COVID-19 and the Regulation of Alternative Financial Services
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores how the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed and exacerbated existing inequalities with respect to access to basic financial services in Canada. The authors examine changes made to the regulation of financial products in the wake of the pandemic in order to expose the need to ensure that these regulations protect the ability of all Canadians to meet their needs and financial obligations. Part IA compares the regulation of government cheques cashed at banks and alternative service providers. Part IB analyzes Ontario’s changes to the regulation of institutions providing payday loans and warns that the current regulatory scheme leaves a gap in the regulation of installment loans. Part II provides an overview of voluntary credit relief programs offered in response to the pandemic and discusses how taking advantage of these programs may impact a borrower’s credit score. Part III cautions that financial stress as a result of the pandemic may lead to those with poor or no credit history to turn to so called “credit repair loans”. The authors conclude by expressing their hope that the pandemic will generate the political will to work towards a regulatory system for financial produces that meets the needs of all Canadians.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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".