Precarious Worlds

Contested Geographies of Social Reproduction

Deborah Cowen, Nik Heynen, Melissa Wright, Katie Meehan, Kendra Strauss

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780820348827, 9780820348810
• eBook ISBN: 9780820348803
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Social Sciences

This collection contributes to the theoretical literature on social reproduction—defined by Marx as the necessary labor to arrive the next day at the factory gate—and extended by feminist geographers and others into complex understandings of the relationship between paid labor and the unpaid work of daily life. The volume explores new terrain in social reproduction with a focus on the challenges posed by evolving theories of embodiment and identity, nonhuman materialities, and diverse economies.

Reflecting and expanding on ongoing debates within feminist geography, with additional cross-disciplinary contributions from sociologists and political scientists, Precarious Worlds explores the productive possibilities of social reproduction as an ontology, a theoretical lens, and an analytical framework for what Geraldine Pratt has called "a vigorous, materialist transnational feminism."

PART ONE

State Transformations

CHAPTER 1

Return of the Nightwatchman State?

Federalism, Social Reproduction, and Social Policy in Conservative Canada

KATE BEZANSON

On the tail of the global financial crisis of 2008, Canadians reelected Stephen Harper’s Conservatives to parliamentary office with a majority in the spring of 2011, in effect continuing Conservative rule since 2006. Although the economic crisis struck Canada with comparatively less force than it did the United States or some European Union nations, it worsened and multiplied existing poverty and disadvantage and cleared the terrain for a series of changes in federal scope and spending. In the Canadian case, and especially in a climate of economic uncertainty, the Conservative government’s project of open federalism laid the foundation for a realignment in the distribution of the work of social reproduction. This recent economic crisis, and the return of the Conservatives despite their anti-redistribution policies, underscores the need to focus attention on social reproduction and production at a broad level and on the ways in which economic changes are mediated by states, families, and individuals more specifically. Put simply, we must direct attention to how the physical, social, and psychological work of caring for people is done or not done, by whom (women, men, states, markets, charities), under what conditions (forced/coerced, voluntary, subsidized), and with what effect (more or less time seeking wages/income; more or less time provisioning; gendered, class-based, or racialized stratification) in order to understand the implications of open federalism for Canadian society.

The principle of classical federalism promoted by the Conservative government builds on existing neoliberal tendencies (see Mahon 2008) but adds a neo-conservative twist by emphasizing family life and traditional values even as such policies erode the conditions for familial reproduction and life’s work. While Canada is a highly decentralized federation, the Conservatives are deepening this decentralization via an emphasis on criminal justice, commerce, the military, and trade at the federal level while further divesting federal responsibility and standards for a host of “soft” issues, such as the environment, labor, and income support to provincial and municipal governments that frequently lack the requisite resources. In an effort to explore what appear to be deeply gendered, racialized, and class-based consequences to an emerging nightwatchman federal state, the lens of social reproduction is applied here to pull apart the dynamics and ideological basis of this new federalism.

This chapter seeks to draw out the alliance between neoliberalism and neo-conservatism and begin to understand its material consequences for families and households. Thus, the chapter sketches the kind of state that may be emerging by asking three key questions: (1) What might be the implications of Prime Minister Harper’s federalism and governance in relation to social reproduction? (2) How do socially conservative approaches to gender and family life animate Conservative social policy? and (3) Do social policy changes, proposals, and omissions suggest a broader reconfiguration of the existing gender order?

The chapter begins with a brief discussion of Canadian legal tradition, structure, and form. The chapter then examines Conservative Party views of “open federalism” and maps the contours and consequences of the neoconservative and neoliberal approach. Finally, the chapter explores the material impacts of Harper government policies, such as childcare, maternity leaves, and families’ income splitting, arguing that such policies resurrect male-breadwinner family norms even as they prioritize families with high incomes, while subjecting those who are socially and economically vulnerable to an escalated disciplinary neoliberalism (see Gill and Roberts 2011). The gendered tasks and processes of social reproduction, including transforming welfare incomes into the necessities of life and internalizing/normalizing social stigma, are decentralized to provinces and to families as the state is transformed from a safety net into a “nightwatchman” (Rice and Prince 2013), with the result of making the lives of the most vulnerable even more precarious.

