TITLE: A Diagnosis by Ideology: Ideological Perspectives

This study introduces a methodology designed to evaluate the extent to which liberal-democratic and marxist-critical ideological values are reflected in the development and formulation of public old age pensions in Canada. Two taxonomies based on the values of equality, freedom, and justice were constructed. The first provides a model of features one would expect to find in a pension system based on the liberal-democratic assumptions. The other provides features one would expect to find if the marxist-critical challenges were valid. The empirical historical factors claimed by the liberal-democratic model to be associated with the introduction of old age pensions in 1927, universal pen-sions in 1951, and contributory pensions in 1965 were analyzed and the extent to which they reflected the appro