Read an excerpt of The Social Safety Net by Nora Loreto below, and order a copy off our website or your favourite book retailer now!
The year 1985 is as close to the end of the Second World War as it is to the 2025 federal election. The forty years that came before 1985 and the forty years that have come after have been radically different. The social, economic, and political differences of these two eras created two separate Canadas: one that grew in the shadow of two world wars and economic depression, and another that has gradually unwound everything that was built from postwar prosperity.
I was born in 1984, in the middle of this eighty-year chunk. It was the year that Mulroney was elected and that Orwell imagined as the future in his famous novel, near the upper end of what would eventually be called the millennial generation. When I hear the sound of Brian Mulroney’s voice, honestly, it soothes me, as if I’m sitting in earshot of the TV in a high chair hearing him speak during the midday news show (or watching the CBC show Midday). While I was raised in the shadow of the 1970s and 1980s, the only Canada I have ever known was deeply influenced by the man who brought neoliberalism to Canada. Our Margaret Thatcher, but Irish. Our Ronald Reagan, but Canadian.
The transition from the postwar welfare-state period to present-day Canada has been a decline. Under the cover of financial crises, Mulroney introduced neoliberalism to Canada through tax cuts, spending cuts, and free trade, and the slide has never stopped. Indeed, we could argue that it has actually accelerated. A decline is a continual loss of something, whether that be strength, power, numbers, quality, or as the Canadian Oxford Dictionary says, vigour. Deterioration. Regardless of where one sits on the political spectrum, the notion of decline shades the discussion of every issue. From housing (we used to have affordable housing and now we don’t!) to education (education used to be higher quality, but now kids are being shortchanged!), from healthcare (we used to be able to rely on the public health system, but now we can’t!) to whatever else (why doesn’t anything work?), we talk about this moment as if we have accepted that Canada is in decline, regardless of whether or not we use that word.
But where did this decline come from? And does “decline” mask a darker truth: Was Canada ever great to begin with? Indeed, “decline” is not the perfect word to describe a settler-colonial state that has never achieved a state of justice or truth, especially about itself. But the postwar period did bring about prosperity that was used, for the first time, to create better lives for Canadians beyond the ruling class. However, the spoils of that prosperity were not shared equally, and, as the welfare state and its social safety net started to fall apart, Canada had two options. We could have expanded the net and shared even more of that prosperity, giving coverage to people who had been intentionally left out. Or, we could have snipped at the net itself, transforming not only what people could access from state services, but also what they believed they should receive from their state. This latter process was how neoliberalism came to Canada. In Chile, it came with bombs. In the U.K., it came with police violence against striking miners. In Canada, it arrived through smiling politicians singing Irish songs and through promises that actually, no, nothing would be made worse; we would all, in fact, live much better.
To understand our particular decline, we must go back to the start — right to Canada’s early colonial origins — and proceed through to the evolution of the colonies into provinces united through our current federation. Many of the reasons why our decline looks the way it does can be explained by moments in our past, and not just moments from the mid-1980s. From Canada’s early origins through the postwar period and the dawn of neoliberalism, the country’s status quo — the character of any given moment in which Canadians find themselves — has been constantly evolving, improving especially for the elite. At the same time, it’s been devolving for everyone else, especially over the past forty years.
Nora Loreto is a freelance writer and editor at the Canadian Association of Labour Media. She co-hosts the popular political podcast Sandy and Nora Talk Politics. The author of four books, Nora lives in Quebec City. Learn more here.