Early History and Social Welfare

The Elizabethan Poor Law (1601) first introduced the concept of deserving poor in the context of social policy and the administration of relief. The poor laws in England called for a differentiation between categories of poor, a concept that was mirrored in the development of systems of poor relief in Canada.^{Footnote 4} Amendments to the Poor Law in 1662 established the Law of Settlement,^{Footnote 5} which restricted the mobility of the poor and downloaded, but divided, responsibility, in an attempt to address the fiscal imbalance faced by parishes. Canadian legislation required parish authorities to provide relief for those members who were too old, sick, or disabled to support themselves (the impotent poor), to provide work for the able-bodied unemployed, and to punish those deemed able to work but unwilling to do so.^{Footnote 6} The beginning of standardized procedures for poor relief in Canada also meant the beginning of systemic measures to stigmatize destitution and pauperism. Poor relief became more institutionalized and criminalized than ever before.^{Footnote 7}

Allan Moscovitch suggests that social welfare in Canada passed through roughly four phases of development, with the first period (1840–1890) being that of the establishment of the legislative and institutional precursors of welfare state policy as charitable organizations gradually began to obtain state funding.^{Footnote 8} The following period (1891–1940) constituted a transitional phase towards a welfare state as other forms of state-aided social welfare—such as health care and pensions—began to emerge.^{Footnote 9} This period also witnessed several significant social movements and certain foundational achievements for women, including the women’s suffrage movement, although women’s work was still a long way from being recognized or valued.^{Footnote 10} This phase was followed by what Moscovitch calls the interventionist phase (1941–1974), which marked a change in the direction of public welfare policy that would purportedly lead to the development of an actual welfare state in Canada.^{Footnote 11} The final phase (1975–present) has been recognized as the demise of the welfare state and the rise of neoliberalism.

The Postwar Period and Canada’s Welfare State

During World War II, federal money was available for daycare centres to enable mothers to work in crucial industries while men were at war.^{Footnote 12} On 20 July 1942, the federal government signed an order-in-council authorizing the Minister of Labour to assist provincial governments with the “cost of organizing and operating where necessary, day nurseries, crèches, recreation centres and like facilities” for the children of “mothers or foster mothers” who were “employed in war time industries in Canada.”^{Footnote 13} This service, however, was not accessible to all mothers, and childcare availability was concentrated in urban centres.^{Footnote 14} When the war was over, many women gave up their jobs and went back home to their domestic duties, while others were laid off in order to free up jobs for men returning to the civilian labour market. Those women who wanted to remain in the workforce would struggle to find childcare, despite the rise in “female jobs”^{Footnote 15} that resulted from women’s wartime participation and the challenge to prevailing assumptions about gender and work.^{Footnote 16} Access to childcare revealed itself as a temporary wartime service and did not lead to any major debate about equal employment. However, the postwar period did create conditions in which the socially structured behaviour of men and women with respect to employment began to change.^{Footnote 17} Unevenly, public policy began to reflect a Keynesian vision of the welfare state through active government intervention in the economy.

The Family Allowance Act (1945) was representative of the social objectives of the time, which aimed for a redistributive justice that recognized some social responsibility toward reproductive burdens and sought a greater measure of equality of opportunity for all children.^{Footnote 18} In 1946, the Ontario Day Nursery Act (DNA) proposed new provincial-municipal cost sharing of non-parental childcare. However, half-day kindergarten programs were favoured as an appropriate educational supplement to familial care,^{Footnote 19} and the DNA (1946) established that full-day childcare was intended only as a necessary service for the working poor.

The gendered separation of paid labour and domestic labour was shaped by the emergence of the family wage system in the nineteenth century.^{Footnote 20} The family wage system was a reflection of the single-breadwinner nuclear family norm. A postwar subcommittee to the Advisory Committee on Reconstruction, the Post-War Problems of Women, was formed, and it held that women should be allowed to make a clear choice to either return to the domestic sphere or continue in paid employment. Yet it also assumed that “the normal urge towards marriage, home and family life . . . can be relied upon to reduce largely the number of women now listed as gainfully employed.”^{Footnote 21} Women who worked outside the home were seen as taking jobs away from men, while women who worked inside the home were not valued as productive workers.^{Footnote 22} The market economy’s emphasis on the “productive” value of men’s work in the highly visible and salaried labour market obscured the significance of women’s work in the home, “work that is not salaried and deemed largely invisible.”^{Footnote 23}

