Welfare Reform In Canada

Welfare Reform in Canada provides systematic knowledge of Canadian social assistance by assessing provincial welfare regimes and emphasizing changes since the late twentieth century. The book examines activation, social investment, and economic inequalities and provides nuanced perspectives on social welfare across Canada's provinces in relation to trends and issues in the country and beyond. These conceptual, international, and historical perspectives inform in-depth case studies of social assistance reform in each province. The key issues of social assistance in Canada, including gender relations, immigrants, Aboriginal peoples, and the impact of activation programs, are addressed, as is the possibility of convergence taking place in provincial welfare policy. This book is the second volume in the Johnson-Shoyama Series on Public Policy, published by the University of Toronto Press in association with the Johnson-Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy, an interdisciplinary centre for research, teaching, and executive training with campuses at the Universities of Regina and Saskatchewan.

This examination of Canadian welfare policies updates changes to the fall of 1997. It begins with a look at fiscal restraints originating at the federal level and then turns to changes in welfare policy by province and territory. The individual provincial chapters are followed by an analysis of two of the factors with the most impact on the welfare system: jobs and money. A concluding chapter contains a series of recommendations for improving welfare in Canada.

The Collapse of Welfare Reformexamines and compares a decade of welfare reform policy efforts in the United States and Canada, explaining the failure of each. While many scholars attribute differences in welfare policy to socioeconomic factors, Leman contends that political factors were responsible for these differences in the two countries under study. His is the only detailed and comparative recent work on public assistance policy and is one of the few book-length comparisons of the United States and Canada on any subject. It updates past discussions of U.S. welfare reform by discussing President Carter's Program for Better Jobs and Income as well as former President Nixon's Family Assistance Plan, and provides the most comprehensive account available of the Canadian Social Security Review and its aftermath. The issues, data, and lessons presented in this book will interest political scientists, social workers, policy planners, and general readers who are involved in welfare assistance programs and issues.

Poverty Reform in Canada addresses a central theoretical concern in the contemporary study of public policy - the dichotomy between society-centred and state-centred perspectives on the modern state. Haddow makes the case that poverty reform during the 1960s and 1970s can be explained by combining insights from these seemingly mutually exclusive theoretical perspectives, arguing that the societal perspective explains the important preconditions of policy making, such as the impact of policy legacies, ideological beliefs, and accumulation strategies that reflect the historic weakness of working-class politics, while the statist perspective accounts for the impact of federalism and evolving structures of cabinet decision making.

Examines the "democratic deficit" present in Confederation today and applies to it these foundational principles: expanding Canadians' freedom of choice; challenging Canadians to accept greater personal responsibility; and deepening Canada's practice of federal democracy."

An ethnography of the development and travel of the New Zealand model of neoliberal welfare reform, this study explores the social life of policy, which is one of process, motion, and change. Different actors, including not only policy élites but also providers and recipients, engage with it in light of their own resources and knowledge. Drawing on two analytic frameworks of the contemporary anthropology of policy-translation and assemblage-Kingfisher situates policy as an artifact and architect of cultural meaning, as well as a site of power struggles. All points of engagement with policy are approached as sites of policy production that serve to transform it as well as reproduce it. As such, A Policy Travelogue provides an antidote to theorizations of policy as a-cultural, rational, and straightforwardly technical.