THE NEW DEAL MOVES NORTH
Sykes, Jay G.
The New Deal Moves North By JAY G. SYKES THE potential wealth of Canada is incalculable. Her forests contain the greatest perpetual reserves of soft wood timber in the world. Saskatchewan has the...
...They are integral parts of a long-range program...
...The checks are paid to the mother and they are intended to be used for the benefit of the child...
...This increase amounts to an average of $15 a year for a family of four...
...Saskatchewan has the biggest uranium mining and refining operation on the continent...
...Since 1945, Canada's mineral production has tripled and her national budget doubled...
...In the first year of operation, the hospital tax covered 60 per cent of the cost of the program, and the provincial government made up the balance out of a real estate tax...
...Prince Edward Island makes available free cancer diagnosis to all its residents...
...Canada's "New Deal" in health and welfare is costly...
...We are helping build a nationwide community in which far-sighted, warm-hearted interest in the welfare of others less fortunate is the common concern of us all . . . In our democracy, citizenship is a symbol of our sharing of fortune and misfortune...
...Although one of the stated purposes of the program was—and is—to lay the foundations for national health insurance, it was, nevertheless, called by the president of the Canadian Medical Association "the most important event in Canada's health history...
...The Department of Veterans Affairs operates thirteen major hospitals, in addition to a number of wings attached to general public hospitals...
...in which people dared to think it practicable to make . . . the ideal of welfare of all a practicable objective instead of a mere Utopian dream...
...Under the impetus of the program and with the help of its financial assistance, many municipalities and provinces have already established the beginnings of a compulsory health program...
...By March of 1954, almost five JAY G. SYKES, Seattle attorney and writer, has made a special study of social and economic developments in Canada...
...From birth to age six, the child gets $5 per month...
...X-rays, and operating-room facilities...
...The largest aluminum smelting plant on earth is in the Kiti-mat in British Columbia...
...In Alberta, a municipal hospital program provides standard hospitalization for nearly the entire provincial population for $1 a day...
...Canada's peaceful revolution started with the passage of the Unemployment Insurance Act of 1940...
...They regard it, rather, as one Canadian sociologist described it, "a universal transfer of wealth from the large taxpayers to the pockets of those who bear the burden of raising the next generation...
...British Columbia and Saskatchewan have already progressed past the compulsory-contribution stage in their health programs, and now finance their hospital services directly out of provincial tax revenues...
...In 1951, Canada passed its second universal pension program...
...from six to nine, the allowance is $6...
...A National Fair Employment Practices Act, passed in 1953, forbids employers "subject to federal jurisdiction" from discriminating against persons in, or seeking, employment, on the basis of race, national origin, color, or religion...
...Alberta provides free TB treatment and hospitalization, free polio care and after-training, and free cancer surgery, X-ray, and radium treatment...
...This pension, like the family allowances, is paid as a matter of right, not charity, without regard to need or of a prior work record (as required in our Old Age Survivors Insurance system...
...The transformation has been almost completely ignored in the United States...
...It pays the cost of hospital and medical care for rheumatoid and arthritic patients under the age of 25...
...With this stimulus, Canada broke away from the traditional social-insurance patterns and introduced, for the first time on this continent, the concept of national, universal pensions...
...It is in the battle against sickness that the Canadian advance has been the most far-reaching and impressive...
...Nearly 8.5 per cent of Canada's national income is devoted to health and welfare (compared to about four per cent in the United States...
...Canadians do not consider their Family Allowances as relief or charity or socialism...
...They are implementations of the basic social philosophy derived in large part from Britain's Report on Social Insurance and Allied Schemes—the monumental Beveridge Report...
...Contributions are collected in equal amounts from employer and employee, with the federal government adding, out of its general revenue, an amount equal to one-fifth of these combined contributions...
...The Alberta government reimburses the municipalities for one-half of their expenditures on the program...
...It conducts an extensive and continuing program of medical research relating to physical conditions peculiar to veterans...
...we demonstrate our common concern and common brotherhood, and, above all, [our belief] that the welfare of the individual—whatever his lot in life —should be the first and foremost concern of government...
...Vast new oil and natural gas deposits have been discovered in Alberta, and iron has been found in Labrador...
...IV Canada's achievements are imposing, and there is no inclination by that nation to stop and consolidate her gains...
...Under the Veterans Land Act, 60,000 veterans have been established on farms, in small businesses, and in commercial fishing enterprises...
...Actually, Canada's concentrated assault on sickness started in 1948 with the enactment, of the National Health Program...
...It is paid on the assumption that the recipient, having reached the age of 70, after 20 years in Canada, has contributed, in taxes and labor, his share of the national wealth...
...The provinces of Ontario, British Columbia, and Saskatchewan all have Equal Pay Acts that require employers to pay women at the same rate of pay as men doing comparable work...
...II These measures are not ad hoc reforms...
...Since 1940, through a series of bold and imaginative reforms, conservative Canada has quietly built a social welfare system that is today one of the most advanced in the world...
...million children in more than two million families were receiving these "baby bonuses," which are paid uniformly, irrespective of need, or of prior contribution, or of the number of children in the family...
...In each of Canada's ten provinces, the treatment of these "catastrophic illnesses" are public services...
...In 1955, Parliament passed the Disabled Persons Act, under which the federal government, sharing the cost equally with the provinces, provides monthly allowances up to $40 to totally and permanently disabled persons over 18...
...A proposal to adopt this principle nationally, however, was voted down by the House of Commons, 109-78...
...Basically orthodox, this legislation was patterned after the programs in the United States...