Federalism and Social Reproduction in Canada

FEDERALISM, NEOLIBERALISM, AND NEOCONSERVATISM IN CANADA

Canada in the 2011 federal election was a different place than it was in 2006. In the 2006 election, the Canadian economy was booming and boasted significant budget surpluses. The federal Liberal Party, in power for thirteen years, had negotiated agreements with the provinces for the creation of a national system of early learning and childcare. The central topics in the federal leaders’ debate were equality issues: childcare, reproductive rights, and the Canadian charter of rights. The expansion of segments of Canada’s welfare state infrastructure was curtailed when the Conservative Party won a minority in that election. Issues of equality were also transformed through a series of funding decisions (Dobbin 2010). By the 2008 election, the economy moved to the fore of public priorities as a global recession began to take hold; Canadians faced this recession with greater financial uncertainty because of significant tax cuts over the intervening two years. By the 2011 election, despite a $56 billion federal deficit, the key issue in the leaders’ debate pertained to governance and accountability, especially in relation to the proroguing of Parliament (twice) and the unprecedented contempt of Parliament judgment against the Conservatives. Issues of equality were totally absent, and women were mentioned only during a discussion on gun control in reference to their being killed by guns. In the seven years since 2006, the foundations of federalism and governance have changed.

Canada is a complex federation whose history is shaped by a vast geography, proximity to the United States, and an ongoing negotiation over federal and provincial/territorial areas of jurisdiction, especially with reference to the French-speaking province of Quebec. Canada has a federal government that sits in Ottawa (Ontario) in central Canada and thirteen provincial and territorial governments. Canada is a constitutional monarchy with a Westminster-style parliamentary democracy. It has a bicameral national legislature, with an appointed Senate (upper house) and an elected House of Commons (lower house). Constitutional divisions of power and responsibility between the federal and provincial/territorial governments have evolved from being highly centralized in the hands of the federal government to being one of the most decentralized federations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) (Gray 2010).

Despite this decentralization, important programs remain federally administered and/or regulated, such as employment-based social insurance policies like Employment Insurance, the Canada Pension Plan, and workers’ compensation. Transfers of federally collected tax dollars (some conditional on meeting certain national standards) are made to the provinces/territories for areas such as health care, education, and social assistance (welfare). Until recently, the federal government played a direct role in areas such as social housing and homelessness, childcare, and training. Although it funds hospital and physician services for citizens, Canada is a liberal welfare state in which responsibility for social reproduction “is largely conceived of as a choice, and thus the responsibility primarily of the family, and in the absence of the family, the market” (White 2012, 661). Who does what—federal or provincial, municipal or collective, market or individual—matters in terms of mobilizing and sharing resources, establishing and maintaining standards, and attending to issues of equality and voice. Federalism, in other words, matters.

The Conservative federal government under the leadership of Stephen Harper came to power with a vision for decentralizing key elements of the federal state, transforming its institutions (especially the judiciary), and enshrining property rights in the Canadian constitution (see Bezanson 2010). While it built upon the neoliberal (later social investment) approach of the long-governing Liberal Party (Jenson 2009a), it drew its road map from a melding of social conservatism, western Canadian populism, and the ideas of neoliberal intellectuals such as Hayek and Friedman (Boily, Boisvert, and Kermoal 2005; Boily 2007; Bezanson 2010). “Open federalism” is a term employed by Prime Minister Harper (Harper 2004) to capture his vision for Canadian federalism (see Jeffrey 2011). It involves a strong adherence to the constitutional division of powers between federal and provincial/territorial governments (a variant on states’ rights approaches in the United States). This vision views all matters of social reproduction as provincial and local, and it understands the federal role as strictly related to commerce, the military, and corrections (Kent 2008). It is consistent with the neoliberal approach to federalism, which centralizes most “market-enabling policy capabilities at the federal level” (Harmes 2006, 736) while decentralizing tax and regulatory powers in order to encourage competition among provinces/territories.

Open federalism, a centerpiece of the 2006 Conservative election, has, in practice, reduced fiscal room for existing and new social policy initiatives via increased spending on law and order issues, despite declining crime rates and austerity budgeting (see Prince 2012). This kind of paradigmatic restructuring (Orloff and Palier 2009) involves dropping support for a set of principles that have served as a basis for policy action (Rice and Prince 2013). Open federalism must be viewed, then, as part of a broader philosophical and ideological approach to transforming the role of the federal government in Canada. This approach is at once neoliberal and moral in orientation.

The Conservative Party vision is one in which the welfare state is reduced and/or abolished and a socially conservative morality is brought to bear in areas such as the courts, charter rights, crime, private property, family, the military, and immigration (Bezanson 2010; Arat-Koc 2012; Porter 2012). The moral orientation of the party has been obscured during its minority tenure (2006–11), as Prime Minister Harper (Harper 2003) argued that the only way to make the Conservatives into what he called the “natural governing party” was to emphasize economic ideas while downplaying moral ones. The explicit policy visage of incremental change has been successful in casting the leader of the party as a center-right fiscal conservative. The values conservatism that forms a large part of the conservative base and philosophical orientation, however, has made strong inroads in meaningful and hard-to-reverse ways, particularly around how the responsibility for social policy is shared between the federal and provincial/territorial governments, senate and judicial appointments, and, consequently, around family policy (MacDonald 2011).

