Marginalization through a Custom of Deservingness: Sole-Support Mothers and Welfare Law in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite the reluctance of most liberal states to provide forms of income security and social supports to those in need, some from within their ranks have managed to be seen as more “deserving” of modest forms of support. Canada’s welfare system has always been structured using a “custom of deservingness.” Historically, sole-support mothers were among those considered, however precariously and unevenly, to merit the status of most “deserving” as recipients of public funding. Unfortunately, however, extensive welfare law and policy reforms since the neo-liberal re(formation) have effectively erased the category of sole-support mothers as being a “deserving poor.” By synthesizing welfare law then and now, it is possible to identify the continuities and discontinuities that have shaped and reshaped the lives and experiences of sole-support mothers. Analyses of how increasingly punitive treatment has rendered them undeserving can help illuminate the profound changes that have occurred under neo-liberalism. !e path from past to present has been marked by shifts from public responsibility to private self-reliance, and from social welfare entitlement rights to individualized support and workfare obligations aimed at combating dependency. !e “custom of deservingness” and workfare system’s emphasis on erasing the “dependent” category has resulted in the marginalization of sole-support mothers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".