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Dissertation Proposal Gabriel Arsenault, March 2014 Title: The Social Investment State and the Social Economy: The Political Origins of Quebec’s New Social Model, 1995-1998 Supervisor: Rodney Haddow Committee members: Christopher Cochrane and Alain Noël By the end of the 1990s, it became evident that Quebec had developed a distinct social model (Vaillancourt, 2003; Noël, 2013). This state of affairs raises two puzzles. The first is about what that model is: How are Quebec’s social policies put together so that Quebec has the social model that it has? The second puzzle is about the causes of that model. Whereas all provincial welfare states have unique traits, Quebec is arguably the only province to really have a distinctive “social model”: why has Quebec developed a distinct social model in the mid-1990s? In my dissertation, I seek to resolve both puzzles, which I present in more details in sections 1 and 2, respectively. I then introduce my research strategy and design (section 3), present a preliminary breakdown and overview of my dissertation’s chapters (sections 4 and 5), discuss my method and field work (section 6), and suggest a preliminary timeline for the completion of my research (section 7). 1. Debating the explanandum: What is Quebec’s social model? The presence of a number of social innovations in Quebec suggests that Quebec has a distinct “social model”. To dispel any confusion, let me provisionally define a social model as a coherent set of features characterizing a number of social policy fields. This definition conveys three core ideas. First, a social model is restricted to a state’s social policies, i.e. the “welfare state”. In contrasts, most definitions of the Quebec model refer to a model of economic development (Bourque, 2000; Lévesque 2003; Rigaud et al. 2008). Second, a social model extends over several policy fields; it is a more general construct than, say, a “family policy model”. Third, rather than referring to the sum of a welfare state’s idiosyncrasies, a social model implies some coherence between a welfare state’s policies. This coherence can be achieved in different ways. The “Nordic” model is coherent insofar as it tends to be distinctively pro-labour across policy fields (Esping-Andersen, 1985); the more recent Danish “flexicurity” model is coherent insofar as a distinctly high social security is thought as a compensatory measure for distinctly high labour market flexibility (Wilthagen and Tros, 2004). Does Quebec have such a social model? If so, what is it? Debates regarding Quebec’s social model tend to normative (e.g. Boivine and Fortier, 1998; Venne 2003, Côté and Lévesque, 2009, Wright 2010) or, when undertaken by academics, focused on just one or two policy fields. The few Canadian social scientists who have written on Quebec’s current welfare state understood as a single system, however, concur that Quebec has a distinct social model. I nonetheless distinguish between two surprisingly “parallel” readings of Quebec’s social model. One reading stresses the more egalitarian nature of Quebec’s welfare state, whereas the other reading stresses its greater reliance on civil society actors. Let me schematically present these two readings, in turn. The “egalitarian” reading is the most common one. It argues that the Quebec welfare state has a “model” insofar as it has progressively grown to become more egalitarian and generous than other provincial welfare states since the 1990s. This distinctive feature holds 1 across a number of policy fields including higher education (lower post-secondary tuition fees), family policies (universal child care, more generous family allowances, more generous, flexible, and inclusive parental leaves), a high minimum wage (fixed at 46% of average hourly wages), some segments of health care (universal drug insurance plan, extended public home care system), and social housing (high housing allowances, greater provision of social housing). Taxes are also higher in Quebec while poverty and inequalities are lower. A clear account of this reading is found in Alain Noël’s work (e.g. 2013, 2010). Peter Graefe roughly shares this reading, although he seems especially careful not to overemphasize the distinctiveness of Quebec’s welfare state and he appears less confident of the sustainability of Quebec’s social model (Graefe 2012; Graefe and Orasch 2013). In contrast, Rodney Haddow shows, in a forthcoming book, that the distinctiveness of Quebec’s social model, at least when compared with that of Ontario, shows little signs of abatement in most policy fields. Consistent “egalitarian interpretations” of Quebec’s social model are found in Gérard Bouchard’s cultural analysis (2013) as well as in the writing of Béland and Lecours (2006, 2011). In the political realm, the view that Quebec is distinguished by a progressive social model has been most strongly upheld by Gilles Duceppe, who, while leading the Bloc Québécois, had continuously framed Quebec as being to the left of Canada on both moral and economic issues (see Caron 2008 and forthcoming for a critical