Liberal social programs canada

Regional support programs foster inclusion and healthy living for people with disabilities. These programs help participants work, volunteer, exercise and improve their daily living skills. Community agencies also provide group homes, family homes and specialized residences for those in need of extra support. Refugees are immigrants who have been forced to leave their country due to war or persecution. The Immigration Loans Program provides financial loans to refugees selected for resettlement.

The federal government offers special benefits to current and former members of the Canadian Armed Forces and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. These programs include income support, compensation for injury or illness, prisoner-of-war benefits, death benefits and emergency funds. See Department of Veterans Affairs. Government of Canada Income Assistance. Indigenous Services Canada Social programs. Health Canada.

Search The Canadian Encyclopedia. Remember me. I forgot my password. Why sign up? Create Account. Suggest an Edit. Enter your suggested edit s to this article in the form field below. Accessed 14 January Social Programs in Canada.

In The Canadian Encyclopedia. Historica Canada. Article published October 01, ; Last Edited August 07, The Canadian Encyclopedia. Thank you for your submission Our team will be reviewing your submission and get back to you with any further questions. Thanks for contributing to The Canadian Encyclopedia. Article by Katrine Raymond. Income Assistance Programs Employment Insurance Benefits The Employment Insurance EI program provides temporary financial support to citizens in case of unexpected job loss, illness or injury.

Did you know? The CERB provided financial support to workers who had stopped working due to the pandemic. Some people who were eligible for EI or who had recently used up their EI benefits also qualified. The government created a similar benefit — the Canada Emergency Student Benefit — for students who were unable to find work. Granted, expectations for Ignatieff, who turns 64 next month, could hardly have been lower. Since winning the Liberal leadership uncontested in December , he has failed to connect with Canadians.

In its latest poll, the Ipsos-Reid firm asked Canadians who would make the best prime minister: 49 percent chose Harper, 34 percent picked Jack Layton leader of the socialist New Democratic Party , and only 17 percent named Ignatieff.

Conservative attack ads portray Ignatieff, who spent three decades living abroad, as a snobbish dilettante whose commitment to Canada runs no deeper than his desire to become prime minister. But Ignatieff scored points in the first week of the campaign by emphasizing policies, meeting voters in unscripted events and answering as many questions as reporters and citizens could throw at him.

Social welfare in Canada has passed through roughly four phases of development that correspond to the country's economic, political and domestic development. In the early phase of capitalist development, the state's response to poverty and disease was largely regulatory in nature. Social welfare, considered a local and private concern, consisted of the care of the mentally ill and of disabled and neglected children see Child Welfare , and the jailing of lawbreakers.

After Confederation , the provision of social welfare continued to be irregular and piecemeal, depending in part on the philanthropic concerns of the upper class — in particular of those women who viewed charitable activities as an extension of their maternal roles and as an acceptable undertaking in society. The first extensive debate on child welfare was led by J.

It was the beginnings of the child-saving movement in Canada. A similar approach was taken up by other provinces. Reform of this system was based on the notion that the family was the basis of economic security. The institutionalization of the family and the social reproduction of labour began with laws to enforce alimony, to regulate matrimonial property and marriage, and to limit divorce and contraception.

This was expanded with limits on hours of work for women and children. Compulsory education and public health regulations were developed primarily in response to the spread of disease and fears of social unrest. Provincial governments began to support charitable institutions with regular grants. In Ontario , the first evidence of permanent support was in the form of the Charity Aid Act of which also called for the regulation of charities.

Although the main concern of the Canadian state remained the promotion of profitable private economic development, the state also came to be associated with providing a supply of appropriately skilled labour through the regulation of capital and labour, the maintenance of the family, and the recruitment of more immigrants.

This was largely achieved by the use of state mechanisms to maintain stability in the economy and the family, and also through the signing of treaties with Aboriginal people to further free up land for European settlement. During the same period, charity workers and organizations began to consolidate and to battle ideologically, generally unsuccessfully, for control of social welfare. The appearance of laws compelling children to attend school and giving public authorities power to make decisions for "neglected" children was part of a growing number of state interventions to regulate social welfare.

The first industrial relations law, the Industrial Disputes Investigation Act , was passed in , allowing the state to intervene in relations between labour and capital.

The first compulsory contributory social insurance law in Canada, the Workmen's Compensation Act , was passed in Ontario in During the First World War , two important forces speeded the development of an interventionist welfare state: demands for the support of injured soldiers and for the support of the families left behind.

Both led to a Dominion scheme of pensions and rehabilitation and, in Manitoba , to the first mothers' allowances legislation in Several provinces followed with mothers' allowance legislation of their own, but it was restricted to providing minimal support to deserted and widowed women.

By war's end, after the incorporation of many thousands of women workers into the wartime labour force, they were encouraged to step aside to provide employment for male heads of households. The postwar era also ushered in the first and brief federal scheme to encourage the construction of housing, but it lasted only from to Despite considerable debate during the s about whether to establish permanent unemployment, relief and pension schemes, the only result was the passage of the old-age pension law, and this was in part the result of the efforts of J.

Woodsworth and a small group of Independent Labour members of Parliament. Under the law, the federal government shared the cost of provincially administered and means-tested pensions for destitute persons over the age of It was a modest beginning. The law explicitly excluded Aboriginal people.

