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Introduction A major purpose of this special issue on social welfare is both to honour and to examine the life and work of Leonard Marsh, the pioneer social researcher and reformer whose long and varied career spanned forty-three years from his arrival in Canada in 1930. The focus here is on his first period of social reform work, from 1930 to 1944, during which he produced his bestknown work, Social Security for Canada. When Leonard Marsh arrived in Canada at the beginning of the Depression the Canadian state had established only three social welfare programmes: Workers' Compensation, the Dominion Old Age Pension, and Mothers' Allowances. Workers' Compensation first appeared in Ontario in 1914 and was established in most of the other provinces by 1930. The Dominion Old Age Pension was passed into law in 1927; it provided a small pension to those seventy years or older, who satisfied extensive residence requirements. Because its cost was shared by the federal and provincial governments, each province had to agree to it individually. As a result, the pension was not available nationally until 1936. Mothers' Allowances, a provincial programme which was first put into place in 1916 in Manitoba and appeared in most provinces by 1930, provided support to deserted and widowed women with children who were "deserving" of the minimal funds the programme provided. Except in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick where a version of the old English Poor Law was still in force, there was no general statutory requirement that the State provide relief to the poor. Medicare had been debated principally in British Columbia, but in 1930 there were no medicare or hospitalization programmes; no unemployment insurance, or grant programmes to create employment or provide relief; no national industrial pension plan; no relief programmes for disabled persons; and no grants for post-secondary education. Why was social welfare so underdeveloped at this time in comparison with other industrial nations? The answer is a matter of some speculation, but in comparison to developments in other countries several factors appear important . Canada in 1930 was still relatively less developed industrially and its population was divided almost equally between urban and rural. The relatively smaller and more heterogeneous character of the working class meant that there were no mass-based socialist parties or major trade union federations linking large numbers of workers who could agitate for reform. A further factor of importance was the limited body of social research and numbers of social reformers who in other nations had served to bother the conscience of the ruling party and class. Amateurs of the energy and ingenuity of Booth, Rountree, and the Webbs in England, and LePlay in France were little to be seen in Canada and their activities were more limited. The work of Herbert Ames in Montreal, the young MacKenzie King in Toronto at the turn of the century, and J.S. Woodsworth, Thomas Adams, and Charlotte Whitton before and after the First World War provided an important foundation of social research. But the social reform organizations that had emerged Joumal of Canadian Studies Vol. 21, No. 2 (Ere 1986 Summer) 3 in numbers in the thirty-year period prior to the First World War appeared to decline in importance in the 1920s. In this context, Leonard Marsh became a primary contributor to the creation of an ideology of social reform and the reduction of insecurity through state social programmes. Through his work with the McGill Social Science Research Project, the League for Social Reconstruction, and the Advisory Committee on Reconstruction during the period 1930 to 1944, he combined the work of social researcher, social activist, and social reformer. In 1930 Marsh became Director of the McGill Social Science Research Project where he was to remain until 1941. As Allan Irving notes in his detailed examination of Marsh's work during this period, the project was the centre of the first major attempt to examine social conditions in Canada and to study the nature of social problems like unemployment, health and working conditions. Marsh's contribution as head of the McGill Social Science Research Project was to organize its ambitious publication programme, as well as to research and write Health and...

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