Sir John A. Macdonald in his illustrious if somewhat intoxicated career in arguing for an unelected senate suggested that it is important to protect the rights of minorities and that the rich would always be a minority. This, is to say the least, a restricted view of citizenship and a complete denial of the ideal of social citizenship. Macdonald’s idea of citizenship is based on the assumption that we are as humans both self-interested and selfish a view highly prized by the neo-liberal crowd today. I don’t think you can have a democracy without a strong sense of the importance of the notion of social citizenship. In 1976 Canada ratified the UNs covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights an acknowledgment that we need more than just political and civil rights to flourish as a society. Social citizenship means little to those living in poverty and for a society without strong continuing public social programs of education, health and social security. How things have changed since 1976; recently Canada along with Australia, the U.S. and New Zealand refused to sign on to the UNs covenant on universal indigenous rights. A disgrace!

I always begin my lecture every fall to the undergraduate students in my introductory course on Canadian social welfare with a discussion of the meanings of public and private goods. Private goods do not advance the idea of social citizenship but only see humans as consumers each pursuing their own private interests that some governments want us to believe will somehow aggregate to the overall social good. More and more to my horror students are referred to as customers. It promotes unbridled individualism and ultimately results in what J.K. Galbraith called private affluence and public squalor. People simply strewn about like grass seed in an uncaring and capricious market.

The concept of public goods on the other hand puts forward the idea of citizens with collective social rights and entitlements, and creates a sense of social cohesion; public goods benefit the entire society not just those able to command resources over goods in the market. The creation of the welfare state in Canada from the 1930s through the late 1960s is a striking example of how Canada came to accept the philosophical ideal of social citizenship; public broadcasting (1933) and public electrical power (Ontario 1911) are others. Social citizenship came to include pensions for seniors, universal health care, national programs for affordable housing, unemployment insurance, unions in the public and private sector, re distributive income tax policies, decent levels of spending on public education; all this and more meant that Canadian Governments would have to be active interveners in the economy to alter what would be the inequality created daily, hourly, by a brutal market-based economy as the only engine of social progress.

In my interpretation the importance of the concept of public goods began its long slide into obscurity in 1977 when the federal government under extreme corporate pressures of globalization, in company with the rapidly emerging new forms of high speed electronic computer communication, passed the Established Programs Financing Act altering the basis of fiscal federalism for health care and education. No longer would the federal government share equally the cost of these two crucial public goods. From that point on, although the federal budget of 1973 contained the seeds of what was to follow with its reductions of corporate taxation, Canada yoked itself to the so-called New Economy of global neo-liberalism of e-commerce, deregulation, privatization, austerity plans for the poor, the market as god, anti-unionism, pro-global sweat shops, focus groups, reality TV, fast food, environmental degradation, talk shows and instant fame, wealth polarization, and the repeal of the welfare state. The meaning of this sea change was captured in Margaret Thatcher’s well known quip that there is no such thing as society only private individuals pursuing private goods.

What possible chance does the idea of public goods have? Since the early 1950s the unrelenting bombardment of advertising for private goods has invaded and colonized everyone’s consciousness to the point where there is little room for much else. When was the last time we have seen an ad on TV for the spending of our money not on some desired private good but instead spending through taxes on desired public goods? It may be somewhat historically inaccurate but nevertheless hard not to remark that in the past 20 years or so we have returned to the imperatives of the 1834 British poor law reforms which championed, self-reliance, independence, self-support, and fostered market solutions to all social ills. It’s worth noting that social theorist Raymond Williams observed that the words or terms used to describe social life - self-reliance, independence – are also active forces in shaping social life. Our language creates our reality.

From the 1930s to the 1970s social welfare in Canada was transformed from a system of allocating benefits solely on the basis of relief and means testing to one that was more centered on principles of universal entitlement, public social services, and social insurance. universal Old Age Security (1951), universal Family Allowances (1944-45), and universal Health Care (1957, 1968; Saskatchewan early 1960s) are the universal programs providing benefits as entitlements and social rights. Unemployment Insurance (1940), Workers’ Compensation (Ont. 1914), and CPP/QPP (1965), represent the social insurance method of income support. The important Canada Assistance Plan (CAP) of 1966 abolished in 1996 is a fine example of cooperative federalism in its conditional cost-sharing arrangements for provincial social assistance and social services.

