Canadian Social Welfare in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

In Pursuit of the Public Good: Essays in Honour of Allan J. MacEachen. Ed. Tom Kent. Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1997. 207 pp. Patchworks of Purpose The Development of Provincial Social Assistance Regimes in Canada. Gerald William Boychuk. Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1998. 159 pp. Retooling the Welfare State: What's Right, What's Wrong, What's To Be Done. John Richards. Toronto: C.D. Howe Institute, 1997. 304 pp. Women and the Canadian Welfare State. Challenges and Change. Eds. Patricia A Evans and Gerda R. Wekerle. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. 329 pp. Over the past generation, the Canadian welfare state has undergone a radical transformation. Principles of universality, nurtured during and after the Second World War, have been superseded in the 1980s and 1990s by selective programmes that target benefits according to need. Contemporary social programmes are also decreasingly comprehensive, and governments' willingness to provide a reliable funding base, likewise, has been diminished. As well, political leaders have attempted to transfer social welfare responsibility to other levels of government. Ottawa has downloaded responsibility to the provinces, or in some instances directly to municipal jurisdictions, and the provinces have downloaded more fiscal and administrative responsibilities to municipalities. All levels of government, in turn, have hoped for - and in many cases systematically sought - an increased role for non-governmental authorities - social service organizations, religious groups and community and neighbourhood groups. If these fail, default rests with those families capable of providing support. Not surprisingly, holes in the social safety net are apparent. Those experiencing these changes directly and those working on the front lines of social services can attest to the profound - and to many, the present reviewers among them, unnecessary - suffering that many Canadians experience regularly. Shelters for the homeless in major urban centres are well beyond capacity, and the homeless are increasingly apparent in downtown cores.' Underresourced homes for the aged provide less care for those unable to care for themselves (Lightman). Programmes such as Employment Insurance provide decreasingly comprehensive benefits to a shrinking proportion of the country's unemployed! In 1995, Statistics Canada announced a 58 per cent increase in childhood poverty over the previous six years, and a total of 1.4 million Canadian children living below the poverty line (Canadian Council on Social Development). These and dozens of other social problems highlight contemporary social-policy-related problems. At least part of the underlying logic for changes to contemporary social policies has been ideological, with the rise in the 1980s of neo-conservative politics and the apparent flattening of the ideological spectrum in that decade and the years since. Part of the logic has been fiscal, with burgeoning government debt and deficits creating a rationale for reductions in certain government spending commitments - social welfare especially. Part, as well, has been the rise of a new international capitalism, sometimes referred to under a broader rubric of globalization. Free-market forces and privatization prevail, transnational corporations are seemingly freed from a sense of national responsibility, and environmental policy, workplace conditions, job security, wages and social policies appear to be determined less by national policy and more by the market-driven forces of an increasingly international and competitive industrializing world. But as social welfare policies are commensurately transformed, is there, one wonders, any coherent vision of how things should be? Where are today's equivalents of those systematic blueprints that ushered in the post-Second World War, comprehensive welfare state that we once knew? …