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analysis

Antisemitism and orders of worth in the Canadian Hansard

A project of the Lab for the Global Study of Antisemitism, Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies, University of Toronto. Built, analyzed, and annotated by Ron Levi with Claude Code (Anthropic).

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Almost every member of the House condemns antisemitism. They do not condemn it on the same grounds. One speaker reaches for equal citizenship and the Charter, another for hate-crime statistics and whether a programme works, a third for what the world will think of Canada, a fourth for a neighbourhood and an inherited memory. Those are not stylistic differences. They are different claims about what makes the harm a harm, and, in Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot's term, different orders of worth.

This page takes their framework, from On Justification: Economies of Worth (1991), and applies it to every coded statement in the corpus.

Filter the corpus

Narrows every count, chart and table on this page to statements matching your selection. Choose one option per category; choose “Any” to clear it. The panel on the right tracks the eight orders as you filter, so you can watch government against opposition, or one party against another, without scrolling down.

Who was speakingfrom the parliamentary record
How it was codedjudgments made by a language model, not by hand

Nothing was picked. A statement can rest on more than one order, and most do: — carry two, — carry one, and — carry none. Every order a statement carries is counted, so a statement grounded in both rights and evidence adds to the civic column and the industrial column alike. That is why the percentages sum to well over a hundred, and why no order was ever chosen over another. The examples further down are the exception: those are drawn from the minority of statements resting on a single order, so that the passage illustrates that order and not a blend.

The eight orders, and how often each appears

Percentages are of the — statements carrying at least one order. They sum to more than 100 because a statement may rest on several.

How to read the breakdowns that follow

Raw shares would mostly repeat one fact: civic worth is the common tongue of Parliament, and every group leans on it. The index separates the groups where a raw share cannot, by dividing a group's share of an order by the share across the whole corpus. 1.00 means the group uses that order exactly as often as everyone else. 1.50 means half again as often; 0.50, half as often.

Bars run right of the centre line when a group sits above the corpus average and left when it sits below, and they clip at 2.5 so one outlier cannot rescale the rest.

Orders of worth over time

The share of statements resting on each order, decade by decade. Each panel is scaled to its own maximum, so read the shape rather than comparing heights between panels; the peak is printed on each. Decades before 1990 rest on a few dozen statements and a handful of speakers, so the early movement is noisy.

Orders of worth by party

Every party with at least one coded statement, so a reader looking for a specific party, the Green Party, Reform, can find it. Read the n printed under each party's name before trusting the numbers next to it: a handful of statements swings an index wildly. Party and era are confounded throughout, and badly for the small ones. Social Credit is almost entirely the 1940s and 1950s; a signature that looks like the party's own may really belong to the decade.

Government and opposition

Which side of the House a speaker sat on, on the day they spoke. The two sides are not answering the same prompts (a minister defending a programme has reason to reach for evidence and machinery that a critic does not), so read this as a difference in position, not in conviction.

By chamber

The House of Commons, the Senate, and House committees. Committee evidence is available only from 2006, so the committee column is a modern one.

By what the speaker is doing with the term

Condemning antisemitism, reporting an incident, blaming someone for failing to act, naming someone as antisemitic, or disputing that a charge holds. The orders do the most work here: the grounds a speaker reaches for track the political act closely.

By subject

The real-world domain a statement is substantively about: history and commemoration, a specific act or threat of violence, funding, Israel and Zionism, education, law, community life, immigration, or media, coded by a language model from a short passage rather than the full statement. A residual accountability category holds statements that are mainly an exchange between parties about responsibility or conduct, without primarily describing any of the others.

One statement per order

Each of these rests on a single order and no other, which is uncommon (most statements blend two). They are drawn only from statements that condemn or report, so that choosing an illustration does not put a named person in a bad light on our authority rather than on the record's.

How far to trust this

Every tag on this page, including the orders, was assigned by a language model, not by hand, and that coding is still being checked by hand, statement by statement. The orders are the most interpretive tag in the project, and they should be read as exploratory. Two independent model passes agreed on the primary order for about seven statements in ten; where they disagreed, the record carries both. Boltanski and Thévenot built the framework from disputes in French firms and public administration, not from a chamber where almost everyone condemns and the disagreement is about grounds.

Subject was coded separately, also by two independent passes over a short passage, which agreed on about nine statements in ten; where they disagreed, the statement carries the first pass's subject and is flagged for review. A handful of very short passages could not be coded at all.

Era confounds party. Social Credit spoke almost entirely in the 1940s and 1950s, so its signature may belong to the decade rather than the party. The same caution applies, more weakly, to the Bloc and the NDP, whose statements cluster after 1990.

Ministers and critics also face different questions. A minister answers for a programme and reaches for what a programme has: budgets, training, numbers. A critic has none of that to point to. Some of the government/opposition gap is that difference in position rather than in belief.

The full definition of each order · How the coding was done · Browse the statements this analysis is built from