Canada Needs to Revamp its Social Safety Net for the 21st-Century, say Canadian Think Tank
Originally posted on Maytree Conversations, May 26th, 2015
Canada’s social architecture is showing its age. Many core programs and policies designed in the 1960s and 1970s have started to falter. Drawn at a time when there were fewer women in the paid workforce and when someone with a high school education could get a stable well-paying job with benefits, they no longer reflect today’s high rates of part-time work and fewer jobs with pensions and benefits.
Over the years, the safety net stitched together for a different era has become an intricate web, difficult to navigate and weak at places. While warnings about inadequacies in the system have been flagged by various think tanks, there has been no concerted action to renew Canada’s social safety net until now.
Researchers from four such institutions – the Mowat Centre, the Caledon Institute of Social Policy, the Institute for Competitiveness and Prosperity and the Institute for Research on Public Policy – have banded together to launch social-architecture.ca.
