Protection sociale et federalisme dans le miroir de l'Amerique du Nord (review)

Reviewed by: Protection sociale et fédéralisme dans le miroir de l'Amérique du Nord Dominique Marshall Protection sociale et fédéralisme dans le miroir de l'Amérique du Nord. Bruno Théret. New York : P.I.E.-Peter Lang/PUM, 2002. Pp. 496, illus. b&w. €31.60 In a search of fresh solutions to the future of the institutions of the European Community, the French economist Bruno Théret has brought depth, clarity, dynamic, and a wider meaning to the history of the Canadian welfare state. Often stereotyped and marginalized in discussions of North American federalism, the forms of the Canadian state, he argues, present a 'case of reference' (85). It forces European debates outside the questions of centralization and decentralization, towards more openness and imagination. Théret concentrates his attention on welfare measures, not as a mere case of intergovernmental relations, but as the main locus of Canadian federal politics. The 'mirror' in the title refers to the reverse ways by which European and Canadian political formations have come to be similar. Théret observes [End Page 558] that, from opposite directions, both have evolved towards 'unseen forms of federalism, intergovernmental, asymmetrical and where social policies occupy a central place' (37). What interests him is the logic of federations as they innovate, their 'policy patterns,' and what he calls their anthropology. He opposes these cultural dimensions to the hierarchies and the configurations favoured by static typologies (83), and he confers upon them an autonomy that materialist analyses deny. This approach supposes an awareness of the constant reconstruction of institutions, of their 'historical depth' (53), and of the political values that inform their making. The author insists on the study of the provincial level of politics, often neglected in European assessments, that 'appears to be the pivot of the Canadian welfare state' (111). Théret's broad understanding of social policies includes the 'social role of education and the economy' (87). To chart the whole of his subject, and to identify objects of comparison, the economist has put together a hundred tables and graphs. These documents, most of them original, are intelligent and varied (although some of them are difficult to read). Théret keeps an eye on the large questions of state formation, by focusing on the distinctions between the United States and Canada. In the 1920s, to summarize his argument, Canadian social policies resembled those of the United States. They were liberal, residual, and maternal, aimed at injured workers, poor mothers, and veterans. Had the Canadian welfare state operated along a strictly economic logic, it would have remained in line with its southern neighbour (118). But with the Depression, Canadian programs for the unemployed took the inequalities between provinces into account to an extent that the American New Deal never reached. It is as if the very constitutional rigidities that were slowing down the adoption of social policies in Canada ensured them a status in federal party politics that they did not gain in the United States. In the process, the possibility of third parties offered by the British system of parliamentary politics - from which Canada had never broken away - helped to widen the differences. After the war, provincial projects diverged, Saskatchewan calling for a general system of social security at one end, Quebec for strictly provincial systems on the other. At this junction, the Canadian solutions, at once redistributive and built on conditional grants, can better be understood with a 'modern' concept of federalism, one that accepts overlapping jurisdictions and allegiances, as opposed to the watertight model of classical federalism. At the turn of the 1960s, the same forces widened the differences between the United States and Canada to an unequalled degree. In the [End Page 559] face of the variety of the regional impacts of existing social policies, provinces and third parties combined to politicize relations between levels of government. The system of equalization payments between provinces, together with the mechanics of executive federalism (acknowledgement of federal prerogatives in a sector in exchange for a right of withdrawal with compensation), all came from provincial initiatives such as the Quebec Pension Plan or the Saskatchewan medical insurance system. The author finds...

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