From UI to EI: Waging War on the Welfare State.

• Author: Haffner, John
• Position: Book review

Georges Campeau, From UI to EI: Waging War on the Welfare State, trans, by Richard Howard (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005). P.p. xiii, 235.

Georges Campeau is not happy about how the unemployment insurance regime has evolved recently in Canada. A former activist lawyer and now a professor of social law in the Faculte de science politique et de droit at Universite du Quebec a Montreal, Campeau aims to show--through a detailed discussion of the evolution of unemployment insurance in Canada--how the attitude of the state towards the unemployed is the single most important factor in the degree of protection and social support afforded the unemployed at any given time. For Campeau, all the seemingly technical questions of unemployment (and later employment) insurance--its scope, the criteria for exclusions, the duration of coverage--all these questions are ultimately determined by ideological considerations. He laments the fact that advocates fought over many decades to establish a robust system of universal social insurance for unemployment in Canada, only to have this achievement undermined by a narrowing of the scope of unemployment protection in the last couple of decades, in what he variously describes as a "counterreform ideology" (137), a "backlash" (91), a form of "revenge" (ibid.), and even a "hijacked" system (147).

The book contains considerable detail in the history it narrates. Readers interested in labour relations, social justice, law and economics, and the role of politics in judicial interpretation will all find moments of interest in this book. The argument will be especially useful for those who want to understand the significance of important court rulings, notably in the period 1940-1990, on the shape of unemployment policy in Canada. For all these merits, however, the book has some significant limitations and deficiencies.

First, the narrative is tedious in places. In most of the chapters, there are many ponderous sentences like the following: "Starting on 5 April 1987, however, retirement income would no longer be deducted from benefits when the weeks of insurable employment used to establish the benefit period were accumulated after pension payments began" (100). Such passages are not out of place in the legal academy, but the reader who was lured by the promise of a narrative about war on the welfare state might be forgiven for moments of boredom. Second, Campeau (or at least his translator) uses the term "liberal" and its...