Federal vs provincial Throne Speech Policy Priorities (Trudeau 2021)

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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.

Policy Table Creation Methods

In this chart the themes of commitments or plans 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 Canadian 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 or intended results). 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 are linked to the original French source text.

The theme of each plan was first classified semantically using OpenAI embeddings and a “zero-shot-classification” technique. Then all commitments and source text in this dataset were read through and given a two to three word topic label and compared to the classified theme. In many cases the major theme of the policy was chosen over any minor themes that maybe present in a policy. 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.