...The annual com bined outlay for family allowances and old age pensions is approximately $700 million (which in terms of the population of the United States is $7 billion...
...The "means" test has been discarded as degrading and unnecessary...
...The new disability allowance, which covers about 25,000 persons, will cost $16 million every year...
...nor are they isolated political gestures or mere advances in administrative techniques...
...With only one dissenting vote as liberals and conservatives voted together, Parliament adopted the Old Age Security Act, which provides monthly pensions of $40 for every man and woman who has reached the age of 70 and has lived in the country for 20 years...
...Since 1940, Canada's heal th-and-welf are spending has increased by 500 per cent...
...These programs are rooted deep in a basic philosophy of government's relation to the individual...
...Trained social workers in the Veterans Welfare Service Branch give consultative services, and train and place disabled veterans in gainful employment...
...It was during the same year that the Canadian Parliament passed the Family Allowance Art, under which the federal government pays a monthly allowance to every child born in Canada...
...The reports of Canada's efficient, democratic, and painless distribution of the Salk polio vaccine, in such glaring contrast to our own debacle, was an example of the rationality and enlightenment practiced by our neighbor to the north...
...Benefits, which are roughly equal to those in our more liberal states, are uniform throughout the country...
...In twenty communities of British Columbia, the provincial government shares the costs with the community in subsidizing free dental clinics for children...
...In most cottage-hospital areas, an annual pre-payment of $15 entitles a subscriber to out-patient diagnosis and treatment, and hospitalization when necessary...
...those unable to pay for non-service illnesses are treated free...
...In 1944, Canada created a Department of National Health and Welfare, appointed a minister of cabinet rank, and charged him specifically with the "development of plans and undertakings designed to promote the health and well-being of the Canadian people...
...This list is only illustrative and far from complete...
...That concept was expressed by Paul Joseph Martin, national minister of health and welfare, in these words: "Step by step we are moving steadily and irresistibly toward our goal of social and economic well-being for all Canadians...
...Experience has proven that, with negligible exceptions, that is the way they are spent...
...III Under Saskatchewan's Hospital Services Plan, all residents pay an annual hospitalization tax of $5 per person, with a family maximum of $30, in return for which they have full pre-paid hospital care in public wards...
...Home care is provided for physically handicapped or aged veterans in need of accommodation and surveillance...
...Canada's death rate has readied an all-time low of 8.6 per 1,000, putting it ahead of the United States (9.6), the United Kingdom (11.4), and France (12.4) Only the Netherlands (7.3) and Norway (8.3) are healthier, statistically at least, than Canada...
...Canada reflects, perhaps more than any other nation in the Western Hemisphere, the essential accuracy of Arnold J. Toynbee's celebrated prediction: "My own guess is that our age will be remembered chiefly neither for its horrifying crimes, nor for its astonishing inventions, but for having been the first age since the dawn of civilization...
...After fifteen years of operation, the fund has an accumulated reserve of about $700 million...
...It maintains special centers for the investigation and treatment of arthritis, paraplegia, TB, and has established long-term projects on the cause and cure of arteriosclerosis, bronchitis, and various mental diseases...
...In its first five years, the federal government has made available to the provinces $165 million for hospital construction, mental health, cancer and tuberculosis control, for crippled children, and for a national health survey...
...Under its Hospital Insurance Service, the government of British Columbia pays premiums into the fund on behalf of all residents, the payments being offset by a two per cent increase in the social services tax...
...A major achievement in the health field has been the recognition by Canada that certain illnesses, like polio and tuberculosis, require such long and costly care that they are beyond the income capacity of the average family...
...A major innovation, however, was Canada's adoption of a national program, administered directly by the federal government, instead of by the ten provinces which had operated ten separate programs, and in contrast to the 48 different programs in the United States...
...And yet she has barely begun to tap her vast natural resources...
...For this $15, the man, woman, or child who has lived in the province for a year has all-inclusive in-patient benefits, including bed and board, nursing services, drugs...
...Total spending for health and welfare on all governmental levels—federal, provincial, and municipal—runs to 20 per cent of all expenditures...
...The results are impressive...
...By helping to ease the load for one another...
...At the opening of the 1955 Parliament, the government announced plans to increase blind pensions and lower the eligibility age from 50 to 18, increase war veterans' allowances, and increase unemployment benefits during the winter months...
...With each session of the Parliament at Ottawa and the ten legislative assemblies, existing programs are liberalized and fundamental reforms are added...
...Canada's "Veterans' Charter," which is actually the sum total of all veterans' legislation, is considered the equal of any in the world...
...Newfoundland has a "cottage-hospital" scheme which operates on a voluntary pre-payment basis and makes hospital care available to 250,-000 persons...
...Canada could be, for the United States, that laboratory of social and political experimentation that our own 48 states are supposed to be...
...Every modern industrial society, Beveridge . said, is exposed to five major evils—squalor, idleness, ignorance, want, and sickness, against which every civilized nation must protect its people...
...British Columbia provides free TB clinics and free biopsy service and consultative clinics for those with cancer...
...at ten it goes to $7, and from twelve to the child's sixteenth birthday, it is $8...
...The most spectacular—and the most significant—development, however, is not the emergence of this new wealth, but the manner in which Canada is turning it to the welfare of its people...
...Canadians are apparently willing to pay the cost...
...Some qualify for a Helplessness Allowance which provides from $480 to $1400 a year...
...Veterans, as in the United States, are treated free for all war-incurred disabilities...
Vol. 20 • April 1956 • No. 4
