The Financial Inclusion Illusion: Bricolage, Agnotology, and the Mis-Selling of Canada's Financial Consumer Protection Framework, 2014-2024
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation examines a central paradox at the heart of Canadian finance: How a system celebrated for its institutional stability can be defined by a culture of predatory sales practices that fuels profound household precarity. I argue this is the outcome of a coherent architecture designed to systematically displace risk onto households. This architecture operates to cultivate and extract profit from Risk Power, defined as the capacity of households to bear financial risk, undertake debt, and remain on payment. Extending political economic value theory, I contend that Risk Power has potential to become a primary source of profit extraction in financialized capitalism. Through an extended qualitative case study into a genealogy of Canada's Financial Consumer Protection Framework (2014–2024), my research deconstructs the mechanisms that produce and sustain this system. Employing a parallax view, I juxtapose the official discourses of regulators and bank executives with the counter-narratives of whistleblowers, consumer advocates, and ATI documents. My analysis reveals a system characterized by endemic mis-selling driven by high-pressure sales cultures; the strategic production of ignorance (agnotology) by regulators like the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada, whose review of bank sales practices (DBRSPR) found ‘no widespread mis-selling,’ serving to manage scandal rather than address its root causes; and a process of opportunistic legislative tinkering (bricolage) that creates an illusion of reform while advancing industry interests. The dissertation traces the legislative lineage from the failed Bill C-29 to the passage of Bill C-86, arguing that the resulting framework, under the guise of modernization, codifies a weaker ‘appropriateness’ standard for financial advisors and opens the door to an automated future of Algorithmically Appropriate Advice (A³). This technological shift, I argue, does not solve the problems of mis-selling but merely displaces them, embedding the logic of exploitation into opaque, unaccountable algorithms. Ultimately, I conclude that the Canadian financial system is functioning as designed, undergirded by the managed indebtedness of its households. Future research may further explore the antagonisms, contradictions, and possibilities between the capacity to risk and the capacity to labour.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.031 | 0.061 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".