By the early 1950s, municipal policies had turned childcare into a targeted program for only those most in need. Need was determined through means testing, casework, and investigation in a climate of restricted eligibility that ran counter to the new national emphasis on Keynesian economics and universal programs.^{Footnote 24} Federal funding for childcare was excluded from public policy as the reassertion of male economic primacy was marked by the dramatic changes in women’s employment opportunities immediately after the war.^{Footnote 25} Second-wave feminism focused on women’s role in the workforce, which was evidently brought about by women’s essential labour during the Second World War but did not translate into a recognition of reproductive or female productive labour.^{Footnote 26} Gender inequalities in the labour market continued to disadvantage women, who were subjected to lower wages for equal work, discriminatory hiring practices, and differential treatment in the workplace.^{Footnote 27}

Some laws were implemented in an attempt to counter direct, indirect, and systemic discrimination against women. However, they achieved limited success in rectifying occupational and professional segregation and the devaluation of women’s work. The Female Employees Fair Remuneration Act (1952), intended to protect women’s rights to equal pay for equal work, was passed in Ontario,^{Footnote 28} and in 1954, the Fair Accommodation Practices Act was enacted to prevent discrimination in services, facilities, and accommodations in Ontario’s public spaces.^{Footnote 29} However, anti-discrimination legislation was ineffective without mechanisms to ensure its implementation. The enforcement of the acts was said to be constrained by their conciliatory framework, and provincial officials reportedly interpreted the equal pay legislation quite narrowly.^{Footnote 30}

Social policy in the 1950s and 1960s continued to reflect the nuclear family norm, and access to childcare was limited to cases of “family failure”—“when the male breadwinner was absent or could not provide or when the mother was an inadequate caregiver.”^{Footnote 31} Childcare remained a residual service for those women who had to work, and, showing little progression from the 1601 model of poor relief, it was often organized by charities operating on a local scale.^{Footnote 32} Government aid remained available only for those who were deemed deserving. While sole-support mothers were often considered to be among the most deserving,^{Footnote 33} meagre public benefits did not significantly ameliorate their ongoing economic hardships, which included low earning capacity and sparse job opportunities. During this period, the conceptualization of deserving, and the resulting hardships faced by women, was preconditioned by the nuclear family norm and the devaluing of women’s reproductive and productive contributions.

This system of relief for sole-support mothers also worked as a form of double shaming, as women were told that they should engage in paid labour either to stay off the dole or to demonstrate that they were not idle and lazy; ironically, however, those who engaged in paid labour were criticized for doing so.^{Footnote 34} The existing legislation placed the onus on women to conform to the criteria of deserving, and it put primary responsibility for family maintenance on the individual rather than the state. Social assistance policies demonstrated explicit gender-role expectations in eligibility criteria, requiring a wife to be “abandoned and not responsible for the separation, to be morally impeccable as a mother, and to have made every effort to locate her absconding spouse prior to seeking help from the courts.”^{Footnote 35} Stigma also served as a form of social control, keeping recipients of social assistance subordinate.^{Footnote 36}

The CAP (1966) and the Erosion of the Welfare State

In 1966, the Canadian Assistance Plan Act (CAP) was introduced as a federal cost-sharing plan, which established general criteria for social assistance programs across Canada that were designed to remove “arbitrary eligibility restrictions.”^{Footnote 37} The CAP used federal funds to support and deliver provincial programs, and its passage was a defining moment in the history of the Canadian welfare state. The 1960s also witnessed the establishment of a national scheme of health insurance and several major studies on the marginalization of certain groups, including women. This new approach to social welfare and family well-being, however, would soon face tremendous challenges, and liberalization began before a national childcare initiative had a chance to emerge. The Keynesian economic model that had been adopted by many leading Western economies during the World War II era—and that informed social policy through this period—soon eroded, and preference was given to individualism, consumption, and minimal government intervention.^{Footnote 38} The postwar economic prosperity and expansion that had been the foundation for an active, redistributive, regulatory state began to fail, creating a fertile political economic climate within which liberal capitalism could gain popularity.^{Footnote 39} The Canadian welfare state was thus short-lived, as governments began to abandon the Keynesian objective of full employment in favour of an economic focus on balanced budgets and low interest rates.^{Footnote 40}