It was the trauma of the Great Depression that forced a change in social philosophy and state intervention. In , with hundreds of thousands of Canadians unemployed, the newly elected Conservative government under R. Bennett legislated Dominion Unemployment Relief, which provided the provinces with grants to help provide relief.

The government then opened unemployment relief camps run by the Department of National Defence , often in isolated locales, to give work at minimal wages to single unemployed men, and to keep them away from urban areas. By the Conservative Party's stern resistance to social reform had been softened in the face of an economic catastrophe, with up to a quarter of the workforce believed to be unemployed.

Continuing pressure from trade unions, and from relief camp workers and from social reformers for jobs, better wages and unemployment insurance , led Bennett to abandon reliance on the so-called natural "restorative" powers of capitalism in favour of social reform in Bennett's New Deal.

This was introduced in a series of radio talks in January Later that same year, the Dominion Housing Act became the first permanent law for housing assistance. Although the provinces objected on constitutional grounds to the New Deal's labour and social insurance reforms -- and the courts and the British Privy Council subsequently determined that the federal government did not have the power to pass such legislation -- the need for social reform was affirmed in the Report of the Royal Commission on Dominion-Provincial Relations, created to examine the constitutional and social questions posed by the Depression.

The Report recommended that the federal government take responsibility for employment and the employable unemployed, and the provinces for social services and for those people deemed to be unemployable, e. The federal Unemployment Insurance Act was passed in , after agreement with the provinces.

A constitutional amendment to the British North America Act was necessary to give the federal government authority for unemployment insurance. The Tax Rental Agreements, arrived at with the provinces after protracted negotiations early in wartime, gave the federal government the right to collect income and corporate taxes for the duration of the war, a right it has retained to the present.

This phase marks the arrival of what is commonly called the welfare state. By the beginning of the Second World War , the economic and political lessons of the Depression had been well learned. Canadians increasingly accepted an expanded role of the state in economic and social life during the war, and expected this to continue after the war. To facilitate Canadian involvement in the war, Ottawa created a wide range of measures including the construction of housing, controls on rents, prices, wages and materials, the regulation of industrial relations, veterans pensions, land settlement, rehabilitation and education, day nurseries and the recruitment of women into the paid workforce in large numbers.

A wartime study in Britain by William Beveridge, released in December , provided the promise of postwar employment and economic security. In the same month the federal government commissioned a report that offered similar promises for Canada — the Report on Social Security, prepared by Leonard Marsh and released in March The government largely ignored this and other wartime reports. Instead, Mackenzie King settled on a political compromise.

After re-election in , the Mackenzie King government moved to dismantle much of the apparatus of state intervention constructed during the war. The White Paper on Employment, which appeared the same year, expressed the government's belief in the approach to economic management which followed from the work of the economist J. The economy would be managed to produce full employment by providing assistance to private enterprise rather than by engaging directly in economic activity — or by providing further social welfare measures.

Still, at the Dominion-Provincial Conference that year, the King government presented the Green Book proposals, which included social assistance and hospital insurance measures, in order to gain concessions from the provinces on income and corporation taxes. The provinces did not agree, and the proposals were not subsequently revived until more than 10 years later.

Still, pressures for social reform continued. Under the postwar government of Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent , public housing, federal hospital grants and assistance programs for disabled and blind persons were initiated. A trade union campaign for changes in pensions led to the creation of universal old-age pensions for those over 70, and means-tested old-age security for those between 65 and 70 in — The new legislation required agreement from the provinces for a constitutional amendment.

For the first time, cash benefits were extended to Aboriginal people. An amendment to the Indian Act in extended the application of provincial social welfare legislation to Aboriginal people.

One result was the disastrous program initiated in several of the provinces to take Aboriginal children into the care of the state, and to adopt many out to non-Aboriginal parents. The first permanent program for the funding of social assistance, the Unemployment Assistance Act , was put into place in after pressures from private charities and the provinces, which could no longer support the cost of relief at a time of increased unemployment.

During this period, permanent programs for the funding of hospitalization, higher education and vocational rehabilitation were introduced or extended. The popularity of medicare led Diefenbaker to appoint Saskatchewan judge Emmett Hall to head a Royal Commission on Health Services to investigate the possibility of a national medical insurance program. In , Hall recommended a national program based on the Saskatchewan model.

The Liberal Party was returned as a reform-oriented government under Prime Minister Lester Pearson in , on a cyclical economic upsurge. It also made federal cost-sharing available for a range of social services including day care; and Medicare — which established a national system of personal health insurance administered by the provinces.

To these were added the Guaranteed Income Supplement, and the gradual reduction over the subsequent five years of the age of receipt of the universal pension to the age of Also added were an increase in post-secondary education funding, and the consolidation of hospital, Medicare and post-secondary education funding in the Established Programs Financing Act , , see Intergovernmental Finance.

The National Housing Act was also amended in to provide loans on favourable terms to provincial housing corporations, clearing the way for more public housing. In the same year, the Indian ration system was transformed into a parallel system of Aboriginal social assistance, based on provincial legislation in each of the provinces. Only Ontario had an agreement, signed in , to cover per cent of on-reserve costs of social assistance and services.

The point system was also introduced into the Immigration Act during the s, paving the way for a substantial increase in immigration, particularly from Asia and the Caribbean.