Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
of the federal governments in Ottawa and Washington DC. Thereafter, I study
comparatively how King's liberal government managed to overcome the ini-
tial resistance while Roosevelt's government struggled to include in the Social
Security Act provisions much more respectful of states' autonomy.
Preference Heterogeneity and Initial Responses
Canadian Prime Minister Bennett's conservative government took office shortly
after the 1929 financial crash on Wall Street. At the time, there was much con-
tention about passing the buck. As the provinces and the municipalities were
overloaded, Ottawa tried to keep its financial and administrative involvement
to a minimum and hence insisted that, constitutionally, taking care of the
unemployed was their task. Ottawa remained committed to this view and suc-
ceeded until the second half of the 1930s.
8
Yet demand for relief was increasing
across the country, as was demand for a national, noncontributory, unemploy-
ment insurance system. Such demands fueled as much support as opposition
and motivated the mobilization of important institutional, social, and political
actors.
In 1932 Bennett was presented with a petition in support of a national,
noncontributory insurance system endorsed by 94,169 people. Behind the peti-
tion were, among others: several members of the parliamentary left, most
prominently A. Hasleep and his Cooperative Commonwealth Federation; the
Worker's Unity League, a fairly radical trade union responsible for significant
industrial action and mobilization during the first half of the 1930s; and vet-
erans, who felt entitled to better treatment in terms of relief and opportunity
in compensation for their war service. Veterans were indeed very active at the
local, provincial, and national levels, and supported actively the demand for
social security throughout post-Depression Canada (Campbell
2000
). Many
overstretched municipalities also supported the initiative. Even certain sectors
of the industrial and financial elite supported the introduction of an insurance
scheme, though for very different reasons. In 1932,the
Financial Times
com-
plained that “workers, unlike corporations, did not have the good sense to
build reserves against distress in the event of future unemployment” (Finkel
1979
: 85). The potential fiscal effects of such hazardous behavior would justify
new government regulations to administer and control workers' exposure to
risk.
This view was far from universally shared amongst employers though. Large
manufacturing companies, represented by the Canadian Manufacturing Asso-
ciation, were opposed to the idea. Worries stemmed from the cost of the state
assuming the development of this program, and, interestingly, from the poten-
tial disfunctionality of implementing the same plan in companies with many
8
This summary draws on historical accounts by Guest (
1997
); Pal (
1988
); and Struthers (
1983
).
The latter provides the richest historical account of the unemployment problem in Canada
between 1914 and 1941.
