Alberta Views – The Magazine for Engaged Citizens. How social services came and went. During the Depression, diminished federal and provincial government spending only worsened the economic crisis. Slowing the flow of money and . From 1. 93. 9 to 1. Albertans had seen the tremendous power of the state to harness the economy for . Why not, many Albertans asked, marshal the enormous power of the state, so clearly evident during the war, to spend and raise the level of social services available to all Albertans? Find the Alberta government services and information you need. There is a general division in Canada between SOCIAL SECURITY programs and social and welfare services. Social security programs, which are the. We are a multi-species livestock welfare organization and the collective voice of the industry on animal care and welare in Alberta. Financial assistance can help you pay for your post-secondary education. Learn how to apply for student loans through Student Aid Alberta. Income Support Social support services for Fort McMurray evacuees and returning residents. Please visit alberta.ca/wildfire-recovery.cfm for up-to-date information on. Get financial assistance. Financial Benefits Program. Alberta Child Welfare Class Action Settlement. Welfare in Canada 2012 Canada Social Report 1 Introduction This report focuses on the incomes of four different households living on social assistance. Enhancement Act that are filed as Alberta Regulations under the Regulations Act Alta. Amendments Child, Youth and Family Enhancement Act. Child Welfare DHS Local Offices. Local Offices Currently selected; Assistance home page. Most social services remained municipal responsibilities, as they had been since villages incorporated into towns and towns into cities. Intervenors in Alberta. The Alberta Association of Municipal Districts called for full provincial funding and administrative responsibility for unemployment relief. The Alberta Board of Trade and Agriculture demanded that the province pay for at least 5. This information sheet presents an overview of the current structure of First Nations child welfare in Alberta as it was in 2011. It builds on work done for the First. The Alberta Farmers Union insisted that Alberta assume full responsibility for mothers. The Edmonton Chamber of Commerce, the Property Owners. This was the dawn of the atomic age, a time when technological and scientific advances were transforming citizens. Albertans wanted a modern educational system for their children. They wanted a healthcare system that could employ new and emerging medical advancements to care for the ill and the infirm. They wanted investments in infrastructure to modernize their cities and towns, and to renew and rebuild housing that had been deteriorating since at least the early 1. And they wanted a modern, provincially organized, funded and administered public welfare system to protect the unemployed, the unemployable, the elderly and the disabled. Part of the trouble was the Constitution. The federal government had more revenue- generating options open to it but none of the responsibility for social services, while the provinces were limited in their revenue- generating options but had all of the responsibilities for social services. The British North America Act had delegated jurisdiction over social services to the provinces. No one in 1. 86. 7 could have imagined that social services would, by the Great Depression of the 1. And so the BNA Act granted the greater taxing powers to the federal state, which was responsible for defence, criminal law and foreign affairs, while smaller taxing powers were awarded to the provinces. But Depression- era Canada was not the Canada of the 1. Rowell. Reporting in 1. Commission pointed out that . They wanted public investments in social services. The massive unemployment and poverty of the Great Depression ended in 1. Second World War and nearly full employment. This eased the financial crunch nationwide even though the constitutional imbalance remained. Governments faced mounting pressure to meet Canadians. In Alberta the Social Credit government introduced a dramatic series of interventions designed both to meet these expectations and to consolidate social welfare programs under provincial, rather than municipal, control. In 1. 94. 4 the province created a public welfare department with social welfare responsibilities for everyone from children to single men, the M. By 1. 94. 5, responsibilities for mothers. And over the course of the next two decades, up to the mid- 1. Social Credit government embedded no fewer than five more categories of public welfare into the department, including widows, the disabled, deserted women and people living in care homes and institutions. None of this, of course, could happen, at least to the extent that it did in Alberta, without massive public investment in social services. And the discovery of oil near Leduc on a cold late afternoon in February 1. Between 1. 94. 6 and 1. John Barr indicates, provincial spending . Alberta led the nation in spending on education in 1. The people of Alberta had demanded extensive state intervention into the economy, and the Alberta government had delivered. As impressive as the Social Credit government. In fact, the Social Credit regime offered Albertans and outside investors the lowest taxes continent- wide, preferring to fund provincial business largely through oil and gas royalties that were themselves the lowest in North America. The trouble with linking social policy spending to wildly fluctuating oil and gas revenues, of course, is that social programs benefit when the price of oil is high but suffer when it drops. Meanwhile, the federal government was busy establishing an equally impressive architecture of public welfare, both independent of the provinces and in collaboration with them. The Act created an unemployment insurance fund into which employers, workers and the federal government made contributions and out of which unemployed workers could draw funds. But collaboration with the provinces was the real social- policy story. Through the early 1. And in 1. 