The federal government’s earliest sustained involvement in income security was the introduction of financial benefits for veterans. The social context for this was both the government’s regard for veterans and the fear of social unrest as represented by the Winnipeg general strike of 1919. Returning WW I veterans were not guaranteed work and from 1916-1939 the federal government became active in social policy for veterans, instituting in 1916 a Board of pension commissioners to award and administer pensions for to WWI veterans. In 1918 the Department of Soldiers’ Civil Re-establishment was set up to help reestablish veterans into civilian life and offer care for dependents. The Veterans’ Pension Act of 1919 committed the federal government to providing pensions for disabled members of the armed forces and their dependents. These pensions were not means tested and the Veterans’ Pension Act of 1919 is the first universal income benefit in Canadian social welfare. Canadian historian Desmond Morton has written a fine book on these developments.

With the cost-shared Old Age Pension Act of 1927 the federal government moved more to centre stage in the provision of income security. The act authorized federal payment of 50 per cent to any participating province for means tested pensions to British Subjects (Canada did not pass a citizenship law until 1947) aged 70 and over who had lived in Canada for 20 years and in the province for five years. The pension issue had been smoldering for some years with the Trades and Labour Congress of Canada calling for legislation since 1905. Prime Minister Mackenzie King on the verge of being forced to resign after the 1925 election with the Conservatives winning more seats, offered Labour Group members J.S. Woodsworth and A.A. Heaps cabinet positions; both declined but said they would support the government in passing old age pension legislation. The King government passed the legislation but Sir John A’s unelected senate defeated it thus forcing another election with King this time winning a majority government with the promise of a public pension plan.

The 1930s Great depression changed dramatically the way Canadians and governments thought about social welfare policy. Artists and poets - Dorothy Livesay and F.R. Scott - were highly influential in the cultural arena; a reminder of how important the arts are in social change. By the depth of the depression in the bleak year of 1933, the Canadian economy had shrunk by 1/3 from its 1929 level; unemployment rose from 3% to 25-30% ; hundreds of thousands were out of work, social unrest widespread (the most famous of which was the on to Ottawa trek of 1935 emanating from the despised work relief camps of British Columbia, and leading to the Regina riot), the view quite quickly took hold that unemployment and poverty were not just the result of individual failings but caused by large structural forces at work. Self-sufficient individualism ceded to more collective ideas and solutions for social distress. Political alternatives in Canada manifest themselves: the CCF and the Regina Manifesto of 1933, Social Credit, the Communist Party of Canada, the Union Nationale, farmers unions and cooperatives. People looked to government to provide relief and protection from the chaotic forces of unbridled capitalism. As the punishing economic conditions persisted throughout the entire decade the costs of unemployment relief raced far ahead of the resources of municipal and provincial governments, drawing the federal government into yearly agreements to provide substantial assistance to the provinces for provincial social assistance. Harry Cassidy, Canada’s foremost authority on social welfare at the time, called these federal relief payments the first nation wide service of economic security for the Canadian population.

The federal government amended the Old Age Pension Act in 1937 to include blind persons over 40, passed the Prairie Farm Assistance Act in 1939 to help farmers devastated by drought conditions, and established the Canadian Wheat Board. A wide ranging Act for Employment and Social Insurance was passed in 1935, as part of RB Bennett’s New Deal, but was challenged by provinces as unconstitutional, and in 1937 the Act was declared as beyond the powers of the federal government by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in Britain, the final court of appeal for Canada at the time. However, by 1940 with WW II underway the provinces and the federal government agreed to amend the constitution to include federal responsibility for unemployment insurance.

I want to mention two 1930s factors that gave a strong shove forward to the idea and importance of an activist interventionist state: the ideas of economist J.M. Keynes and the Royal Commission on Dominion-Provincial Relations (the Rowell-Sirois Commission, 1937-1940). With the publication of Keynes’ The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money (1936) and its influence on social welfare and policy makers, welfare thinking took off in new directions. Before his book was published it was accepted that full employment in a capitalist economy was part of the natural order of things. Bouts of unemployment and recessions were unfortunate aberrations that soon would be corrected through natural market forces. It was assumed that any person who wanted to work could find employment if they looked for it and were prepared to accept prevailing wage rates. The massive unemployment of the 1930s put paid to these economic nostrums. A million or more people were willing to work for pretty well any wage but there simply were no jobs. Keynes argued for government spending - and for spending on social programs - to stimulate the economy and to create demand which would in turn lead to more employment. Following Keynes it came to be accepted in Canada that social welfare policy, as well as providing much needed income security, could be an effective policy instrument in economic management. Politically this fortuitous bringing together of the social and economic functions of social welfare policy reduced much of the hostility towards the launching of large social programs. The Keynesian revolution changed the discourses of social welfare policy: social welfare programs were now viewed as countercyclical benefits instead of unwarranted anti-capitalist intrusions into the economy. Not surprisingly Tommy Douglas was a committed Keynesian.

