Decision-Making

Canada has never adopted a single approach to federalism. Rather, we have cho-sen to live with three distinct models of federalism—three federalisms in one country—each with its own decision rules and intergovernmental processes. Social policy reflects all three models particularly well. Throughout the history of the Canadian welfare state, federal and provincial governments have designed different social programs according to different intergovernmental rules and processes. The distinctive incentives and constraints inherent in the different models help explain a number of puzzles about the Canadian welfare state, including the striking contrast between the limited nature of the country’s income security programs and the more universalist character of its health care. Moreover, in recent decades, the three models help explain the highly uneven impact of retrenchment on different social programs. This chapter develops these themes in four sections. The first section describes the federal–provincial division of jurisdiction in social policy and the three mod-els of federalism. The second section examines the impact of the three feder