Andrew Griffith. Policy Arrogance or Innocent Bias: Resetting Citizenship and Multiculturalism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Andrew Griffith. Policy Arrogance or Innocent Bias: Resetting Citizenship and Multiculturalism. Ottawa, ON: Anar Press, 2013. 120 pp. Notes. $14.99 sc. This slim but informative book sheds light on the understudied subject of the relations between political masters and their civil servants. Penned by a thoughtful former public servant who toiled on multicultural issues for three decades in the Departments of Canadian Heritage and more recently Citizenship and Immigration, Andrew Griffith offers a cautionary tale: when governments change, public servants must be prepared to jettison long held assumptions regarding operational as well as policy issues. Griffith witnessed the events associated with the shifting of responsibility for multiculturalism from one department to another. Public administration guru Gilies Paquet encouraged Griffith to write the book and Griffith delivers a trenchant case study in policy change management as a participant-observer. Some smartly titled chapters--Which Ideology Will that Be? Would That Be Evidence Or Anecdote? and So What Kind of 'Yes Minister' Will That Be? communicate competing worldviews. Elected in 2006, the Conservatives have been less sanguine than most civil servants about government as a positive force. Each side is convinced of its rectitude. One has a mandate to deliver on its platform promises and seeks to fulfil them; the other offers large-scale survey evidence and the lessons of its experience in the policy trenches. The current responsible minister and undisputed czar of multicultural policy, Jason Kenney, is a senior cabinet member trusted by the prime minister and less tethered than most ministers to the PMO's leash and talking points. He also wields substantial influence as chair of the cabinet's operations committee, which is tasked with the day-to-day coordination of the government's agenda including issues management and communications. He has had significant success in weaning new Canadians from their attachment to the Liberals and wooing them to the Conservative banner. According to Griffith, Kenney--once cloaked in a robe by a Filipino organization and crowned on a throne with a sash festooned across his chest proclaiming him the King of Multiculturalism--actually endeavours to deemphasize older approaches to multiculturalism policy and to strengthen his government's preferred narrative of Canadian citizenship. Kenney's determination to drive the bureaucracy and not be driven by it shines through. What emerges is this minister's strong sense of purpose, which precipitated trauma among his officials. They were surprised the Conservatives assumed power with ready-made answers and conclusions rather than questions. Civil servants did not appreciate the Conservatives' discomfort with long-standing multiculturalism and citizenship policies. For decades, bureaucrats had internalized the multicultural regime established by Pierre Trudeau's Liberals and extended by Brian Mulroney's Progressive Conservatives and their Liberal successors. The sharper ideological edge (21) of the new Conservative vision harkens back to some Reform party positions of the 1990s: doing away with the Department of Multiculturalism and thus deemphasizing Canadians' racial, cultural, and linguistic differences, i. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".