The majority government, in its first session of Parliament, substantially laid the groundwork for further decentralization, a reduced social infrastructure, and an altered distribution of the work of social reproduction. The incremental Conservative approach is changing the landscape of Canadian constitutionalism and federalism, and these changes now have a lasting legacy: the prime minister made more appointments to the senate than any other prime minister, and the upper chamber is now Conservative dominated. This guarantees the passage of key Conservative pieces of legislation, but it also blocks future attempts by other parties to alter current initiatives.

Some of the façade of moderation that accompanies the Harper government’s incrementalism stems from its response, albeit much delayed, to the economic crisis that took hold in 2008. While the prime minister has appeared to compromise on key Conservative Party ideals, especially when he agreed to stimulus spending in the 2009 budget, extending to but not beyond the 2010 budget, the spending was overwhelmingly infrastructural. This spending boosted mostly male employment and has been termed a “macho stimulus plan” (Abelde 2008). Canadian banks were comparatively better regulated and less exposed to the subprime market than their OECD peers, yet banks received significant sums from both the Canadian (CDN$75 billion) and U.S. (US$111 billion) governments (Government of Canada 2008; Slater 2010; see also Bakker 2012). The automotive sector was also assisted, but the bulk of public attention was directed at spending on primarily “shovel-ready” projects. In fact, unlike the United States, where elected representatives debated bailout packages, no such parliamentary process occurred in Canada. Moreover, the Keynesian-style measures served as a highly visible source of political capital of federal government dollars invested into local constituency projects. The series of major tax cuts that preceded the economic crisis positioned the Conservatives so that the budget surplus was largely eliminated, and thus the need to respond to calls for expansions of social spending at the federal level could be avoided.

The neoliberal “disembedded federalism” (Harmes 2007) approach coexists with a deeply moral social project. The prevalence of such strong social conservatism is unusual in Canadian politics. Social conservatism is, however, a core facet of the Conservative Party: many of its Members of Parliament have strong ties to antichoice, pro-gun, and traditional family, religious, and lobbying organizations. In fact, in 2009, 75 percent of the Conservative Caucus were members of the secretive Pro-Life Parliamentary Caucus (Haussman and Rankin 2009). The name “Conservative” itself is misleading as it reflects a compromise reached in the merger between the former Progressive Conservative Party and the right-wing, religiously based Alliance Party in 2003. Responding to social conservative grievances, a series of changes in laws, courts, and equality issues have occurred, including: changing the way judicial appointments are made, in part in response to Conservative concerns about judicial interpretations of the charter’s equality provisions; eliminating the national gun registry; cutting the federal agency Status of Women Canada and removing the word “equality” from its mandate; eliminating the Court Challenges Program and funding for the National Association of Women and the Law while appointing conservative jurists to federal courts and regulatory agencies (MacDonald 2010); proposing an international maternal and child health initiative that does not include reproductive rights; and eliminating the nascent national system of early learning and care. According to Porter (2012, 24), since 2006, “more than 30 women’s organizations and research bodies have had their funding cut or been defunded,” primarily when the government was posting a surplus. These cuts and changes followed at least a decade of neoliberal delegitimatization of advocacy groups as “special interests” (Jenson 2009b, 463).

Socially conservative values thus infuse the more neoliberal open federalism project, at once individualizing and familializing its effects. The economic crisis provided a pathway for the project of open federalism and the attendant dismantling of social entitlements, federal bureaucracy, and social services. These changes have far-reaching implications and appear to have begun a process of shifting the existing class and gender orders in Canada. We now turn to a specification of the relationship between social reproduction and Canadian federalism under the Harper government.

SOCIAL REPRODUCTION AND CANADIAN FEDERALISM

My version of conservatism is summed up in three Fs: freedom, family and faith.

—PRIME MINISTER STEPHEN HARPER, Speech to the Manning Institute for Democracy, March 2009

Unusual on the Canadian political menu, defense of “family values”—especially paired with religion—is a powerful political invocation: it serves discursively as a made-in-Canada approach to realigning the work of social reproduction, under the auspices of attending to Canadian women’s very real need for greater balance between their paid work and their family lives. The Harper government’s form of open federalism is buttressed by a rearticulation of the relationship between the state and the household that relies heavily on rhetoric of “the ordinary Joe” and his family. Family, however, is normatively construed. Put plainly, “Joe” lives with “Jane” and they have kids; even as they embrace a particular and often simplistic commonsense view of social and economic issues, Joe and Jane still must find ways to absorb the insecurities produced by neoliberal atomization and individualization. Framing political strateg...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: New Frontiers in Life’s Work
• Part One State Transformations
• Part Two Re-placing Care
• Part Three Bodies and Barriers
• Part Four Working Materialities
• Conclusion: Demanding Life’s Work
• Contributors
• Index