The papers in this special issue of the British Journal of Canadian Studies have their origin in a seminar hosted at the University of Ulster Institute for Research in the Social Sciences, Canadian Studies Research Programme in February, 2011 entitled, Welfare State Restructuring and the Role of the Social Economy and the Voluntary Sector: Canadian Reflections at a Time of Austerity. Earlier versions of three of the papers, by Laforest, Phillips and White, were given at that seminar. The background to the seminar and this special issue is found in the profound changes in welfare states constructed in the post-Second World War period that have occurred since the mid-1980s in many Western democracies as a consequence of the neoliberal turn in politics and economics. This led to a crisis in confidence in the state and a radical shake-up of public administration. Management techniques were imported from the private sector and a period of outsourcing of public services to both private and to voluntary bodies was set in train (Barzelay 2002; Osborne and McLaughlin 2002). The focus of the discussion in this issue is on the changing role of civil society and the relationship between organizations within civil society and the state in this period and on how this is talked about. The Canadian story is interesting as the changes have been particularly profound because of the way in which the institutions of the Canadian welfare state had been integrated into an earlier narrative of nation-building, giving civil society a leading role in promoting strong links between disparate national and ethnic identities into an overarching Canadian civic citizenship. Analysis of what happened after the mid-1980s thus casts a sharply illuminating light on recent Canadian history. The first four articles in this special issue tackle the theme from a variety of perspectives, but they all hone in on the proper role of civil society as a separate sphere of activity to the market and the state in a democratic society and as a contributor to democratic debate and civic integration. A fifth article considers the policy outcomes of a weakening of this role in Canada that has allowed legislation promoting equality of opportunity to minorities in employment to be vitiated through poor enforcement. The renewed scholarly interest in the concept of civil society, particularly as a source of national and democratic renewal, dates back to the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the ending of a number of authoritarian regimes, particularly in South America, both in the late 1980s. Whilst this revival in interest was in part circumstantial, it was also driven by an 'associational revolution' as the number of associations within civil society 'sky-rocketed' across many jurisdictions in the world at a time when traditional forms of political engagement were seen to be in decline (Salamon 1994: 111). Whilst the variety of these associations in both form and function could be bewildering constituting a 'loose and baggy monster' hard to pin down in a single definition (Kendall and Knapp 1996), together they have come to be viewed as a separate sector within society, distinct from the state and the market (Salamon et al. 2003). Despite their variety, their core features include independence from government on the one hand, and on the other the lack of private owners taking profits from their operations, surpluses being directed to the purposes for which they were established (Salamon and Anheier 1998). Two interlinked strands in scholarship have developed from these beginnings. First, there has been a focus on how the world of these associations relates to state structures and programmes in particular jurisdictions (Smith and Gronbjerg 2006; Casey et al. 2010), and we will see in this issue how important this relationship has been in understanding recent Canadian social history. But second, this strand has acquired additional relevance through being filtered through debate on the normative role of civil society in contemporary politics (Edwards 2009; Munck 2006; Anheier 2007; Dekker and Evers 2009). …