The watershed in this century's politics of welfare is the transformation in income security away from charitable towards governmental support. But in the Canadian case its origins still remain obscure. Although the shift is often pinpointed as occurring during and after World War II, the decisive battles over the propriety of a more active state role were fought between 1914 and 1939. The aims of this study are to demonstrate their significance in pioneering acceptance of the principle of social collectivism, and to shed light on the range of forces shaping the complex process of social policymaking. The case-study method is used to investigate the legacy of interwar welfare politics, viz., the development of emergency and statutory aid for select groups among the very poor. This technique has the advantage of capturing the historical dimension of the policymaking process, and filling the much-needed gaps in Canadian welfare research. Moreover, it provides an opportunity to test propositions concerning social policy innovations and developments. The existing literature identifies several factors as important: the nature of the economy, the cultural context, the structure of political institutions, and four sets of participants - militant workers, interest groups, politicians and bureaucrats. The analysis focuses upon the interaction between these determinants in shaping all the major interwar policy decisions in means-tested income maintenance. The evidence reveals that a myriad of forces shaped the origins of the Canadian welfare state, but their influence varied. Socio-economic change played a mediating role by creating the social problems requiring resolution, and generating the revenues to finance innovations. The general framework of ideas and the institutional structure also exerted a mainly indirect impact, with the former defining the values and the latter guiding the behaviour of the participants. In contrast, all the active political forces played the pivotal role of interpreting the problems and deciding the timing and content of the policy decisions. Interest group power overshadowed working-class militancy as the effective societal spur, with farmers rather than businessmen qualifying as the arch opponents of the collectivist cause. Inside government, elected, not appointed, officials dominated the social policymaking process. / Arts, Faculty of / Political Science, Department of / Graduate

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This thesis attempts to develop our understanding of the ultimate interprovincial rupture at the signing of the Social Union Framework Agreement (the SUFA) on February 4, 1999. Questioning the widely accepted "money talk" explanation, which argues that increased federal transfers motivated the ROC provinces to go along with the federal government at the expense of an interprovincial common front with Quebec, this thesis suggests analyzing the dynamics of the SUFA negotiation process with special attention to the visions of Canadian federalism to which the ROC provinces, Quebec, and the federal government had subscribed respectively. This analysis demonstrates that the final split between the ROC provinces and Quebec resulted from their discord over the question whether or not Canada is a mononational federation or a multinational federation.

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