Remaking Canadian Social Policy: Social Security in the Late 1990s

Elaine Porter is an associate professor of sociology at Laurentian
University.

This book provides a useful antidote to the nostrum that deficit
reduction should be the driving force behind social-policy reformulation
within the federal government. It does so by speaking to the
expectations for social-policy reform following the 1994 release of the
position paper “Agenda: Jobs and Growth: Improving Social Security in
Canada” by Human Resources Development Canada. The authors of the 21
chapters take the government to task for having converted cost-sharing
agreements between the federal government and provinces into block
funding and for having retooled such federal programs as unemployment
insurance. The book’s focus on policy changes implemented by the
Liberal government in 1995 can be explained by the fact that its authors
were all participants in the Seventh Conference on Canadian Social
Welfare Policy held in Vancouver in 1995. Ironically, this was a
conference funded by the National Welfare Grants program, itself a
victim of subsequent budget cuts.

The various authors explain the losses that come with the dismantling
of the welfare state based on a variety of disciplinary perspectives
spanning economics, sociology, political science, and social work, with
the latter field being the most prevalent. Topics tackled include tax
and pension reform, unemployment insurance reform, training programs,
workfare, gender analyses of women’s relationship to the state,
child-care policies, and the effects of globalization on social welfare.
Several chapters present the views of program recipients themselves.

The coherence in the book comes from an implicit rejection of
neoliberalism by all of the authors. There is a considerable amount of
quantitative data presented as evidence for each of the policy issues
examined, and all of it is clearly explained. The editors have even
thought to include one chapter outlining the social-review proposals set
out by the government. Taken together, the chapters give us fodder to
argue against the hegemony of the marketplace. One would hope that its
critical stance does not suggest why its own source of funding, the
National Welfare Grants, was discontinued.