Canadian Federalism, Welfare Reform, and North American Integration : A Sector-Specific Factors Approach

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

At a time when so many arguments exist about the impact of globalization on the structure of welfare state in advanced industrial nations, Canada's experience for the past two decades provides a good testing ground for competing accounts of welfare reform, especially in a direction of retrenchment. Not unlike in other OECD countries Canada since the 1980s is also said to have gone through a dual adjustment: external adjustment to globalizing market forces and internal adjustment of welfare regime. In Canada over the past decade the usual suspect for welfare retrenchment has been North American integration which came to materialize into NAFTA in 1994. While scholars and pundits alike in Canada debated over the extent to which the continentalization of the Canadian economy has inflicted damage on the nation's social and economic policy autonomy, a crucial question has been ignored about the relationship between federalism and welfare reform. This paper examines the ways in which significant variation by province has been shaped by both provincial responsibilities for welfare under federalism and different factor mobility across provinces with a high sector-specificity. These differences interact with varying impact of North American integration-a contextual variable here-to produce province-specific outcomes of welfare reform.