Premium Essay

Housing

In: Business and Management

Submitted By longlong
Words 17843
Pages 72
Working Paper 46
November 2008 138 Union Street, Kingston, ON K7L 3N6 www.queensu.ca/sps

Peter Hicksi

Social Policy in Canada – Looking Back, Looking Ahead

This paper discusses recent policy trends, the changing role of the various actors in the system, international comparisons and a range of other social policy topics. The immediate purpose of the paper is to examine the reasons why social policy analysts need to look into the future, and to explore ways of managing the inevitably large risks associated with such future-looking exercises. The underlying purpose, however, is simply to introduce a range of important Canadian social policy topic to students and others who are interested in social policy, but without much previous background in the areaii. The first part of the paper was taken directly from a 1994 presentationi that was intended to provide outside social policy experts (from Latin America in this case) with an overview of the Canadian social policy landscape, particularly of recent trends and possible future directions, mainly from a federal government perspective. At that time, major reform of social security policies was being discussed and I tried to give our visitors some flavour of the background to that reform, with particular emphasis on the

i

Peter Hicks was with the department of Human Resources Development Canada at the time of the 1994 paper which forms the basis of Part I of the present paper. The following year he left the Government of Canada to join the OECD in Paris. ii Indeed, this is a revised version of an introductory reading that was drafted for use in a 2008 social policy course in the MPA program at the Queens University School of Policy Studies. The students came from different academic backgrounds and I was unable to find an off-the-shelf reading that: a) would quickly introduce them to recent social policy

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