The assumption remained that most women were willing and able to care for their children at home, but many of these norms had begun to erode, and in any case, many families found they needed two salaries to make ends meet. The shift from a male-breadwinner to a dual-earner family began in the 1960s and accelerated through the 1970s and 1980s.^{Footnote 41} Feminist movements and liberal politics encouraged an emphasis on human rights and equality, while the high cost of living in urban areas increased the need for a secondary family income. Thus, the “mother outside the home was becoming more commonplace every day and women’s right to be recognized as equals was receiving more and more support.”^{Footnote 42}

The federal government began to retreat from cost-sharing initiatives beginning in 1977, with the block-funded Established Programs Financing (EPF).^{Footnote 43} The CAP was later replaced by the Canada Health and Social Transfer (CHST), introduced in 1996 and combined with EPF, which would further exacerbate the precarious situation for federal funding of childcare.^{Footnote 44} Liberal capitalism began to dominate political agendas, favouring autonomy and market reliance over notions of redistributive social justice.^{Footnote 45} This resistance by policy-making elites to any further major reforms such as childcare extended to other social programs.^{Footnote 46}

After the Royal Commission on the Status of Women first recommended the introduction of the National Daycare Act in 1970, the availability of affordable, high-quality childcare became a primary concern for the organized women’s movement.^{Footnote 47} In Toronto during the 1970s and 1980s, feminist activists moved to establish the foundations to address the rapidly growing need for universally accessible childcare.^{Footnote 48} The provision of childcare was highlighted in the televised party leaders’ debate on women’s issues during the 1984 federal election, when all three national political parties promised to improve childcare if their party formed the next government.^{Footnote 49} For a short period, increased political interest suggested that the lack of funding for childcare might be addressed in a cooperative and comprehensive manner. No new program materialized, however, as fiscal issues continued to take precedence over social services.

Although there is a perception of continuous growth in women’s labour force participation, it has been shown that the actual number of women in the labour force with children under the age of six has declined since 1971, and that women may well be responding to childcare problems by not having children.^{Footnote 50} While some progress has been made since the postwar era towards achieving gender equality, traditional gender roles continue to reinforce gender gaps in the labour force and to devalue reproductive work. Women remain the primary caregivers for their children and are primarily responsible for arranging alternative care;^{Footnote 51} thus, they are primarily affected by the lack of accessible childcare in Canada. While childcare should be considered a parental responsibility and not just a maternal one, the historical construction of gender roles has meant that women in particular have borne this burden, while the high value placed on productive work has reinforced the gendered devaluing of the reproductive economy.

Neoliberalism in Ontario and Low-Fee Childcare Policy in Quebec

The mid-1990s brought about a crucial change in social policy and welfare reform in Ontario under Premier Mike Harris’s Common Sense Revolution platform, which represented a dramatic shift towards a neoliberal justification and restructuring of welfare law.^{Footnote 52} Harris formed a majority government in 1995 and was re-elected in 1999, and he promoted a neoliberal ideology that focused on reducing the deficit by cutting spending and lowering income taxes. This inevitably included cuts to social services that were previously available. Between 1990 and 1993 under the New Democratic Party government, reliance on social assistance in Ontario had more than doubled,^{Footnote 53} which created further anxiety about government over-spending on social assistance and paved the way for the Harris cuts. With rising anxiety over the deficit, Ontario and other governments began to blame “welfare moms,” as social reproduction was no longer considered to be a public service. An emphasis was placed on creating “choices” to work and become self-sufficient,^{Footnote 54} without consideration of the childcare needs of women.

Ontario’s welfare replacement program, Ontario Works (OW), implemented by the Harris government, is a compulsory, work-first program that focuses on rapidly matching participants to available local jobs.^{Footnote 55} The Harris government’s welfare reform created a powerful shift in the public conception of undeserving, virtually eliminating any notion of deserving poor. This was achieved, in part, by a dramatic increase in state-implemented programs aimed at “ferreting out and punishing the undeserving poor.”^{Footnote 56} While welfare dependency became a form of “personality disorder, diagnosed more frequently in females,”^{Footnote 57} current subsidization policy for childcare was influenced by the suspicion attached to anyone needing public support.

