The Empire of the Lone Mother: Parental Rights, Child Welfare Law, and State Restructuring

This article uses the Supreme Court of Canada\u27s decision in G.(J.) v. New Brunswick to frame a discussion of the historical and ideological character of Canadian child welfare regimes on the nature and experience of women’s citizenship within the liberal political order and, in particular, within the current neo-liberal restructuring of welfare provision. The article also analyzes traditional understandings of the political character of child welfare in terms of state intervention and non-intervention, by placing the state ordering of parent-child relations in the context of larger issues of colonialism, gendered parenting discourses, and the linkage between child neglect and poverty. The article argues that this more complex account of state/family relations exposes the rhetorical slippage between a family privacy and family support interpretation of liberal respect for family autonomy in both judicial discourse and the broader political sphere