Question the welfare state
Does orange paper sound to you like one of those things, such as the NDP’s Halloweenish colours, that should have been thrown out at the end of the 1960s? Well, there’s one pile of it that apparently was that I wish we would fish out of the rubbish bin of history for a second look.
Specifically, the fabled 1973 Working Paper on Social Security in Canada. Dubbed the “Orange Paper” for its Austin Powers- eque cover, was a commendable attempt at a comprehensive review of Canada’s welfare state under then- minister of national health and welfare Marc Lalonde. It came with a surprisingly frank, surprisingly early admission that “Canadians increasingly have come to question the effectiveness of the nation’s social security programs.” And it enjoys a sort of mythical status in discussions of the subject. But try finding the thing itself.
It’s odd, given its iconic status and that you can find anything on the Internet, regardless of whether it’s true or not, that I finally had to unearth a battered paper copy in the archives of the University of Ottawa. While Canadians can be surprisingly cavalier about their heritage, I submit that the main reason it has vanished is that the questions it raised have proved impossible to answer, which is so awkward, it’s better to bury the whole business and slink off.
Unfortunately, as I had an annoying habit of reminding senior Reformers during my brief tenure as their social policy researcher more than two decades ago, questions thrown out the door have a way of climbing back in the window. As I also kept re- minding them, applying the words of U. S. political scientist Aaron Wildavsky about central planning to t he problem of a welfare state that relieves misery without promoting dependence or breaking the bank: “When people spend over 40 years looking for something in many countries and do not find it, there is a good chance it is not there.”
They threw those questions out the door with me attached. But I’m back and still asking: why, if the Canadian welfare state is just about the highest achievement of public policy in human history, does it do so little good at such high cost?
The Orange Paper itself only alludes indirectly and delicately to cost. Its various statements of principles, values and program design never mention such a square concept as sustainability. Nor does it express any doubt that the state can do anything it wants, given sufficient goodwill and expertise.
No amount of experience with government failure since, or the excessive cost of it, has dented anyone’s faith that the perfect set of social programs is: a) just around the corner; and b) already here. Nor has anyone been willing to discuss seriously the possibility that it’s unsustainable. But almost everything else about the paper has vanished like sideburns and bell- bottoms, including its sober effort to start from first principles.
There was a pretentious attempted redesign under Lloyd Axworthy during my unhappy tenure with the Reform party. But nobody remembers it today. Probably not even Axworthy. Certainly all the pomposity led nowhere except in a propeller plane to a Yellowknife motel with cigarette-burned sheets and a wired TV remote. But I digress.
Some blame the unaffordable failure of the welfare state on the alleged shredding of social programs by every incumbent from Brian Mulroney to Stephen Harper and even Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin. And not just from the left; Reformers even tried calling Martin the “Jack Kevorkian of Canadian health care.” But these are absurd calumnies.
Public policy in Canada since the 1960s has been in the hands of politicians and public servants who believe deeply in government social programs. Doubts have been carefully repressed or hooted off the stage at least since 1973. Yet the welfare state was in trouble from the outset, and has resisted all attempts to make it work since, even by generations of dedicated, compassionate people capable of writing blank cheques on the taxpayers’ account.
Don’t take my word for it. Ask the advocates, activists and politicians urgently demanding it be expanded. And yet having brought it in with much self- congratulatory fanfare, noticed it wasn’t working, ambitiously sought to perfect it and failed, people basically stopped talking about the dilemmas of program design and started tweaking them for electoral, rather than social, advantage, like expanding the Canada Pension Plan for comparatively prosperous seniors while ignoring the poor.
My MP’s latest “Householder” mailing chirpily hailed, “Budget 2016: Growing the Middle Class.” The middle class is not a tomato, “grow” does not mean “make bigger” and the Liberals famously don’t know what the middle class even is. But it votes. If that doesn’t tell us anything about the problematic dynamics of social programs, it sure tells us something about ourselves.
It’s past time to dust off this supposedly pivotal document and ask whether the reason its key questions have not been answered is that they can’t be.
IT WAS IN TROUBLE FROM THE OUTSET, AND HAS RESISTED ALL ATTEMPTS TO MAKE IT WORK.