L’État-providence soutient qui et comment? Le logement des ménages à revenu modeste dans trois provinces canadiennes, 1975-2015

Although understudied, low-income housing policy in Canadian provinces have experienced fundamental shifts since the welfare state’s expansion during the post-war era. These shifts relate to who benefits from public monies and how these are spent. Such changes raise important questions for our understanding of the welfare state. This dissertation examines the policy similarity of low-income housing policy in British Columbia, Alberta and Quebec. The resemblance is particularly interesting after the federal government’s disengagement from the low-income housing domain in the mid-1990s. The policy similarity focuses around three fundamental shifts: 1) targeting of vulnerable citizens; 2) construction of new social/affordable housing units through third sector providers rather than government-owned public housing projects; 3) stronger use of private market instruments (housing allowance and rent supplement). How and why did the provinces decide to design similar housing policies? Yet the three provinces are known to have different approaches with regard to social policy. Starting with empirical material collected in archives and through interviews with policy elites, the analysis demonstrates that the three fundamental shifts in each province result from the interaction of two processes. The most important one is the puzzling process with its two learning mechanisms (social and instrumental). They can help us to understand that in a context of cost-containment, decision-makers have made the difficult choice to target the most vulnerable citizens following an equity principle, and to move away from the traditional public housing model for efficiency reasons. Public administrators in the three provinces have mostly financed non-profit housing owned by non-profit groups in the third sector and supported private market instruments. However, the puzzling process meets with the path dependence process and its two mechanisms (policy feedback and increasing returns) in the decision-making phase. Both of these mechanisms are useful to understand why subsidies to third sector groups and the use of housing allowances as well as rent supplements, which have started before the federal withdrawal, were pursued. Therefore the fundamental shifts with regard to policy instruments exhibit a certain form of continuity. In addition to the empirical contribution resulting from the study of three major provinces from the 1970s to the 2010s, the thesis develops an analytical framework around policy learning and the permanent search for the best use of scarce resources. This mechanismic framework furthers our understanding of government decision-making, between innovation and continuity forces, with the objective to maximize social welfare at the lowest possible cost for government. Based on welfare economics premises, this analytical framework relies on traditional cost-benefit evaluation seeking efficiency, but also integrates the normative aspect of equity.

Keyphrases: Social housing, Social policy, Welfare state, Mechanisms, Decision-making