The Emergence of Social Security in Canada. 3rd ed.

Jeffrey J. Cormier is a Ph.D. candidate specializing in Canadian society
at McGill University.

This third edition of Guest’s standard text on Canada’s social
security system (originally published in 1980) is the most comprehensive
in the field of social policy analysis to date. Guest has revised
chapters and added two new ones, providing an up-to-date commentary on
Canadian welfare policy. The updated version is timely, for the debate
between a residual or market orientated approach to welfare and an
institutional or solidaristic one rages as strongly today as it did at
the turn of the century. In times of economic crisis, are individuals
responsible for their own welfare or is the state and society?

Guest traces five major themes that have shaped Canada’s social
welfare system since 1867: the search for alternatives to social support
other than family and the market, the development of a social minimum of
care, the process of defining and redefining the causes of poverty, the
increased participation of citizens in the welfare decision-making
process, and the role of the Constitution in the functioning of state
welfare. Guest offers more than an abstract discussion of principles. He
is sensitive to the historical, social, and political context within
which welfare policy was and continues to be formed in Canada. For
example, he continually links discussions of social welfare to the
larger issue of changing federal–provincial relations.

In essence, The Emergence of Social Security in Canada is two books.
The first, a detailed historical account of the evolution of social
welfare from the 1920s up to and including the 1970s, was Guest’s
doctoral thesis at the London School of Economics, which might account
for why it is such superb social history. The final chapters, in which
the cost-cutting initiatives of both Mulroney’s Conservatives and
Chrétien’s Liberals are criticized, are much more polemic in tone.
Guest argues that we have moved to a more residual stance on social
security, believing that as things get worse economically, the
dismantled, almost nonexistent social security net will hardly be enough
to support us in the future.