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 Facult de science politique et de droit at Universit du Qubec
Montral, Campeau aims to showthrough a detailed discussion of the evolution of
unemployment insurance in Canadahow 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) insuranceits scope,
the criteria for exclusions, the duration of coverageall 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 variants in both positive and
negative senses at different moments in the textat one point even within the same
paragraph1without defining the various usages. Lastly, the epilogue ends with a bill
1 The liberal reading on this issue represented by Abrahams was often demolished … A number of
decisions on voluntary leaving and misconduct reflected the neoliberal context … (170). A third use
of the term occurs where Campeau describes the Gill Report that linked the financial predicament of
the unemployment insurance system with its liberal policies (in this case Campeau uses the term in
quotation marks) (78).
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tabled in 2001, and the book claims to be accurate only as of 2002,2 even though it
was published much later in English, in 2005.
These complaints, however, are all of secondary importance. The core deficiency
of the book is the overwhelmingly one-sided character of the story it wants to tell: a
glaring bias that ultimately eclipses the admirable research and sound analysis of its
better moments.
Campeau aims to defend and affirm an understanding of unemployment
insurance as a form of social insurance. His commitment is rooted in a simple idea in
the tradition of Jacob Lawrence Cohen, an author of the 1930s whom Campeau
paraphrases as arguing that no worker should bear the responsibility for the
unemployment risk personally since that person had no control over the causes of
unemployment, which was generated by the operation of the economy (68). If
unemployment is primarily a failure of the market, then it should fall to the state, in
Campeaus view, to compensate people for this failure.
Many people, perhaps most people, would agree with Campeau on this
proposition if stated at a high enough level of abstraction. Not all reasonable people,
however, would agree on the detailed implications of the claim. Campeaus argument
quickly turns doctrinaire in his tacit assumption that anyone who would want to
qualify or question this claim in any way is self-evidently hostile to the welfare state,
or indifferent to the human face of suffering. Thus Campeau speaks disdainfully of
the actuarial ideology (see e.g. 78) that dares to ask questions about the financial
sufficiency of the unemployment insurance system: in his view, such questions are
cold (102) and distract from the human reality of unemployment, and they are part
of the neoliberal approach (103). Similarly, even if some people have committed
fraud under the unemployment insurance scheme, Campeau insists that so many
cases were motivated by the survival instinct (155). In his rosy conception of the
unemployed, he leaves aside the question of what proportion of fraud cases might
have been motivated by mere criminality. Campeau is also impatient with
conventional economic arguments that an overly generous compensation scheme
could unintentionally and perversely encourage some people in the direction of
unemployment instead of employment.3 Is it the case that everyone who is prepared
to consider these more textured questions can only be described as neoliberal
ideologues?
Campeau, at least, does not want to pursue such questions very far. Much of the
last few chapters reads like a story about hamartia, of how the policy arrow has
missed its mark of generous, universal compensation.4 Campeau is most dogmatic
2 I stress that the book reflects the state of unemployment insurance legislation as of 30 September
2002 (ibid. at xiii).
3 See e.g. Campeaus purely descriptive (and by implication, dismissive) treatment of the moral
hazard argument as the keystone of the actuarial ideology (71).
4 Or as Jerold Waltman puts it, what Campeau wants is a return to 1971 (Book Review of From
UI to EI: Waging War on the Welfare State by Georges Campeau (2004) 15:4 Law & Pol. Book Rev.
433
BOOK NOTE / RECENSION SIMPLE
2006]
where he simply describes the alternatives that evolved in place of this idealas
though those descriptions will be so manifestly repugnant to the reader that it is not
necessary to point out their flaws or to refute the assumptions underlying them.
Consider how he discusses one product of the so-called neoliberal ideology in the
1990s: the idea that Ottawas Keynesian postwar strategy had to be reviewed, and
more specifically, the notion that [t]he governments redistributive role must be
limited to the needy (149). The author laments how the universality of the past
would now be replaced by an effort to target the disadvantaged (ibid.). Yet there are
many readers who would need to be persuaded why this targeting of the
disadvantaged or the needy is an unreasonable, cold, and inhumane development,
rather than simply told that the development took place.
The concluding chapters left this reader, at least, with many questions. Does
Campeau have a theory about how markets and governments can together aim to
maximize employment, and should they do so? Would it not make sense to design
overall unemployment policy, including any possible job training measures, with this
prior employment objective in mind? Why is the goal of financial self-sufficiency in
an unemployment insurance scheme so inappropriate; and why, for that matter, should
actuaries not contribute their expertise in the pursuit of this goal? And finally, why
should policy makers not make an effort to minimize abuses and unintentional work
disincentives in the compensation system? The reader who opens the book as an
agnostic, ready to be converted to Campeaus vision, may find herself closing the
book with heretical questions along these lines.
John Haffner
322, online: Law and Politics Book Review