Simultaneously, federal spending cuts made between 1989 and 1997 disproportionately affected the status of women, as billions of dollars in reduced funding translated into significantly less support for women. Many women were undertaking more unpaid care of the young, old, ill, and disabled,^{Footnote 58} and the availability of childcare to enable mothers to engage in paid work became increasingly precarious as social spending decreased. Between 1989 and 1993, the annual growth rate in the number of regulated spaces across Canada dropped from 13% to 3.5%.^{Footnote 59} Between 1990 and 1996, the federal government introduced a series of freezes and cuts to cash transfers to the provinces.^{Footnote 60} The restructuring of fiscal arrangements between federal and provincial governments, and the billions of dollars cut from transfer payments between 1995 and 1998, destabilized programs and services at the provincial and territorial levels, further eroding community programs, income supports, and public goods that women in Canada relied on.^{Footnote 61}

Consistent with this approach, most provincial governments were inclined to move toward a market-driven agenda in the provision of childcare, as seen in Ontario’s proposal for reducing the requirements for regulation.^{Footnote 62} At this time, all provinces and both territories, with the exception of Quebec, had subsidies for childcare fees for low-income parents who met the specified criteria.^{Footnote 63} The Quebec provincial government implemented a universal low-fee childcare policy, which was enlarged over the years to become a truly universal childcare program. In contrast to the Quebec system, fee subsidization in Ontario was limited by budget constraints that did not meet the childcare needs of local families. While funding and subsidies were being reduced or frozen in Ontario, infant daycare fees were rising from an average of $599 per month in 1989 to $1109 per month in 1993.^{Footnote 64} During this period, fees increased, average family incomes decreased, fee subsidies became harder to obtain, and subsidies failed to keep pace with fee increases.^{Footnote 65} The obvious result was a decrease in the affordability of regulated childcare.

Quebec is, in some ways, an outlier among Canada’s ten provinces and three territories, in that it provides substantially more funding for childcare than the rest of Canada.^{Footnote 66} In 1997, the Quebec government announced a number of family policy measures as part of the government’s “fight against poverty, [and to support] equal opportunity, the development of the social market economy, transition from welfare to the workforce and increased support to working parents.”^{Footnote 67} When the provincial Parti québecois (PQ) government initially introduced the $5 per day childcare program (increased to $7 by the provincial Liberal government that followed), it intended to expand non-profit centers and family childcare homes while phasing out for-profit providers.^{Footnote 68} However, pushback from for-profit operators led to the PQ government lifting the moratorium on for-profit providers in 2002 to expand supply, and the Liberal government, once elected in 2003, continued to allow the expansion of for-profits.^{Footnote 69} However, the percentage of non-profit childcare in Quebec (86%) remains high compared with other provinces and territories as well as with the national average (75%).^{Footnote 70}

The Quebec government’s decision to fund full-day kindergarten for children aged five and to provide fixed-fee childcare for all children up to age four (regardless of maternal labour force participation)^{Footnote 71} went against the trend in the rest of Canada, which preferred the intrusive micromanagement of poor families through subsidization. Rationales for Early Childhood Education (ECE) programs in social democratic and continental European welfare regimes are shaped at least partly by considerations of children’s rights, women’s equality, and social inclusion.^{Footnote 72} A neoliberal conception of early learning tends to treat it as a social investment intended to generate economic returns and human capital benefits.^{Footnote 73} The effects of the Quebec policy are interpreted in one study as largely beneficial in terms of labour force participation of mothers with young children.^{Footnote 74} A lack of strong governance or regulation, however, has yielded childcare of mixed quality in Quebec.^{Footnote 75} Economic evaluations of ECE programs have shown that the benefits of public spending exceed the costs; however, gains are not realized or not as great if the ECE is of poor quality.^{Footnote 76} While the Quebec childcare system does not provide a flawless example of universal childcare, it demonstrates a stark contrast in political ideology when compared with the social policy reform measures implemented in Ontario during the same time period.

The promotion of individual responsibility and private self-reliance that underpins Ontario’s reformed welfare system is typical of neoliberal policy initiatives. A report to taxpayers on welfare reform stated that “doing nothing on welfare is no longer an option . . . Participation [in Ontario Works] is mandatory for all able-bodied people, including sole-support parents with school-aged children.”^{Footnote 77} Defining work as paid employment means that women who do unpaid work can no longer be dependent on the state. Work is strictly confined to the private market, and mother work no longer receives “even the tacit recognition that it was once accorded by Keynesian states.”^{Footnote 78} Ontario Works explicitly reinforced this gendered devaluing of women’s work by encouraging the idea that even sole-support mothers are not worthy of social assistance, the underlying assumption being that reproductive work is not economically valuable.

