Federal vs provincial Throne Speech Policy Priorities (Carney 2025)

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The policy priorities chart above was created by looking at the numbers of future commitments governments made in their most recent throne or inaugural speech from the curate policy table dataset.

Policy Table Creation Methods

In this chart the themes of commitments are those that provinces have made in their most recent speech from the throne, and inaugural address in Québec. Our political scientists first compiled and digitized the most recent Throne Speeches to create the human verified Throne Speech Table.

Each speech was then read (multiple times) and annotated to identify any text that constituted a future plan or commitment; text that describes future action, goals and plans are identified. Statements that indicate that something needs to be done are not included unless attached with promises of action to resolve or work on the identified need.

A descriptive sentence is then written for each unique policy and linked with the corresponding throne speech text. For Québec, Chat GPT-4o was used to translate the speech for our English speaking scientists, but the labeling process remained consistent, and all plans remain linked to the original French source text.

All commitments and source text in this dataset were read through and given a two to three word topic label. The policy’s major theme was then attached. If many themes were present, the major theme of the policy was chosen over any minor themes. This curated dataset then undertook a third and final human verification step of the source, plan and theme texts, creating the P. A verified Canadian Policy Table.