To mark the publication this week of the newest book in the Johnson-Shoyama Series on Public Policy—Welfare Reform in Canada: Provincial Social Assistance in Comparative Perspective, edited by Daniel Béland and Pierre-Marc Daigneault—the authors provide the following summary of social assistance issues and necessary reforms. The Johnson-Shoyama Series focuses on important themes in provincial public policy and is intended both to explore the range of policy variation across Canada in comparison with federal and international patterns, and to present viable alternatives.
By Daniel Béland, Johnson-Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy, and Pierre-Marc Daigneault, Department of Political Science, Université Laval
In Canada as in other advanced industrial societies, social assistance is a central component of the welfare state. This is true because social assistance programs support members of some of the most vulnerable populations in our society. With the key exception of aboriginal peoples living on reserve,* social assistance for working-aged people is a provincial matter. Commonly referred to as welfare, this type of social assistance does not have a good reputation in Canada.** In fact, just like in the United States, the term welfare frequently has negative connotations, in both popular parlance and media discourse. Yet, although citizens and policymakers alike might think we know a lot about welfare, in reality, public knowledge about provincial social assistance programs is rather sketchy. As a result, much more work is needed to provide a truly comparative and systematic overview of major issues and trends in this policy area, which is the safety net of last resort for so many Canadians. Moreover, because each province operates its own social assistance program, a lot can be learned by analyzing and comparing the different jurisdictions in a rigorous manner.
This is exactly what our recent University of Toronto Press volume does. Titled Welfare Reform in Canada: Provincial Social Assistance in Comparative Perspective, this volume gathers some of the best specialists of social assistance in Canada, from both within and outside academia. Contributors include scholars from different disciplines (political science, economics, sociology, and social work) as well as current and former policy practitioners. They offer the first systematic look at provincial social assistance in more than 15 years. An outstanding feature of the volume is that each province gets its own chapter, which allows for an in-depth, comparative look at social assistance trends and reforms across the country. Simultaneously, broad historical, international, empirical contributions allow the reader to grasp the “big picture” of social assistance while paying attention to its various dimensions and issues. Finally, more focused chapters explore crucial issues such as aboriginal issues, activation programs, disability, gender, housing and homelessness, immigration, and population aging. The result is a rigorous analysis of social assistance trends in Canada that both practitioners and researchers should find useful, as the most comprehensive primer on social assistance ever published.
Several of our volume’s findings are particularly striking. First, as Ronald Kneebone and Katherine White show in their contribution, as in the past, provincial social assistance benefits for single employable individuals are generally set well below what is needed to cover their most basic economic needs. On average, lone parents as well as married parents fare relatively better, although this is much more the case in Prince Edward Island, Québec, and Saskatchewan than in British Columbia, Manitoba, and Nova Scotia, for instance.
Second, as this example suggests, significant variations among provinces persist in the field of provincial social assistance. At least regarding differences in benefit levels for single employables, lone parents, and married parents, there is no evidence of a strong convergence in benefit levels.
Third, and simultaneously, there are clear signs of convergence in the field of disability benefits, which, since the 1990s, have declined in all provinces except Québec. Yet, in a number of provinces, such as Alberta, there is an obvious gap between those with temporary and permanent disabilities, as the latter group sometimes receives much more generous benefits than the former.
Fourth, since the mid-1990s, the average social assistance recipiency rate has declined across the country. While the recipiency rate was higher than 12 per cent in 1995, it is now only slightly above 6 per cent, which represents a deep change in provincial social assistance. Today in Canada, the average recipiency rate is comparable to what it used to be 45 years ago, towards the end of the post-war boom.
Finally, as Gerard Boychuk suggests in his chapter on the historical development of social assistance in Canada, the termination of the federal Canada Assistance Plan (CAP) in the mid-1990s did not result in the strong, unilateral impact on provincial social assistance that many observers anticipated at the time. A reason for this is the fact that CAP itself featured relatively weak conditions imposed on the provinces in exchange for federal funding. Boychuk further argues that social assistance reform is primarily driven by economic and political factors, whose impact can vary greatly from province to province. The policy lesson here is that the provinces, and not Ottawa, are truly in charge of social assistance. This means they are entirely responsible for the well-being of some of the most vulnerable segments of the Canadian population.
Beyond the issue of social assistance, this volume stresses the importance of rigorous case studies and comparative analyses of public policy across the 10 provinces. This case was clearly made in the book co-authored by Michael Atkinson et al., Governance and Public Policy in Canada: A View from the Provinces (University of Toronto Press, 2013).
More recently, in a different policy area, Greg Marchildon, Livio Di Matteo, and their contributors recognize the need for systematic, inter-provincial comparative research in Bending the Cost Curve in Health Care (University of Toronto Press, 2014). We hope that our volume, alongside these two existing books and other recent publications, helps draw more attention to provincial public policy from both a scholarly and a practical standpoint.
Notes:
*The federal government pays for on reserve benefits at the same rate as provincial social assistance in the province where they live.
**Harell, A., Soroka, S., & Mahon, A. (2008). Is welfare a dirty word? Canadian public opinion on social assistance policies. Policy Options – Options politiques, 29(8): 53-56.
Authors:
Daniel Béland is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Public Policy (Tier 1) at the Johnson-Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy (University of Saskatchewan). A student of comparative fiscal and social policy, he has published 12 books and more than 100 articles in peer-reviewed journals. Recent books include The Politics of Policy Change: Welfare, Medicare, and Social Security Reform in the United States (Georgetown University Press, 2012; with Alex Waddan), Ideas and Politics in Social Science Research (Oxford University Press, 2011; co-edited with Robert Henry Cox), What is Social Policy? Understanding the Welfare State (Polity, 2010), Public and Private Social Policy: Health and Pension Policies in a New Era (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008; co-edited with Brian Gran), and Nationalism and Social Policy: The Politics of Territorial Solidarity (Oxford University Press, 2008; with André Lecours). You can find more about his work on his website: www.danielbeland.org.
Pierre-Marc Daigneault (Ph.D.) is an Assistant professor of public policy and public administration in the Department of Political Science at Université Laval. Before his current position, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the École nationale d’administration publique (ÉNAP), the Ministère de l’Emploi et de la Solidarité sociale du Québec and the Johnson-Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy (University of Saskatchewan). Trained as a political scientist, he pursues research on social policy and, in particular, on social assistance and activation programs. In addition, Daigneault has a keen interest in questions related to governance, policy paradigms, program evaluation, and research methods. His research has been published as book chapters and in various peer-reviewed journals, such as the American Journal of Evaluation, Canadian Journal of Political Science, Canadian Journal of Program Evaluation, Evaluation and Program Planning, Evaluation Review, International Journal of Social Research Methodology, Journal of European Public Policy, Political Studies Review, and the Journal of Mixed Methods Research.
