Welfare Hot Buttons: Women, Work, and Social Policy Reform

Welfare Hot Buttons: Women, Work, and Social Policy Reform, Sylvia Bashevkin, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002, pp. viii, 188.

Welfare Hot Buttons raises important, and in some ways uncomfortable, questions. Its major argument, in comparing social policy reform in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada, is that the conservative leaders (Ronald Reagan, George Bush Sr., Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Brian Mulroney, Kim Campbell) were, in their social policy reforms, less punitive, less restrictive and less obsessed with paid work than their post-conservative successors (Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Jean Chrétien). This raises important questions about the importance of elections and of elected politicians. There were real expectations that, to take the Canadian example, electing Chrétien's Liberals was a major shift away from Mulroney's Conservatives yet, as Sylvia Bashevkin shows, this was not true in the vital policy area of social policy reform.