Can the Liberal’s Post-Pandemic Budget Lead to Generational Change?
The history of how governments responded to past national crises tells us yes and no
On April 19, the Liberal government will release its first federal budget in two years. The long awaited accounting of the government’s pandemic spending is expected to outline the Liberal’s post-pandemic plan for the Canadian economy.
Since at least last June, the government has framed the post-pandemic world as a “generational opportunity” to, in the Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s words, “think about what kind of future we want to build together.”
The last time the government updated Canadians with its fall economic update, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland introduced “the largest economic relief package for our country since the Second World War.” $70-$100 billion over three years and a “plan to make a plan” (a favorite of this government) to introduce a national child-care system. The new budget is expected to provide more details.
But how much power does the government have to bring about generational change in the aftermath of a national crisis?
Past national crises - from the First and Second World Wars, to the Great Depression and the Spanish Flu - have uprooted the lives of Canadians in dramatic ways and often been the catalyst to societal change, but that change has usually been the result of longer term changes in the way Canadians think and feel, not new ideas. Ultimately, it has been long-term trends, in progress long before and long after crises, that usually win out.
The First World War, arguably the first truly national crisis in Canada, brought to a head many of the issues that the social reform movement had been fighting for since the 1870s, including temperance and women’s suffrage.
The social reform movement emerged in response to the rapid industrialization, urbanization, and industrialization that greeted Canadians at the turn of the twentieth century. In English Canada, mainly white, Anglo-Saxon, protestant reformers sought to improve the living and working conditions of the lower and working classes and to protect their own position in society.
The war brought a new sense of urgency to the movement. For many, especially in English Canada, the First World War was “the war to end all wars,” a battle between civilization and barbarism, with the whole of Christian civilization and even all of humanity at stake. The war was an opportunity to end wars altogether and create a perfect world. This reformist zeal led to the achievement of many of the social reform movements goals.
The temperance movement used the wartime conditions to argue that if Canadian troops were sacrificing their lives overseas, people in Canada shouldn’t be drinking at home. By 1917, all the provinces except Quebec had enacted prohibition legislation and in 1918 the federal government enacted nation-wide prohibition.
The women’s suffrage movement also took on a new lens during the war. Advocates argued that women were the mothers who raised the soldiers who were fighting in the war and women were sacrificing their sons for the nation, so they should be able to vote. During the course of the war, the four western provinces, Ontario, and Nova Scotia granted women the right to vote in provincial elections, with New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island following shortly after. Federally, the Wartime Elections Act gave women with family members in the military the right to vote in 1917 and the next year the Women’s Franchise Act extended suffrage to most women.
The First World War also brought the Canadian government more involved in the lives of Canadians. The government used the War Measures Act to take over the war economy, instituted for the first time an income tax on individual Canadians, and created social programs like veterans pensions.
As much as the combined crisis of the Great War and 1918 Spanish Flu was the catalyst for social and governmental change, however, in the decade that followed, the reform movement lost momentum. Prohibition laws were repealed, and women’s suffrage remained at a standstill until 1940. Canadian governments went back to their prewar non-interventionist approach to the economy and few new social programs were introduced. The 1920s might have been the “roaring ‘20s” that some predict will follow the current pandemic, but it was not a time of social and economic change, at least at the government level.
The next national crisis to face Canadians was the Great Depression. During the decade of 1929-1939, Canada’s gross domestic product dropped 40%. Unemployment reached 27% in 1933. By 1930, one fifth of the population was dependent on government assistance. In the prairie provinces, that number was two thirds.
The first response of Canadian governments to the crisis was to continue the non-interventionist approach to the economy of the 1920s. They remained reluctant to take on a major role in social services, hoping the depression would be short-lived.
As the crisis wore on, Canadians responded by voting in new governments, including R.B. Bennett’s Conservatives in Ottawa in 1930 and William Aberhart’s Social Credit Party in Alberta in 1935. Governments were forced to introduce relief measures like the federal Unemployment Relief Act, which provided $20 million in assistance to the poor. From 1930-1938, the federal government provided $350 million in relief to Canadians (at a time when the federal budget was around $500 million per year), and provincial governments $650 million.
The depression only ended with the start of another crisis, the Second World War. The war economy quickly solved the country’s economic problems and near full employment was quickly reached. But concerns remained about what would happen after the war.
Canadians emerged from a decade of depression and six years of war expecting the government to maintain a basic standard of living for all. The Mackenzie King government laid the groundwork for a welfare state during the war, introducing unemployment insurance in 1940 and a family-allowance program in 1944. In the two decades that followed, many of the social program we have today, like universal healthcare and the Canada Pension Plan, were gradually introduced.
In the same way that the First World War brought long-term social reform issues like temperance and women’s suffrage to a head, it was the back-to-back crises of the Great Depression and the Second World War that ultimately convinced Canadians to embrace the welfare state. And just as the reform movement of the First World War stagnated in the 1920s, it would take another twenty years to complete the process.
History tells us, then, that fundamental change in our society takes a long time.
In the post-pandemic world, we should look for changes that have been building, like climate change and racial justice, to continue to evolve, and for new trends, like perhaps more people working for home or universal basic income, to develop over the coming decades.
But history, of course, is always full of surprises. Governmental change is only one type of change. Past responses to national crises suggest that it’s the people who lead generational change, our leaders only follow. The Liberal budget should keep that in mind.
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