustrialization, which has some enduring implications for fossil fuel infrastructures today.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.024 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| 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".