| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 60

REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS

Alvin Finkel, Social Policy and Practice In Canada: A History (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press 2006)

THE PRODUCT OF over a decade of work, Social Policy and Practice in Canada traces the history of social policy in northern North America from the precontact period to the present. The book is divided into four parts. The first two deal with the period before 1950, and the latter two with the period from mid-century to the present. Most of the sections that deal with the pre-1930 years are based on extensive secondary research, while those dealing with the post-1930 period (which constitute the majority of the almost 340 pages of text), draw on extensive primary research as well. Finkel covers a vast period and provides considerable detail about attitudes, institutions, and policies directed at the poor, the infirm, the aged, and the young. He does not, however, present his survey as a compendium of "facts." Instead, he argues that social policy in Canada has been the outcome of struggles between elites and popular classes who exist in social realities in which gender and race structure social experience. According to Finkel, with some partial exceptions (particularly some groups on the Pacific coast), Aboriginal peoples lived in fairly egalitarian societies in which the poor, infirm, and aged were cared for by medicine men and were able to obtain sustenance through customs of sharing. Europeans brought with them very different sorts of social structures. Far from egalitarian, they were "class divided and elite controlled," and "featured wealthy business people, professionals, government officials, artisans, farmers, labourers, and paupers." (326)

Finkel traces the feudal arrangements in New France, and the impact of the Poor Law in British North America, and provides an overview of the gradual, post-Confederation emergence of a movement for the state to provide social services and to redistribute wealth. He notes that while the government implemented some limited programs – for example, workers' compensation, mothers' allowances, and pensions for the elderly – before World War II, no universal system existed until after 1950. While the period from 1950 to 1980 or so marked a high point of government spending on social programs, the programs themselves were not about altering significantly basic structures of inequality. Indeed, Finkel suggests that in general those responses tended to leave in place the racism, patriarchy, and inequality that have been and continue to be central to bourgeois society in Canada. Instead, policy makers developed programs and institutions premised on continuous economic expansion. The idea was that by expanding the total wealth of Canadian society, the government could provide social programs to a large portion of the populace by spending a larger amount (measured in absolute terms) of wealth even while proportional distribution remained constant. By 1970 or thereabouts, when "stagflation" slowed growth, advocates of a neo-liberal creed began to decry government overspending. Balancing budgets without raising taxes (and especially without raising taxes on the rich) became the order of the day, and Canadians watched, though often not passively, as ardently pro-business governments reversed or seriously curtailed many of the hard-won gains of the previous 30 years. The book, however, is not a defeatist lament. Nor does it portray the post-1970 retrenchment as a particularly striking development. Instead, it places the post-1945 welfare state within a broader and longer history of struggle between right and left, a struggle that is ongoing and from which more thoroughgoing solutions to the persistent, dehumanizing inequality of capitalist society might materialize.

The book is clearly written. Its author provides a cogent introductory discussion of the relevant international literature. He also includes a lengthy bibliography which students and others unfamiliar with writing about social policy in Canada and elsewhere may consult as a guide for further reading, and provides clear outlines of debates – for instance, that surrounding the purpose of workers' compensation legislation, the development of universal health insurance, issues of government housing policy – in which he periodically involves himself (see, 83, 169–89, and 221–43 respectively). He also compares Canada with the United States, Britain, and other European countries, and provides insight into the international social, economic, and political contexts. This places policy makers and policies within, and makes accessible, aspects of the transnational context. Thus, while the book contributes to scholarly debate about social policy and the welfare state, it also provides those with little background a solid introduction to the subject area, and would make an excellent undergraduate text for courses in the history of reform and/or social policy.

While I read the book, however, it did occur to me that placing reform and social policy, especially in the period from the mid-nineteenth century through to the early 20th century, explicitly in the context of a broader and longer history of colonialism might have provided interesting insights. Finkel is sensitive to some aspects of Canada's colonial past. For instance, he provides insightful discussions of the often abysmal conditions in which Aboriginal people lived and how racist social policies often disadvantaged their communities (see, for example, 56–59, 97–90, 119–21, 187–89). Yet, recent post-colonial-inspired scholarship, such as Adele Perry's On The Edge of Empire: Gender, Race, and the Making of British Columbia, 1849–1871 indicates that in settler societies reform, and many of the earliest movements toward socially-oriented liberal states, were not straightforward responses to poverty in increasingly urban-industrial societies. Instead, they were complex responses to capitalism and colonialism, and were integral parts of liberal state formation. While Finkel notes the difference between Aboriginal and European societies, focusing on the multiple meanings and roles that reform institutions and policies took on in settler societies in this period might have provided added insight into the role of social policy and related institutions in the transition itself.

In any event, this study provides a good synthesis of a wide array of primary and secondary material covering a host of temporal and spatial locations. It deserves the attention of those interested in the history of social policy and the history of the welfare state – student and specialist alike.


KURT KORNESKI Memorial University of Newfoundland

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