either. Ottawa’s future mayor Charlotte Whitton who, according to Dennis Guest, was Canada’s most influential voice on social welfare matters in the early thirties, was determined that any state aid to those in need be subjected to stringent rules, the most important of which was that those being helped,
must honestly and sincerely participate in the whole plan, which is the development of initiative and self-reliance and independence at the earliest possible date, and to such a degree and strength as to avoid future dependency.17
William Watson underlines that Whitton’s opposition to mothers’ pensions was entirely in line with the then reigning consensus.18 Those who thought about the welfare of the most vulnerable and how they could be helped most effectively were one in thinking that the problem of one-parent families was not one of income, but of character and values. Such welfare problems were best left in the hands of local agencies that could know each of their clients and support them in a way tailored to individual needs but always with the aim of ending dependence on charity or government aid at the earliest opportunity.
While the mythology of Canadian politics has it that the Great Depression put paid to classical liberalism in this country, the record shows quite the reverse. R.B. Bennett was on his electoral deathbed when he shifted half-heartedly to imitating the early stages of Roosevelt’s New Deal, much to the disgust of his predecessor as Tory leader, Arthur Meighen. His program was gutted by the courts and quietly shelved by Mackenzie King’s victorious Liberals, much to King’s satisfaction.19
This rejection of American-style interventionism wasn’t limited to a few plutocrats in private clubs in Montreal and Toronto and Anglos in Ottawa either. For example, the Quebec provincial government was firmly opposed to the New Deal style of politics. The Liberal premier of Quebec at the time, Louis-Alexandre Taschereau, scathingly called Roosevelt’s innovation “a socialistic venture bordering on communism.”20
Elite opinion did not see public spending as the solution to the country’s ills; rather it was the contrary. At the height of the Depression,21 at a time when the state in Canada was spending roughly a quarter of the share of national wealth that it spends today, the Globe and Mail could editorialize (under the headline “Crippled by Government”):
We have been indulging in a glorious spending spree much of the time since Confederation was established, mortgaging the future, signing notes for posterity to pay, and not at any time using such prudent measures as a well-ordered business would adopt to prepare in good years for the demands of the bad.
In 1938, the famous Rowell-Sirois Report22 was far from revelling in Canada’s great advance over other nations as a provider of social welfare services. On the contrary, the commissioners deplored our slowness in getting with the program of expanding the welfare state:
No person should be compelled by economic necessity to work or to live below a standard fixed by public policy. Canada for a number of reasons has been slower to accept this responsibility than have Great Britain, New Zealand or Australia.
While some, like James Struthers, have argued that the report served as a “blueprint for the development of the Canadian welfare state,”23 the predominant historical view is that the report and ideas were shelved and largely forgotten in the frenetic activity of post-war prosperity.24 Rowell-Sirois barely made a dent in Canada’s obstinate attachment to limited government and individual responsibility.
Not even the heady days of what was essentially central planning of the war effort in World War II could knock the Liberals, liberals, and Canadians off course. According to William Watson, “Following the New Deal we were probably the most laissez-faire country going. [Author Bruce] Hutchison regarded it as ‘the final tragedy of the war [that it] compelled a ministry devoted in theory to a minimum of government into complete and detailed control of the nation’s economy.’”25
Hutchison need not have worried; the tragedy was short lived. After a brief flirtation with the welfare state in the form of the Marsh Report, Canada’s equivalent of the Beveridge Report that led to the post-war creation of the British welfare state, Mackenzie King essentially reverted to laissez-faire form after the war, having seen off the threat of a briefly resurgent CCF with the Marsh diversion.
Mr. [Arthur] Meighen noted that the word “relief” had been dropped from the [Unemployment Relief] bill, replaced by “the more dignified term ‘assistance.’” The feeling had grown up that claims for “assistance” were in the nature of rights, he said. With each succession of strength to that state of mind, the problem of relief became greater. “If one part of the country can say, ‘We are going to live off the other part, we are going to cast all obligations away,’ do you think civilization can exist on that basis?” asked Meighen.
Arthur Meighen, quoted in the Globe and
Mail, May 18, 1938
Economic policy in Canada during this period was dominated by the redoubtable Clarence Decatur Howe, who during the war became known as the Minister for Everything because of his role in directing the war production effort. But once the war was over, Howe couldn’t get rid of his central planning powers fast enough.
The real Liberal plan, whether by accident or design, was Howe’s. It was based on optimism about the economy, and skepticism about the potentialities of planning. It would not be the economic abstractions of doctrinaire planners in Ottawa that would shape post-war Canada. That would be left to business’s self-interest, guided, prodded and shaped by incentives that businessmen could understand. Post-war Canada would be a free enterprise society.26
Louis St-Laurent, who succeeded Mackenzie King as prime minister in 1949, was said to regard American levels of welfare dependence with distaste and typical Canadian moral superiority; he resolutely but ultimately unsuccessfully fought Jack Pickersgill’s attempts to extend Canada’s meagre unemployment insurance program to Pickersgill’s fishermen constituents in Newfoundland on the grounds that it would not be actuarially sound to include seasonal workers such as these, and it would encourage others to seek unemployment benefits in similarly unsuitable circumstances. As Watson remarked, St-Laurent proved right on both counts.
As late as the federal election of 1957, St-Laurent was opining:
Any ideas of non-essential interference by the Government is repugnant to the Liberal Party. We believe that the private citizen must be left to his own initiative whenever possible and that if some help is required for the individual, that which is afforded by the national government must encourage rather than replace the help which the community or the province with its municipalities can give.27
At the same time as St-Laurent was underlining Liberals’ attachment to small government and individual liberty, so-called progressive forces, represented by figures like Keith Davey and Tom Kent, were pushing the party in a new direction, especially after the defeat of the Liberals by John Diefenbaker’s Tories in 1957. Even then, however, the old roots of the Liberal Party in the founding traditions of Canada were deep and resistance to the reformists was strong. Right after the 1957 election, for example, former Saskatchewan premier and federal Liberal finance minister Charles Dunning argued against the party adopting a social welfare policy agenda. He noted that the ever-increasing number of social services created
a tremendous and expensive machine to bring about redistribution of wealth by taxation, and lessening the responsibility on the part of the individual
