Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation offers the first comprehensive analysis of the second phase of the pro-fossil fuel, “extractive populist” movement in Canada across a largely Alberta-based cycle of protest, from 2016 to 2022, with particular attention on the emergence and diffusion of the convoy as a signature protest tactic. Placing Marxist political ecology, Gramscian approaches to far-right populism, and conventional social movement theory into conversation, I ask what the relationship is between “corporate grassroots” campaigns, climate obstructionism, and the rise of the far right. Drawing on a corpus of data including interviews with convoy organizers and far-right activists as well as the social media output of numerous pro-fossil fuel groups, I trace the personnel, organizational, and ideological overlaps between the corporate grassroots ‘extractivist action coalition’ responsible for an increasingly robust pro-oil and gas protest movement from 2016 to 2018, and three subsequent far-right movements: Yellow Vests Canada (from late 2018 to 2019), Alberta separatism (from 2019 onward), and the “freedom” movement (from 2020 onward). In doing so, I document radicalization at multiple levels across the cycle: in movement tactics, as the convoy underwent an “upward scale shift” from the local to regional then national levels, and was converted from a tactic of demonstration into one of occupation; in ideological frames, as climate denial, nativist and Islamophobic opposition to migration, “western alienation,” opposition to public health measures, and evangelical Christianity, became linked in a chain of equivalence to the globalist conspiracy theory, which served as a “master frame” across the cycle, spreading from the far-right fringes to the mainstream; and finally, in the transformation of electoral politics in Alberta, manifested in the movement-ization of the ostensibly mainstream United Conservative Party. Ultimately, I find that corporate grassroots campaigns can play a critical role in fuelling broader cycles of protest marked by radicalization and an uneasy alliance between fossil capital and the far right. Furthermore, I find that, while extractive populism may have originated as a top-down movement, over time this changed as segments of the population, especially from within the fossilized petty bourgeoisie, became capable of relatively autonomous mobilization. Ultimately, I argue that, without Canadian fossil capital’s corporate grassroots efforts to subsidize a pro-oil and gas movement, the convoy would not likely have emerged as a hallmark of far-right populist protest in Canada.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| 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".