karen louise smith

The Canadian Community for Dialogue and Deliberation or, C2D2 conference happened over the weekend in Toronto. I attended a number of interesting and relevant sessions. The images below were created by Daniel Rose of the Omkase Group and Lissa Sorsa of ThinkLinkgraphics.com. A few of my less beautiful notes from sessions are listed below.

Image by: Daniel Rose

Image by Lissa Sorsa

Mental Health Strategy
Since the Kirby Senate report on mental health was released, a non-profit called the Mental Health Commission of Canada has formed. The Commission has consulted extensively to inform their strategy document. During the session, the presenters demonstrated the use of real-time voting clickers to gather feedback from participants attending public meetings. For me, this session raised many interesting questions concerning the meaning of ‘Commissions’ in Canadian society and where public engagement is situated within the policy-making process. In line with the theme of my proposed dissertation work, I think there are many interesting considerations when a Commission is ‘outside’ government as part of the work of a non-profit organization or it is alternatively ‘inside’ government as part of the Royal Commission tradition. I look forward to following up on some themes from this session.

Youth @ the polls
Many levels of government: federal, provincial, municipal, and community-based, came together to consider what encourages youth to vote and participate politically. Additionally, a representative from Apathy is Boring brought forward civic engagement as a multi-faceted process and experience of citizenship. Youth voices were present and prominent in this session.

Canada @150
The Canada @150 session allowed participants to experience a mini version of the process undertaken by 150 ‘young’ civil servants (with 5 years or less of experiences in government) to envision our collective Canadian policy future. The session was interesting in that we got an insider’s glimpse of the web 2.0 infrastructures used to run this engagement process. I always love an insider view! Our wrap up discussion focused extensively on the difference between internal employee dialogue and deliberation and broader public involvement.