Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
2003). Nonetheless the welfare state was bled by an insidious gnawing away
of redistributive benefits through the loss of universality clauses, the rise of
user-pay fee schedules, contracting out and privatization.
Part of the federal strategy of cost management was to download service
delivery to the provinces (which in turn downloaded what they could to the
municipalities). Different provinces responded at different times to these
challenges. Following a Liberal administration, Ontario even elected its first
New Democratic government in 1990; by mid-decade however, Conservative
Premier Mike Harris' 'common sense revolution', rooted in the neo-
conservative hinterland of rural areas, small towns and new suburbs, brought
swingeing cuts to social programmes and a strong neo-liberal regime of tax
reduction and social benefit shrinkage. In British Columbia the same geo-
graphical base of hinterland politics sent the radical right-wing party, Social
Credit, back to power twenty years earlier under Premier Bill Bennett,
leader from 1975-86. Here too, however, ideological succession was not
smooth, for following 15 years of Social Credit orthodoxy the electorate
returned a decade of NDP administrations in the 1990s.
Neo-liberalism is anything but a consistent strategy repeated simultane-
ously as an unvarying template upon different spaces (Harvey 2005; Ong
2006; Peck 2006). Nonetheless familiar themes include 'rolling back' the
welfare state and 'rolling out' market-based reforms. In principle, though
not necessarily in practice, a downsizing of the state is promised in everyday
life, together with greater individual 'freedoms' - a key word - to rich and
poor alike (Harvey 2005). For the rich this may mean tax cuts, for the poor
benefit cuts and the 'freedom' to be self-dependent. In an urban context the
typical array of policy innovation includes service cutbacks, privatization,
contracting out, private-public partnerships and an entrepreneurial face to
state policy that includes place-marketing, investment promotion, and the
sponsoring of arts and leisure events as attention-grabbing 'loss leaders'
(Harvey 1989; Leitner et al. 2007). The disciplining of expectations con-
cerning public services is pervasive; some authors detect motivation moving
beyond the spirit of competition and discipline to an aggressive attack on
the poor that may include unforgiving harassment and high levels of incar-
ceration (Smith 1998; Wacquant 2007).
Neo-liberalism gained ground through the 1980s sustained by a rising
neo-conservative culture, prolonged economic recession and the failure of
the state to sustain its expensive menu of services in a period of revenue
shortfalls. The Canadian economy, slowing down in the second half of the
1970s, lapsed to an annual growth rate of only 1.6 percent in the first half
of the 1980s (Figure 2.6). The economic recession of the early 1980s was
the deepest in fifty years; in 1982 the economy contracted three percent,
while unemployment exceeded ten percent. Conditions were dire in British
Columbia. A housing price bubble in 1980 collapsed the following year
