From Rights to Needs: A History of Family Allowances in Canada (review)

As students of public policy are well aware, an examination of the birth, life, and eventual demise of a major universal social program can be a complex, sometimes infuriating and often fascinating journey for the social science researcher. This can be compounded by a need to cover a wide expanse of time if that policy is longstanding, a variety of governments charged with overseeing and sometimes altering said policy, and the shifting complexities of core Canadian public policy institutions (in this case federalism). It is under these daunting circumstances that historian Raymond Blake conducts the first full-length book analysis of the origins and history of family allowances in Canada. The good news here is that he is very successful in telling this complicated policy story and challenging previous analyses that he charges as being too singular in focus.

The success of this book is due in large part to the extensive use of archival source materials to chronicle family allowance policy from its first iterations in the late 1920s up to and beyond its phase-out in 1992. The reader is given a virtual bird’s-eye view of the interplay between different political actors including successive prime ministers from Mackenzie King through to Mulroney, their opposition foes in the House of Commons, and the various social health and welfare ministers at the federal and sometimes provincial levels who had a hand in shaping the path of family allowances over the years. This rich detail goes a long way to proving Blake’s main thesis that “social policy making in Canada is a complex process and it emanates from a variety of forces” as opposed to being “the result of a single factor” or “single interest group” (p. 277).

The book illustrates how family allowances largely began as a postwar unity project responding to internal and international pressures for proactive postwar social security policy. Under these circumstances, the federal government used its national spending powers to establish the first universal program in the country, despite opposition suggesting it was encroaching on provincial jurisdiction. Identification of universal family allowances as a “citizenship right” remained strong for a number of decades until political crises from first the intergovernmental/constitutional realm challenged the federal government on the issue of jurisdiction and then finally neo-liberalism replaced postwar Keynesianism as the economic policy of choice among Western governments. Thus successive Canadian regimes began to apply a “needs test” to family allowances, eroding the universality of the program and eventually leading to its demise under the Mulroney Conservatives in the early 1990s.

The archival documentation is very detailed for the earlier two-thirds of the book and gets a bit thinner by the time we get to the 1980s and 1990s as the author accelerates the time frame under analysis. In so doing, he overlooks a few key political points that perhaps would have further illuminated the reasons why the Canadian government and the public respectively were so willing to give up on family allowances with “little more than a whimper” (p. 284). In particular, there is not much exploration of the role of health care as the “new universal citizenship” social program of choice among Canadians (likely usurping the earlier role of family allowances in this vein), particularly after the adoption of the Canada Health Act in 1984. As well, while Blake rightly notes the change in family policy from family allowances to child tax benefits and credits in the 1980s and 1990s, he misses the Conservative government’s universal child-care discussions culminating in the 1988 introduction of Bill C-144 (which later died on the order paper). This suggests that more “politics” was going on surrounding the demise of family allowance. It also would have been germane to have the study consider the reintroduction of “family allowances” in everything but name alone under the current Conservative government in 2006 with the Universal Child Care Benefit (UCCB). Many social policy analysts have identified the UCCB...