The Harris government underscored this point by refining and expanding the “spouse in the house” rule so that welfare recipients would lose their benefits as soon as they started living with someone of the opposite sex who earned an income. Despite the apparent contradiction with family law, which requires three years of cohabitation before recognizing a common-law relationship, this policy was maintained on the grounds that “no one deserves higher benefits just because they are not married.”^{Footnote 79} The redefinition of spouse was intended not to promote equality among diverse types of families but, rather, to expand individual responsibility and ration the provision of social assistance in order to avoid social responsibility for the reproductive work of women.

The Surplus Era

The erosion of social responsibility and the “institutional attack on the social”^{Footnote 80} has fundamentally changed the acceptance of the deserving mother on welfare, who was once considered a public servant of sorts. Neoliberal social policy has reshaped this understanding so that those who receive social assistance are stigmatized for doing so. A review of federal budgets and public accounts reveals that the deep cuts to spending between 1995 and 1998 balanced the books years ahead of schedule,^{Footnote 81} raising doubts as to whether the severity of the cuts was necessary.^{Footnote 82} Despite the subsequent surplus era, the federal government did not attempt to redress the damage done during the deficit era, nor did it advance the promised agenda for action to improve the status of women in 1995.^{Footnote 83}

Instead of addressing the repercussions that resulted from cuts to social spending, the federal government focused surplus spending on providing additional tax breaks (most of which went to higher-income earners and large corporations), ^{Footnote 84} and minimal resources were transferred to the provinces for social services such as childcare. The single largest initiative to alleviate the effects of poverty during this period was the increase in the Canada Child Tax Benefit, which represented only 10% of the total cost of the federal tax reform agenda. Despite this infusion of funds, Canada’s poorest families did not benefit, because “the program permits provinces and territories to ‘claw back’ funds from those on social assistance.”^{Footnote 85} Following the Harris cuts, both federal and Ontario investment in social programs that could advance the economic security of women and their families was deliberately shrunk to levels not seen in half a century.^{Footnote 86} The neoliberal agenda to “right-size” government, which shrank federal program spending by 4% of the GDP in three short years and now holds constant this transformation, is unprecedented among advanced industrialized nations.^{Footnote 87}

The Neoliberal Present Moment

A small number of tax measures have been introduced since 1998 to address parenting issues, such as tax credits for caregivers and increased tax deductions for expenses on child care. Unfortunately, these measures have not helped women who have no taxable income, or who cannot afford to pay for childcare and in turn receive a tax deduction. Further, while tax measures do little to promote the development of regulated childcare services—a factor that is essential for affordable accessible childcare—they allow the government to maintain its commitment to “small government.”

In the 2006 budget, the newly elected Conservative federal government introduced a new “choice in child care” allowance that gives parents with children under the age of six a benefit of $1200 per year. All parents with children under the age of six are entitled to this $100-per-month allowance, whether or not they use childcare services. This plan replaced the Liberal finance minister Paul Martin’s 2005 budget plan, which committed $5 billion over five years to enhancing and expanding early learning and childcare in collaboration with provinces and territories, and which was never implemented because the Liberals lost the 2006 election.

Despite popular opposition to the neoliberal approach, conservative governments have continued to supersede proposals for universal childcare services with tax breaks for parents, grants to for-profit centres, and business incentives to create workplace childcare. When the Liberals lost the election in January 2006, the Harper government, despite protests from the provinces and from childcare advocates, eliminated the bilateral agreements on February 6, 2006 in its first act of power.^{Footnote 88} The foundations program became just another not-quite successful attempt in a long history of similar failed childcare initiatives.

In Canada, the male breadwinner family norm that underpinned the postwar regime is no longer operative, as is evident in the rising incidence of single parenthood and the dramatic increase in women’s rates of participation in the labour force.^{Footnote 89} Yet the national need for childcare services continues to be met with calls for family and market reliance, and policy makers continue to take “an ostrich-like approach, burying their heads in the sand while ignoring the developing crisis around us.”^{Footnote 90} Unfortunately, the neoliberal commitment to small government may be antithetical to the interests of women, particularly mothers, who are primarily responsible for the social reproduction of society. The neoliberal agenda necessarily devalues and disadvantages women through its narrowing conception of deserving, and this despite the social need for the economic security of mothers.