A Swedish Welfare State in North America? The Creation and Expansion of the Saskatchewan Welfare State, 1944–1982

The rise and transformation of the welfare state has been at the center of many scholarly debates. As a result of its generous welfare state, Sweden is often the key case, if not the benchmark, in comparative analysis.¹ This has influenced theory on the growth of the welfare state. Multiple explanations feature causal relationships inspired by Sweden where countries are assessed on their ability to develop comparable independent variables and achieve similar outcomes. For example, with the Swedish experience in mind, the power resource school argues that the road to a generous welfare state requires a strong union/social democratic nexus.² Unsurprisingly within these debates, critiques have stressed that comparative analyses are Swedocentric.³

Very few cases possess the two core and complementary conditions deemed necessary for the development of Sweden’s generous welfare state: (1) the presence of a hegemonic social democratic party with strong union support, as theorized by the power resource theory (PRT);⁴ and (2) a bureaucracy sympathetic to social democratic goals.⁵ Both conditions are found in the case of the western Canadian province of Saskatchewan.

Saskatchewan represents a crucial case à la Eckstein featuring a dominant social democratic party and a bureaucracy tailor made to implement its agenda.⁶ The Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) and its successor, the New Democratic Party (NDP),⁷ ruled Saskatchewan for all but seven years during the period from 1944 to 1982, when the welfare state started to expand.⁸ The CCF also created a bureaucratic apparatus to implement its ideas; it actually went further than Sweden, which targeted departments deemed important to establish core demands from union supporters,⁹ by creating a host of institutions at the executive level to facilitate planning. In line with theoretical expectations originating from the PRT and the bureaucratic thesis, these two attributes should produce the most generous welfare state in Canada, since no other provinces benefited from similar conditions. The presence of both Swedish conditions actually transformed Saskatchewan: originally a very poor rural province with limited administrative capacities, and by 1982 it had become a social innovator and ranked first on many social indicators. The development of its public administration also had a lasting influence on other provinces and the federal government. Surprisingly, however, Saskatchewan did not perform well with such important social indicators as income equality and social spending.

Demonstrating that Saskatchewan succeeded partially to put in place a highly generous welfare state with a Swedish recipe is appealing for three key reasons. First, the comparative welfare state literature (CWS) often ranks Canada and the United States near or at the bottom of rankings regardless of how one conceptualizes and measures welfare state efforts.¹⁰ Studying an exceptional case like Saskatchewan can help tease out which elements are specific (or not) to Sweden when assessing welfare state generosity and which ones have broader application. Second, CWS often ignores or underestimates the importance of federalism when analyzing cases like Canada and the United States; when it does, federalism is used mostly to explain policy development at the federal level with regional units representing an obstacle to overcome for federal authorities.¹¹ A noticeable exception is the emerging literature linking regional nationalist parties and social policy.¹² Third, the election of the CCF in 1944, the first socialist government in North America, gathered substantial interest among academics.¹³ Lipset’s study of Saskatchewan formed the basis of his reflections on “American exceptionalism” when it comes to the absence of a strong left-wing party in the United States.¹⁴ At the time, there was strong skepticism that Saskatchewan could alter the patronage legacy of the Liberal Party and develop a generous welfare state.

This article is divided into four sections. The first presents the complementary Swedish conditions (PRT and the bureaucratic thesis) associated with the creation of generous welfare states. The second discusses the methodology employed to test these conditions on the Saskatchewan case within the context of Canadian federalism. This is followed by an empirical analysis focused on four elements: program characteristics, social spending...