Net benefits
The social safety net as we know it took decades to evolve
Lynn Cunningham
1846 The Hamilton Ladies' Benevolent Society is formed with the purpose of creating an "efficient and judicious system of visitation and relief" in the city and to establish the Hamilton Orphan Asylum. The unlucky and destitute had no claim on any form of public assistance in the nascent country, even something like the punitive British Poor Laws. The 1834 version of these was particularly fixated on deterring "able-bodied paupers" from being "on the parish"-a concept that doesn't seem to have lost its appeal, judging from current Employment Insurance rules.
1932 Franklin Roosevelt is elected in the midst of what may soon come to be known as the First Great Depression on a promise of a "new deal for the American people." Among the measures that the deal encompasses is the creation of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the government's version of the Ladies' Benevolent Society, only on a rather larger scale. Between 1933 and 1935, FERA spends $3 billion in aid.
1940 Parliament passes the Unemployment Insurance Act, a little late for the quarter of the population that was jobless at the height of the Depression. While a definite step forward, the act only applies to just more than 40 per cent of workers, since those in lines deemed either low-risk or high-risk of unemployment are excluded. After several overhauls, eligibility was close to universal by 1971. Like the stock market, coverage has declined since another revamp in 1996: now we're back to roughly the same level as 1940.
1945 The first "baby bonus" cheques go into the mail: $5 a month for children under five up to $8 for teens aged 13 to 15. The money goes to the mothers, and for many this is the first money they have complete control over. Joey Smallwood and his pro-confederation forces sway Newfoundlanders to their side in 1948 by touting the prospect of Family Allowance cheques. Their political organ, The Confederate, declares, "Under Confederation never again will there be a hungry child in Newfoundland."
1968 Six years after Saskatchewan's pioneering implementation of universal health care, the rest of Canadians are covered by what detractors like to call "socialized medicine." One of those detractors, historian Michael Bliss, maintains that the notion of medicare being a defining aspect of national values is "intellectual hogwash" and that the men who took Vimy Ridge in the Great War (presumably this was a defining moment) "had no interest in the idea of the nanny state."
1981 Edmonton is the site of the country's first food bank, shortly followed by many more across the country, including Toronto's Daily Bread, arguably the largest. A quarter of a century later they, like the poor, are always with us. Shamefully, in Toronto, food banks have to serve close to 80,000 people a month, of whom a third are children and almost 50 per cent are disabled or have a serious illness.
