There is a vast social policy literature on how Canada and the United States share key characteristics associated with the liberal welfare regime such as significant reliance on both social assistance and tax-subsidized private benefits and services. Yet, a closer look at these two countries points to key differences in areas such as fiscal federalism, health care, old-age pensions, and family benefits. This special issue of the Journal of Comparative and International Social Policy looks at recent social policy developments in Canada and the United States in ways that further illustrate the broad similarities, but also the key cross-national differences in policy design and real-world consequences, between these two countries. This Introduction explains why Canada and the United States are “unidentical twins” in social policy before discussing the contributions comprising this special issue.

In 1965 and 1966, the United States and Canada adopted single-payer models of government insurance for physician and hospital services – universal in Canada, but restricted to certain population groups in the US. At the time, the American and Canadian political economies of health care and landscapes of public opinion were remarkably similar, and the different policy designs must be understood as products of the distinctive macro-level politics of the day. Subsequently, however, the different scopes of single-payer coverage would drive the two systems in different directions. In Canada, the single-payer system became entrenched in popular support and in the nexus of interest it created between the medical profession and the state. In the US, Medicare became similarly entrenched in popular support, but did so as part of the larger multi-payer private insurance system. In the process universal single-payer coverage became politically iconic in Canada and taboo in the US.

Drawing on the literature on federalism and public policy, the present article explores the recent politics of two highly-similar and closely integrated Canadian public pension programs created in the mid-1960s: the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) and the Quebec Pension Plan (QPP). This article argues that the parallel evolution of CPP/QPP can be understood by examining how the unique jurisdictional arrangements for the CPP/QPP interacted with other factors to generate by these linked programs have led to the emergence of specific federalism policy dynamics, while muting or foreclosing other potential policy dynamics. As shown, governments have engaged in a process of ‘collusive benchmarking’ that has limited the scope of the available policy options. Differing demographic trends in Quebec and the ‘Rest of Canada’ have strained but also reinforced this policymaking dynamic in recent years. Simultaneously, intergovernmental race to the top dynamics have facilitated the recent push for both CPP and, later, QPP expansion.

Over the last few decades, the position of women vis-à-vis the welfare state has changed dramatically. Welfare states have adapted to women's increased labour force participation and to the “new social risks” that characterize postindustrial societies. In this paper, we examine gendered policy developments in the US, focusing on conceptions of vulnerability that inform policies meant to mitigate gendered social risks. Focusing on three policy areas: parental leave, domestic violence and disability, we show that policies increasingly target women's integration into the workforce and self-regulation as strategies to mitigate gendered social risk. We also discuss how these policies rely on individual interventions implemented by what we call punitive therapy practitioners, who encourage women's workforce participation and psychological self-regulation. Finally, we argue that enduring gendered conceptions of vulnerability have shaped the specific designs of policies that emerged in the 1960s–1970s, intensified through the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, and persist today.

Early childhood education and care (ECEC) policies and services in Canada exhibit marked gaps in access, creating ‘childcare deserts’ and distributional disadvantages. Cognate family policies that support children and families, such as parental leave and child benefits, are also underdeveloped. This article examines the current state of ECEC services in Canada and the reasons behind the uncoordinated array of services and policy, namely, a liberal welfare state tradition that historically has encouraged private and market-based care, a comparatively decentralised federal system that militates against coordinated policy-making, and a welfare state built on gendered assumptions about care work. The article assesses recent government initiatives, including the federal 2017 Multilateral Framework on Early Learning and Child Care, concluding that existing federal and provincial initiatives have limited potential to bring about paradigmatic third-order change.

During the Obama presidency, Republicans made major gains in state legislative elections, especially in the South and the Midwest. Republicans’ control grew from 13 legislatures in 2009 to 32 in 2017. A major but largely unexamined consequence of this profound shift in state-level partisan control was the resurgence of efforts to re-segregate public education. We examine new re-segregation policies, especially school district secession and anti-busing laws, which have passed in these states. We argue that the marked reversal in desegregation patterns and upturn in re-segregated school education is part of the Republican Party's anti-civil rights and anti-federal strategies, dressed up in the ideological language of colour-blindness.

There has been a growing discussion in recent years about rising inequality in the U.S. Yet, this discourse, in focusing on the fortunes of the top 1%, distracted attention from the design of policy initiatives aimed at improving socio-economic conditions for the poor. This paper examines the development of anti-poverty politics and policy in the US during the Obama era. It analyses how effective the strategies and programmes adopted were and asks how they fit with models of policy change. The paper illustrates that the Obama administration did adopt an array of anti-poverty measures in the stimulus bill, but these built on existing programmes rather than create new ones and much of the effort was stymied by institutional obstacles. The expansion of the Medicaid program, which was part of the ACA, was also muted by institutional opposition, but it was a more path breaking reform than is often appreciated.

Poverty reduction strategies (PRS) have become a popular instrument for addressing poverty globally. According to their proponents, PRS focus and coordinate poverty reduction efforts in order to overcome traditional economic and socio-demographic obstacles and reduce poverty unconditionally. According to their detractors, however, governments use PRS as ‘window dressing’ to gloss over unsuccessful and/or partial poverty reduction efforts. In Canada, all ten provinces have committed to adopting PRS. In this study, I identify the timing of the introduction of PRS action plans and explore whether they have tended to coincide with changes in provincial poverty levels. I find that more often than not levels have actually dropped before rather than after the introduction of PRS. This suggests that governments may have indeed used PRS as window dressing – but to showcase and claim credit for poverty reduction successes.