In 1937 Prime Minister M. King established a Royal Commission on Dominion-Provincial relations to probe into the crisis of the fiscal crisis of federalism occasioned by the depression. Constitutionally the federal government did not have responsibility for social welfare although unlimited taxing authority; the provinces had far fewer financial resources although responsibility for social welfare. It came to be known as the Rowell-Sirois Commission after its two commissioners, Newton Wesley Rowell, chief Justice of Ontario and Joseph Sirois, a professor of constitutional law. It issued its report in 1940. The provincial governments of Manitoba and Saskatchewan defeated by the depression and severe droughts were simply unable to both provide essential social welfare services and to meet their budgetary commitments. The task given to the Commission was to take an in-depth look at the economic, financial and constitutional basis of Canadian federalism and its distribution of powers and taxing authority and how existing arrangements had simply failed to respond to the crisis of the 1930s. The Commission produced three incredibly important documents known as the ‘red books’ which comprehensively reviewed all existing social programs, social services, old age pensions, health care, social insurance and education. One of the reports central recommendations was that since provinces were unable to finance their social welfare responsibilities without financial assistance from the federal government, a system of unconditional adjustment grants be provided to the poorer provinces in order for them to provide adequate levels of public social services. This was finally taken up and enshrined as equalization payments in Part III of the 1982 Constitution Act –now a disputed issue in the current Saskatchewan election campaign.

Several studies and reports during the war years made it evident that Canada was rapidly moving in the direction of becoming a welfare state. Leonard Marsh’s 1943 Report on Social Security for Canada contained among its welter of detail on social welfare three central ideas: the need for more social insurance programs, children’s (family) allowances, and a vast program of federal social investment which for example would provide for the redevelopment of blighted city areas. Also in 1943 the Heagerty report on health insurance and in 1944 the Curtis report on Housing and community planning were released. Along with the Rowell-Sirois and Marsh reports what all four pointed out was that the economy was clearly not self regulating, and if left to itself would implode, resulting in social unrest and upheaval; individual self-reliance was no longer often enough and many could not count on family, charity or the market to meet their needs. Hence the federal and provincial governments would have to become interventionist in providing protection against income disruption. Overall the four reports were of the view that the state needed to accept three new responsibilities: the stabilization of the economy; the creation of high levels of unemployment; and the development of a comprehensive social safety net. Following from these path breaking reports - key documents in the history of social welfare in Canada – the federal government released two documents in 1945: the white paper on employment and income; and the green book proposals. The white paper has been described as “a precise Keynesian statement of the government’s postwar economic planning”; and the green book outlined the government’s social welfare plans designed to fill three main gaps in the Canadian social security system: health insurance; national old age pensions; and unemployment assistance. Over the next three decades from 1945 on there was widespread acceptance of a state centered approach to social care lead by an activist interventionist Canadian state.

By the late 1970s and continuing to the present this Keynesian consensus, as it was called, for a flourishing economy and the building of a welfare state started to rapidly unravel. Clustering together and highly interrelated were the forces of globalization, the emergence of the philosophy of neo-liberalism and a desire on the part of governments to move back to a residual model of social welfare – residual meaning the view that the two primary ways for human needs to be met are the family and the market. Globalization, in the sense I am using it, means the growing ascendancy of economics over politics, of corporate demands over public policy, of the valuing almost exclusively of private goods over public goods. The NAFTA with its demands for harmonization in social programs is part of global pressures felt by Canadian governments. Neo-liberalism represents the policy side of globalization and exhibits itself in a number of ways: a much more unregulated market; privatization and the devaluing of the notion of the importance of public goods; lower taxes; promotion of the voluntary sector and what has come to be called civic engagement; an unrelenting and brutal attack on so-called welfare dependence; and the devolution of programs and services to lower levels of govt.

