This paper examines British Columbia's residency requirement
on social assistance implemented by the NDP government on December
1, 1995. The policy created a three-month waiting period for
newcomers to the province before they could apply for social
assistance. Because it violated ;the Canada Assistance Plan (CAP),
the residency requirement put the BC government at risk of losing,
through federal penalty, many millions of dollars more than the
intended savings. To explain the BC government's decision-making,
I use a rational choice nested games approach.
I argue that the residency requirement policy produced two
sets of interactions in two separate policy arenas. In the
principal arena, the British Columbia Social Services Ministry
negotiated with the federal Department of Human Resources
Development (HRD). The negotiations centred on the possibility of
federal concessions in- exchange for BC withdrawing the residency
requirement. In the secondary arena, the federal Department of
Finance was consulting with its provincial counterparts regarding
the' long-term funding formula for the Canada Health and Social
Transfer (CHST) set to replace CAP on April 1, 1996. Social
Services interacted with the federal Department of Finance to
influence the outcome of the funding decision.
I propose that the BC government risked minimal resources in
the primary arena to gain substantially higher payoffs from the
CHST funding formula. The government linked these two arenas
through a 'trade-off strategy that allowed them to apply the
political pressure and communication generated by the residency
requirement and negotiations with HRD to the Finance arena. This enabled them to. increase the possibility of a favourable payoff in
that arena. I find that the rational, choice approach produces an
explanation that reflected the government's actual decision-making
more closely than other theoretical approaches.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/4706 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Olmstead, Amy D. K. |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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