Carlo Fanelli

Bryan M. Evans

Following the 2008 global financial crisis, Canada appeared to escape the austerity implemented elsewhere, but this was spin hiding the reality. A closer look reveals that the provinces – responsible for delivering essential public and social services such as education and healthcare – shouldered the burden. The Public Sector in an Age of Austerity examines public-sector austerity in the provinces and territories, specifically addressing how austerity was implemented, what forms austerity agendas took (from regressive taxes and new user fees to public-sector layoffs and privatization schemes), and what, if any, political responses resulted. Contributors focus on the period from 2007 to 2015, the global financial crisis and the period of fiscal consolidation that followed, while also providing a longer historical context – austerity is not a new phenomenon. A granular examination of each jurisdiction identifies how changing fiscal conditions have affected the delivery of public services and restructured public finances, highlighting the consequences such changes have had for public-sector workers and users of public services. The first book of its kind in Canada, The Public Sector in an Age of Austerity challenges conventional wisdom by showing that Canada did not escape post-crisis austerity, and that its recovery has been vastly overstated.

Perspectives from Canada’s Provinces and Territories

The Public Sector in an Age of Austerity

Charles W. Smith

Transforming Provincial Politics is the first province-by-province analysis of politics and political economy in more than a decade, and the first to directly examine the turn to neoliberal policies at the provincial and territorial level and examines how neoliberal policies have affected politics in each jurisdiction in Canada.

The Political Economy of Canada's Provinces and Territories in the Neoliberal Era

Transforming Provincial Politics

Greg Albo

No government jurisdiction in Canada has so radically transformed its public policies over the past decades as Ontario, and yet the province has also maintained a striking degree of political stability in its party system. Since the 1990s, neoliberalism has been the point of reference in constructing policy agendas for all of Ontario's political parties. It has guided the strategy for governance of the dominant Liberal Party since 2003, even as it divides the province between workers and employers, north and south, rural and urban, and racialized minorities and the majority population. With a focus on the governments of Mike Harris, Dalton McGuinty, and Kathleen Wynne, Divided Province brings together leading researchers to dissect the province's public policies since the 1990s. Presenting original, state-of-the-art research, the book demonstrates that, although the Conservative government of Mike Harris implemented the sharpest and most profound shift towards the establishment of a neoliberal regime in the province, the subsequent Liberal governments consolidated that neoliberal turn. The essays in this volume explore the consequences of this ideological turn across a spectrum of policies, including health, education, poverty, energy, employment, manufacturing, and how it has impacted workers, women, First Nations, and other distinct communities. The first book to offer a comprehensive critical account of neoliberalism in Ontario, Divided Province overturns conventional readings of the province's politics and suggests that building a more democratic and egalitarian alternative to the current orthodoxy requires nothing less than a radical rupture from existing policies and political alliances. Without such a decisive break, political space may well open up again for the populist right.

Ontario Politics in the Age of Neoliberalism

Divided Province

Charles W Smith

Over the past thirty-five years, Canada’s provinces and territories have undergone significant political changes. Abandoning mid-century Keynesian policies, governments of all political persuasions have turned to deregulation, tax reduction, and government downsizing as policy solutions for a wide range of social and economic issues. Transforming Provincial Politics is the first province-by-province analysis of politics and political economy in more than a decade, and the first to directly examine the turn to neoliberal policies at the provincial and territorial level. Featuring chapters written by experts in the politics of each province and territory, Transforming Provincial Politics examines how neoliberal policies have affected politics in each jurisdiction. A comprehensive and accessible analysis of the issues involved, this collection will be welcomed by scholars, instructors, and anyone interested in the state of provincial politics today.

Stephen McBride

Bryan M. Evans, Stephen McBride, and their contributors delve further into the more practical, ground-level side of the austerity equation in Austerity: The Lived Experience. Economically, austerity policies cannot be seen to work in the way elite interests claim that they do. Rather than soften the blow of the economic and financial crisis of 2008 for ordinary citizens, policies of austerity slow growth and lead to increased inequality. While political consent for such policies may have been achieved, it was reached amidst significant levels of disaffection and strong opposition to the extremes of austerity. The authors build their analysis in three sections, looking alternatively at theoretical and ideological dimensions of the lived experience of austerity; how austerity plays out in various public sector occupations and policy domains; and the class dimensions of austerity. The result is a ground-breaking contribution to the study of austerity politics and policies.

Bryan M. Evans

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