perspective of this “framing”). In the popular press, Jean-François Lisée (2008, 2012) has arguably been the most competent at popularizing – and defending – this interpretation of Quebec’s social model as distinctively generous when compared to other provinces. More nuanced in his endorsement of this model, economist Pierre Fortin has also highlighted the distinctively social-democratic features of Quebec’s social model in his monthly columns in L’Actualité (see Fortin 2013 for a collection of his best columns). Consistently, right-wing critics of Quebec’s social model regularly describe Quebec’s welfare state as a distinctively “nanny state” (Marcotte, 2011), or, more politely, as relying on exceptionally high taxes and public debts (Bouchard et al. 20051). Although not in contradiction with this first reading of Quebec’s social model, a second reading instead stresses the unusually large participation of civil society in Quebec’s welfare state since the 1970s (Hamel and Jouve, 2006). Most closely associated with this reading are social economy scholars working within the UQÀM-based Centre de recherche sur les innovations sociales (CRISES). Perhaps more than anyone else, Yves Vaillancourt (e.g. 2003, 2012) has argued that, especially since the mid-1990s, social policies in Quebec have become to a unique degree in the federation co-produced – and, less often, co-constructed – by civil society actors. The distinction between co-production (i.e. co-decision in the implementation of policy) and co-construction (i.e. co-decision in the design of policy) is always porous, but good examples of co-production by the community sector include the centres de la petite enfance (Gravel et al. 2007), social enterprises offering home support services (Vaillancourt and Jetté, 2009), co-operative and not-for-profit social housing (Ducharme and Vaillancourt, 2006), social economy training and professional insertion enterprises (Larose et al. 2005), community groups working in health and social services (Jetté, 2008), cooperative health care clinics (Girard, 2012), social economy enterprises offering perinatal services, and ambulances organized as workers’ co-operatives, while the best example of co-construction is the 2002 Act to combat poverty and social exclusion (Noël, 2002; Ninacs et al. 2003). 1 This is the manifesto for a cleared-sighted (lucide) Quebec. Interestingly, the signatories include Pierre Fortin and Lucien Bouchard, a key thinker and founder of Quebec’s new social model, respectively. 2 Which of the two readings of Quebec’s social model is the right one? As John Gerring (2012, 19) aptly puts it, “the fundamental problem of descriptive inference is that for any given subject there are often multiple perspectives, each more or less valid… there is usually more than one plausible answer to the innocent question: What is that?”. Hence, there are certainly different plausible ways of understanding “Quebec’s social model”. That said, I would like to produce a third interpretation of Quebec’s social model that is both more comprehensive and theoretically more fruitful than either the egalitarian or the civil society reading. In constructing my concept of “Quebec’s social model”, I make four moves (which I now only present very schematically). First, I preliminarily characterize Quebec’s welfare state as being both more egalitarian and more reliant on the social economy than other provincial welfare states (which are comparatively less egalitarian and more reliant on the private sector). Second, I conceptualise Quebec’s welfare state’s greater egalitarianism as “greater social investments”. As further discussed in section 2.1, the social investment literature distinguishes between “old”, passive social policies and “new”, active social policies. Whereas all mature welfare states have taken a “social investment turn” in the 1990s (i.e. reorienting their resources toward active social policies), some have taken it more than others (Bonoli, 2013); I argue that the social investment turn was taken more sharply in Quebec in the mid-1990s than anywhere else in the federation2. More precisely, the generous social programs that most clearly set Quebec apart in the federation are “active” social. In contrast, cross-provincial differences in “passive” social policies tend to be much smaller. Hence, unemployment protection is a federal responsibility since 1940; Quebec has its own pension plan since 1966 but it is substantively very similar to the Canada Pension plan (and Canada’s Old Age Security applies to Quebec as in any other province); social assistance is relatively generous in Quebec but not distinctively so (Tweddle et al. 2013; see also Boychuck, 1998); and the 1984 Canada Health Act prevents major cross-provincial variations in the provision of health care (Lazar, 2009). A “social investment” reading of Quebec’s social model, then, is arguably more precise than the unqualified egalitarian reading and it has the advantage of situating the Quebec case in the comparative literature on the social investment state.

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