Vox Populi: Populism, the Legislative Process, and the Canadian Constitution
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This chapter is concerned with the constitutional implications of populism for Canadian parliamentary democracy. It begins with working definitions of two crucial concepts – “populism” and “the constitution.” It then offers an account of how contemporary Canadian populism has attempted to reshape the constitution and identifies the possible effects of populism on legislative powers, processes, functions, and actors; on relations between citizens and their elected representatives; and on relations amongst the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary. A brief conclusion explores the possible long-term constitutional significance of these populist initiatives. POPULISM AND THE CONSTITUTION: WORKING DEFINITIONS Neither “populism” nor “the constitution” is a term of art; they are words whose meanings shift over time and across space. “Populism” in contemporary America is quite different from Australian or Austrian populism, but also from its Canadian cousin, though populists and populisms have often wandered back and forth across the 49th parallel. Likewise “constitution,” a term whose technical and vernacular meanings have evolved as they migrated across the Atlantic and from Canada's colonial period to the present. Populism As a recent study of populism notes, the term “has an essential impalpability, an awkward conceptual slipperiness.” However, like the other “p-word” – pornography – even if we cannot define populism, we can usually recognize it when we see it. And we have been seeing it for much of our history – arguably as far back as the 1837 uprisings in Upper and Lower Canada and the Riel rebellion of 1885.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".