Canada

THROUGHOUT THE DECADE of the 1990s the United Nations Human Development Index regularly ranked Canada first in its quality of life survey. While this ranking has slipped slightly in recent years, Canada continues to be presented as one of the most affluent nations in the developed world.

This image, combined with Canada's vast natural resources, strong manufacturing sector, growing technological industries, and history of strong social policies, suggests that Canada provides a secure “safety net” to protect its citizens from the consequences of poverty. Despite this assumption, Canada's poverty rate remains inordinately high. According to a 1996 United Nations Children's Fund report, the poverty rate for families with children in Canada was the second highest of 18 industrialized nations, double the poverty rate of the Netherlands and six times higher than that of Finland or Sweden.

While these figures provide a shocking counterpoint to Canada's affluent image, conditions are worse for Canada's indigenous peoples, who have been isolated in remote communities and excluded from resource and industrial development. Consequently, despite its legacy of social security and welfare reform following World War II, the Canadian state has failed to effectively address poverty as a social issue. Rather than strengthen the state's role, policy changes since the 1980s have abandoned a universal approach and have increasingly returned social services in Canada to a “residual” model relying on private charity, a transition that drew effectively on the antiwelfare backlash throughout the 1990s and which has resurrected older social attitudes separating the “deserving” from the “undeserving” poor.

Well into the 20th century in Canada, the state had little direct role in providing for social welfare. The resistance to government involvement concerning social welfare reflected the socioeconomic structure of Canada during the mid-19th century. In a predominantly rural nation whose economy was driven by both the agricultural and resources sectors, it was assumed that anyone who was capable of working could find gainful employment and that charity would naturally account for the deserving poor.

Consequently poverty relief was based on a residual model where destitute individuals were expected to turn to their families, church, and philanthropic organizations, and only subsequently municipal or provincial governments, for relief. The residual system placed the emphasis on family and the local community to determine the level at which the indigent would be supported, and allowed for a simplistic separation at the community level between the deserving and undeserving poor. Essentially, outside of direct family-based charity, only those individuals whom the community deemed to deserve it would receive support. The elderly, widows with small children, the blind and deaf, and men crippled through work-related injuries could expect to receive community support.

Others, who were characterized as simply unwilling to work, could not find support. The underlying assumption behind this restrictive measure was the belief that charity inevitably produced dependency. Consequently, following practices that dated back to the Elizabethan Poor Laws, relief payments were customarily kept below the lowest level of wages that could be earned in the community and, to further discourage dependence, often required able-bodied recipients to perform some community service (cutting logs, breaking rocks, or sweeping the streets). These payments were usually made in kind (necessary goods and supplies), as it was generally assumed that individuals who were incapable of supporting themselves could not effectively manage cash relief payments.

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