Shifting Time

Raymond B. Blake is an assistant professor of history at Mount Allison
University and the author of Canadians at Last: Canada Integrates
Newfoundland as a Province.

This short book contains two essays that raise some interesting
questions about how work and social security are changing in Canada. In
their essay on the rise of the information age, Ide and Cordell argue
that the computerization of society will have fundamental economic,
political, and social implications, and pose the question “Where do
the service sector workers go after they lose their jobs to
automation?” They do not provide a definitive answer, but suggest that
the middle class is rapidly disappearing and incomes are increasingly
being polarized. Welfare is rapidly becoming the sector of last resort.

Yalnizyan holds little hope for the welfare system unless Canadians can
pull themselves from the rhetoric of global competition and deficit
reduction, which, she suggests, has “become the root cause of economic
and social insecurity.” She agrees with Ide and Cordell that there is
a trend away from full-time work and that the distribution of wealth has
become more unequal; only social programs have prevented greater
unevenness, but these programs are now under assault by governments
driven by a corporate agenda. She argues that much of Canada’s debt
problem emanates from a systematic reduction of effective corporate
taxes, not from overblown social spending. Even so, social programs
currently promote the work ethic and have targeted the “deserving
poor” for help.

Much of the analysis here is simplistic. Yalnizyan advocates greater
control over capital mobility so that Canadians can “produce a
significant proportion of what they need to consume,” while Ide and
Cordell propose a “productivity tax” on computer and information
technologies. The book’s strength lies in the authors’ call for
readers to consider what is happening to work and social security in
Canada. The nation has embraced new technologies and social security
reform without much regard to the implications of such developments.