96. 7 Alberta signed on to the Canada Assistance Plan, which amalgamated and rationalized all welfare cost- sharing arrangements between the province and the federal government. To be sure, not all Albertans benefited from the rise of the province. Aboriginal peoples, married women and migrant workers did not fall under Alberta. Aboriginal peoples fell almost exclusively under federal jurisdiction, and so the province felt no obligation to attend to their needs. Married women, provincial policy assumed, would share in the wages and benefits of their husbands, and so provincial policy could remain largely silent on their needs. Albertans, it seemed, were ready for change once again, widely embracing Lougheed. In truth, in terms of social welfare, Lougheed. Responsibility for social services was largely transferred from the local to the provincial and federal governments by the mid- 1. In 1. 97. 9 the provincial government established an assured income for the severely handicapped (AISH) and a widows. And in its 1. 98. But the winds were shifting once more, and social policy thinking would shortly change as dramatically as it had at the end of the Second World War. In the 1. 96. 0s, economist Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago had begun espousing a set of ideas that ran starkly counter to the widely accepted Keynesian thinking that undergirded the emergence, growth and wide popularity of the modern welfare state. First and foremost, Friedman and his colleagues advocated shrinking the money supply to avoid rising inflation. Making less money available, the thinking went, would put an absolute cap on inflation and enhance the value of a dollar. This in and of itself made some sense, in some ways, though it must be said that . They decried state intervention in the economy. They also called for tax cuts for big business, believing that doing so would encourage further investment in the economy and ultimately create a more robust, muscular capitalism. Underlying the monetarists. This emphasis on individual responsibility. Interestingly, such thinking would have found a warm embrace amid ideologies prevalent in some quarters during the 1. Canada and propagated by people such as Charlotte Whitton, the famed director of the Canadian Family and Welfare Association. Monetarist thinking slowly but surely made its way into policymakers. This was especially true when . The bugbear of rising inflation and falling wages confounded Western governments, and many, including those in the United States and Great Britain, embraced monetarist policies with vigour. US president Ronald Reagan, who relied in large measure on Friedman himself for economic policy advice, adopted . In Canada the federal government of Pierre Trudeau tried to walk the middle ground, accepting the Bank of Canada. But the tide had already turned. After the election of a Progressive Conservative majority under Brian Mulroney in 1. In Alberta, as in many provinces nationwide, the government took up the cry of unsustainable spending and focused its ire on the rise of . However muted at first, this cry would become much more vociferous by the early 1. The seven- year era of Alberta premier Don Getty came to an end with his resignation in 1. The subsequent leadership race between Environment Minister and former Calgary mayor Ralph Klein and party stalwart Nancy Betkowski rested in large measure on who could promise to make funding cuts faster. Klein won the contest, and in 1. If anyone was even more vocal on these policy directions, it was provincial Liberal leader Laurence Decore, who demanded . Shortly thereafter his government began making good on its election promise to diminish the province. First, Alberta Family and Social Services caseworkers were directed to deny prospective welfare recipients any aid unless the applicants had absolutely exhausted all other avenues of support and had nowhere else to turn for help. Alberta Family and Social Services managed to reduce its overall caseload by half (from 9. What happened to those 4. Doubtless some entered training and education programs designed to transition unemployed workers into the labour force, but, for the most part, such programs did not lead to jobs. Others were forced to turn to charities and family to stay off the street. And others still did wind up on the street. Public policy researcher Gordon Laird has pointed out that homelessness in Calgary alone increased 7. The Klein years represented a fundamental break from Alberta. Almost at a stroke, Klein. In the end, Albertans were left with a mere ghost of a welfare state and a government with a radically different ideological bent than they had known through the four decades immediately following the Second World War. Through those decades Alberta. By the 1. 99. 0s Alberta could only boast to potential investors of having the nation. For his part, Ralph Klein is sometimes remembered as a true- blue Alberta maverick who restored sanity to a welfare state run amok. In fact he was only a small part of a much broader slavish following of anti- state- intervention ideology and neoconservative thinking.
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