Advocating for the Welfare State in Canada: Institutional Responses of the United Church of Canada in the Late 1930s

Autor: Ted Reeve
Rok vydání: 1996
Předmět:
Zdroj: Toronto Journal of Theology. 12:237-250
ISSN: 1918-6371
0826-9831
DOI: 10.3138/tjt.12.2.237
Popis: The 1934 Report of the Commission on Christianizing the Social Order (CSO) articulated a number of foundational principles on social and economic policy for the church. This paper goes the next step in considering how the institutional church utilized these 'principles to consider its own socioeconomic views and to advocate policies that contributed to the development of a welfare state in Canada. An important contribution to the church's deliberations is seen in the work of the church's Standing Commission on Economic and Social Research (SCESR) and its brief to the Royal Commission on Dominion-Provincial Relations, chaired by Judge Rowell, and later by Dr. Sirois (Rowell-Sirois Commission). These deliberations seem particularly pertinent today as many social programs are being downsized or dismantled by the government. Remembering the long years of advocacy required to establish them should make us less hasty to abandon them for the laissez-faire attitude predominant in the early twentieth century. It was the failure of the free market, as so strongly recorded in the CSO report, that motivated so many to seek "managed" or "planned" alternatives.
Databáze: OpenAIRE