HIST 261 March 10 th
Tommy Douglas (the Greatest of Them All)
A Shift to the Left
King introduced the Unemployment Insurance bill/act in 1940 in order to avoid a left-jab from the
CCF. The UI had limited effect as it did not cover farm laborers, married women, assumed that
both employers and the employees would contribute to this fund (which was controlled by the
government but the government didn’t contribute to it). The amount given out was attached to the wages
earned which proved to further marginalize low income and part-time workers while exacerbating the
wealth disparity in society.
In the case of married women, the state assumed that she would then rely on her husband if laid off, but
in this period if a married woman was working it was usually because her husband was dead, unable to
work or didn’t make enough and it also cemented the economic relationship between women and their
husbands.
Leonard Marsh and Charlotte Whitton
The Marsh Report
The Marsh report was influenced by the Beveridge Report made in Great Britain which advocated the
introduction of massive state fund into society in order to boost the economy. It also recommended that
full employment should be a major goal for the government, that health care should be a governmental
and societal responsibility, lessons that had been learned from the Great Depression. In addition dietary,
housing and educational needs should be the responsibility of the government and society.
Charlotte Whitton
She had previously been one of RB Bennett’s advisors relating to unemployment during the 1950’s and
was very Small ‘l’ Liberal. She believed that city workers who were in charge of distributing social welfare
were incompetent and it should be the responsibility of social workers (which she was). She also
advocated self-reliance and elevated individual responsibility in opposition to the Marsh Report as she
believed that government intervention in the social economy undermined initiative and personal
responsibility. She also was a full on eugenicist and was vocally fearful that government intervention
would encourage the ‘feeble-minded’ to reproduce and make ‘feeble-minded’ babies.
The Rise of the Welfare State
The Rowell-Sirois commission of 1937 was done to discover the changing nature of the CND economy
and how the government should implement social polices. The results, produced in 1940, recommended
a rewriting of the constitution to allow for the federal government to administer provincial education and
health care systems. This was rejected strongly by Ontario, AB, BC, and QC (education and healthcare
were run by the church there and that was a bulwark of the FRCND culture) as they didn’t want to hand
over power to the federal government. Most CND’s however didn’t care about constitutional problems and
simply wanted social programs in place to prevent the recession everyone feared would come after the
war.
King and the Welfare State King created three new federal departments, Reconstruction, National Health and Welfare, and Veterans
Affairs. In 1944 King introduced the Family Allowance, which was given to mothers with children under
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