The State of Writing on the Canadian Welfare State

SINCE 1979, THE MAJOR SYNTHESIS on the history of the welfare state in Canada has been Dennis Guest's The Emergence of Social Security in Canada. Revised twice, most recently in 1997, Guest's overview is a workmanlike presentation of the contexts that produced the major pieces of social legislation in Canada. If Guest deals well with the debates surrounding the emergence of various programs, he provides little sense of the range of alternatives that were available to policymakers, and why some were dismissed as too radical while others were viewed as too conservative. Though the third edition registers a great deal of concern about the erosion of the welfare state in the last two decades of the 20th century, there is a Whiggish quality to the lament, a sense that a social consensus was reached at different junctures that allowed some new program to see the light of day, and that most, if not all, Canadians benefited. But such a picture, which reflected the small literature on the welfare state when Guest first produced his book, no longer provides much of the flavour of the historical work that is now being published regarding the emergence and implementation of social programs in Canada. Marxists, feminists, critical theorists, postmodernists, and social activists outside the academy of various ideological

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