Foisted Upon the Government?: State Responsibilities, Family Obligations, and the Care of the Dependent Aged in Late 19th Century Ontario

Christine Hughes is a policy analyst at the Ontario Native Affairs
Secretariat.

Based on the author’s 1994 doctoral thesis, Foisted Upon the
Government? is written for an academic audience, and students of
history, sociology, public policy, and gerontology will likely be the
most interested in this well-researched work.

The author provides a critical analysis of Ontario government policies
toward the elderly and their families in the 1890s. He draws a
comparison between provincial policies at the end of the 19th century,
which required families to care for their aged family members, and the
current directions for long-term care of the elderly and disabled in
Ontario by the family and community. He also demonstrates, using of
19th-century census data (one chapter provides a demographic profile of
the aged in Brockville), municipal records, and case studies (another
chapter details the treatment of elderly in the Rockwood Asylum for the
Insane in Kingston), how the government of Ontario cultivated a sense of
family obligation to care for the dependent aged. By doing so, the
province effectively passed responsibility for care of the elderly to
family members, which resulted in reduced welfare costs. The book
concludes with a chapter on directions for long-term care reform in
Ontario in the 1990s.

Foisted Upon the Government? is a valuable contribution to the
literature on the relationship among the state, the aged, and the
family. Scholars engaged in research in this area will appreciate the 40
pages of detailed notes, 20 pages of bibliographic references (including
a number of primary sources), tables, and graphs.