"The 1969 Hellyer Task Force on Housing and…" — Brendan Nicholas Gemmell (#c407)

Card #c407IR // #c407SynthesisThesis

The 1969 Hellyer Task Force on Housing and Urban Development — launched during Trudeaumania's participatory-politics wave after a Canada-wide public consultation — blended "liberal" and "deliberative" types of participatory democracy in a four-part typology the thesis proposes; the differing political approaches of Paul Hellyer and Pierre Elliott Trudeau help explain the Cabinet's hostile reception of the report and Hellyer's resignation in April 1969.

— In our words · Source: The Federal Task Force on Housing and Urban Development and the Limits of Participatory Democracy, 1968-1969 (Brendan Nicholas Gemmell)

[Use when]

When a consultation exercise collapses, ask which democracy it was practicing — Hellyer's task force asked for input in one register and was judged in another.

[Why it matters]

Public consultation doesn't fail in one way — the thesis gives a taxonomy (liberal, deliberative, radical, revolutionary) for diagnosing exactly which kind of participation a reform actually invited.