The implications of globalization and neo-liberalism for social welfare are:

• a return to a residual approach;
• governments withdraw from social spending, regulation and the delivery of services;
• governments pursue purchase of service arrangements and contracting out to the private sector
• reducing the power of unions
• attacking the idea of universality (OAS, 1989; Family Allowances 1993);
• increases in inequality –growing gap between rich and poor;
• less concern with poverty;
• increasing environmental degradation;
• less concern with workplace safety and health standards
• workfare (not allowed under by CAP; but the abolishing of CAP in 1996 and the establishment of the Canada Health and Social Transfer (CHST) workfare allowed again;
• a reemergence of blaming the victim; an emphasis on individual responsibility; society no longer seen as needing to provide a social minimum;
• food banks;
• social programs seen as hindering economic growth;
• a fading of the idea of social sharing, compassion and a sense of altruism

The discourses about the economy and social welfare have shifted dramatically from one of a Keynesian consensus with social spending a key ingredient to one of monetarism and supply side economics with little regard for social spending. Monetarists reject Keynesian demand management of the economy and emphasize the efficiency of free markets, the control of inflation through manipulating interest rates and lowering corporate taxes. This all plays into what has been termed the fiscalization of policy discourse as a dominant theme in current discourse on the welfare state. Since 1975 when the bank of Canada adopted monetarism as a formal policy and the federal cabinet adopted a budget restraint policy most of the discussion on social policy has been couched pretty well exclusively in the language of fiscal capacity. Fiscalization refers to periods when financial concerns, particularly considerations of expenditure restraint and deficit reduction dominate discussions of social welfare policy.

In an excellent article in Queen’s Quarterly (Spring 2004) Ed Broadbent points out that the regimes of neoliberalism have carried on a sustained assault on our equality-based social programs and the idea of an interventionist state in social welfare. The very idea of social citizenship is viewed with disdain now and generally we speak less about citizens and more about taxpayers and consumers. Politics from Broadbent’s perspective, and I thoroughly agree, has been reduced to some dubious economic nostrums:

• in order to have higher national productivity we must have lower taxes and less government
• reducing the level of government activity will lead to an increase in citizens’ voluntary participation
• if we want less equality and poverty we must let the market grow on its own, unhampered by government involvement
• universal social programs are too costly, inefficient and reduce our competitiveness in an increasingly globalized market place
• universal health care is no longer sustainable

Broadbent in masterly style then debunks each of these neoliberal claims:

• during the 1990s Austria, Germany and the Netherlands (others too) kept taxes high to maintain strong social programs. And their productivity did not go down. In fact their productivity equaled or exceeded those of Canada and the U.S.
• Instead of going up when governments slashed billions of dollars from social programs during the 1990s, volunteer ism in Canada seriously declined by the end of the decade. Citizen participation is highest in countries with strong equalizing social programs
• The claim that poverty and inequality would be looked after by a laissez-faire approach to the economy during the 1990s turns out to be simply not the case - the opposite happened. The gap between the rich and poor widened and poverty increased. During the ten year period while the number and percentage of poor children in Canada went up every year, five western European countries maintaining high levels of social spending eliminated child poverty
• Universal social programs actually maintain a nation’s economic competitiveness and often improve it. In Canada our spending on universal health care costs less per capita than spending on health insurance in the U.S. but their higher level of spending leaves 47 million Americans without any health care coverage. There is much empirical evidence in fact that universal health care provides us with a competitive edge in attracting new investment
• It is simply not the case that our current public health care system is not sustainable. If we want to improve the system as the Romanow commission showed we simply need to restore what the federal government cut in the 1990s. As Broadbent writes, “if medicare is threatened, it is primarily the fault of neo-liberal politicians. During the past decade they treated us as consumers, not citizens. They preferred to give us billions in tax breaks and starve one of the world’s best health care systems.”

In February 1936 Tommy Douglas gave his first major speech in the House of Commons. The speech was wide ranging and Douglas concludes, “I suggest that the dominion government take immediate steps to formulate a coordinated health policy for the Dominion of Canada. The greatest asset for the country is the health and welfare of her people, and that should be the first consideration of any government.”

Tommy Douglas you’re the man! Thank you.

I suggest that the dominion government take immediate steps to formulate a coordinated health policy for the Dominion of Canada. The greatest asset for the country is the health and welfare of her people, and that should be the first consideration of any government...Tommy Douglas

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