“At Last! The Government’s War on Poverty Explained”: The Special Planning Secretariat, the Welfare State, and the Rhetoric of the Poverty in the 1960s
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Special Planning Secretariat was established in the Privy Council Office of the Canadian federal government in 1965 with a mandate to coordinate and promote initiatives against poverty, and was quickly dubbed Canada’s “war on poverty” department. Originally the brainchild of Prime Minister Lester Pearson’s policy chief Tom Kent, who hoped it would make the government’s ambitious social policy agenda more legible, the Secretariat survived Kent’s resignation and took on a lower-profile role generating material to raise public awareness both of poverty and of government’s various efforts to alleviate it. Working in partnership with voluntary organizations and other government agencies including the National Film Board, the Secretariat pioneered new ways of presenting government activities and representing the poor. Its vision of government, reflected in the Index of Programs for Human Development, was comprehensive, reflecting a strategic approach to the federal bureaucracy that would dominate by the 1970s; its representation of poverty, especially in the film The Things I Cannot Change, was bleak and it isolated the poor from social relations. The Secretariat’s activities, which have been obscured by the memory of the redistributive social programmes introduced in the same era, left a mixed legacy for government action to redress poverty.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.037 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".