At the centre of government the Prime Minister and the limits on political power
Bibliographic record
Abstract
"This exhaustively researched and deftly written book offers a first-hand view of the inner workings of the Canadian federal government, with a particular focus on the interplay between the Prime Minister's Office, the Privy Council Office, the federal cabinet, and the role backbench MPs, and parliamentary committees. Brodie argues that the various workings of the PMO, PCO, the cabinet, parliamentary committees, and the role of backbench MPs puts a lie to the proposition that the prime minister has evolved into the role of a dictator of sorts with unchecked control over the levers of political power. He offers a much-needed corrective to the dominant thinking that a Canadian prime minister holds power without limits, approaching unchecked domination over party, caucus, cabinet, Parliament, the public service, and the policy agenda. In Brodie's view, the prime minister is not a tyrant. There are effective checks on executive power. The golden age of Parliament and the backbencher is probably now. The author's contribution is that of a former insider, someone who worked at the centre and witnessed the circumstances, many of them institutional in character, that constrain the prime minister. The book calls for sober second thought about many of the proposals for reform."--
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 | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".