Retrenchment and Restructuring

Abstract This chapter considers the retrenchment and restructuring of the Canadian welfare state since the 1980s. In the 1980s, much of the scholarly emphasis was on retrenchment, as the adoption of a neoliberal outlook led to cutbacks. The emphasis on retrenchment nevertheless missed ways that neoliberalism restructured the state beyond cutbacks, such as new measures to commodify labor, as well as the emergence of new logics, such as social investment, in the early 2000s. Social policy restructuring in the past quarter century has been largely defined by social investment ideas, with partisan politics playing an important role in modulating the extent to which these ideas are translated into policy. While retrenchment and restructuring have often been associated with a loss of the federal government’s policy leadership, the moves to neoliberalism and social investment are marked by a complex dynamic of intergovernmental competition and collaboration as federal and provincial governments move at different paces in policy restructuring.