Western societies are entering a crucial period of debate about the future of the welfare state in which the rights and obligations of individuals‚ families‚ and communities must be reassessed. Much of the debate should‚ of necessity‚ focus on the entitlements of the aged and the distribution of resources between one generation and the next.¹ It is clear that the aged have already become a subject of concern. Many argue‚ however‚ that current discussions have barely touched upon the true complexity of the issues involved.²

According to newspapers‚ Statistics Canada‚ or any one of a number of publications about pensions‚...

The current panic over the aging of the population is often assumed to be an unprecedented product of recent demographic trends‚ but that assumption is incorrect. The Ontario government of the 1890s had similar concerns. Analogous to the situation today‚ government officials assumed that in previous generations the aged population was small and that an aging population necessarily represented a unique crisis. As the following chapters shall explain‚ however‚ much of the panic nineteenth-century officials demonstrated had little to do with the actual number of old people in the province or with any real increases in the level of dependency...

Any investigation of the social‚ physical‚ and economic circumstances of the aged must begin with the issue of where and with whom the aged lived. In Canada‚ however‚ little is known about the composition of the elderly population in the nineteenth century. Several studies have charted the growth of the elderly population since 1900‚ but it has generally been accepted that prior to this date there was only a small population of old people in Canada and that their numbers remained fairly stable. Also‚ since major changes in the position of the elderly in society have occurred only in recent...

Until recently, most literature on the history of the aged, accepting the general argument of government reports, has focused on their poverty and dependency.¹ This has certainly been true of Canadian historical writing on the subject. Richard Deaton, for instance, sums up the basic premise of most historical work on the aged when he asserts that “in British North America the condition of the elderly has been characterized by their continuous impoverishment from at least the early nineteenth-century.”²

In Canada, it has only been in the last two decades that historians have begun to study the aged, and, despite growing...

In the 1890s, much of the debate concerning the state’s responsibilities towards the aged revolved around the issue of family obligations. This discussion rested upon two assumptions: that the care of the dependent aged had traditionally been the sole responsibility of their families, and that late-nineteenth-century families were shirking their responsibilities and refusing to provide the necessary care to their aged relatives. These assumptions became the basis of and justification for major policy decisions which redefined the boundaries between family obligations and state responsibilities and dramatically increased the degree to which families and, more particularly, younger generations were made responsible...

Just as the state has enacted major changes in the social-welfare system during the last fifty years, the second half of the nineteenth century also witnessed a significant transformation in poor-relief policies. Similar to recent policy changes related to the aged, the “great transformation of social experience,” as Michael Katz describes it,¹ and the alterations in social policy that accompanied it during the middle and latter decades of the nineteenth century had an important impact on the lives of the indigent aged in Ontario.

During the later half of the nineteenth century, the Ontario government came to accept a great...

At the end of the nineteenth century, institutionalization rates in Ontario were soaring and the cost of constructing and maintaining public institutions for the indigent was rising steeply. Within these institutions the growth of the aged segment of the population was particularly acute. The Ontario government, accordingly, sought to save itself money by halting the tide of institutionalization, especially among the aged. One way it attempted to do this was to shame families into taking on a greater share of responsibility for the dependent elderly. As a result, numerous public statements were made concerning the degree to which families were...

It is clear that nineteenth-century institutional or long-term-care policies had a negative impact on the aged, who found it difficult to receive the care they required, and on their families, who had to shoulder the burden of caring for those aged people who were deemed ineligible for institutional care. What is unclear, however, is whether the government policies that created these problems for the aged and their families actually benefitted the state in any way.

Despite reducing social spending in relation to all other government spending, enforcing family obligations for caregiving, and restricting the elderly’s access to institutional care, the...

This study began with the assertion that the state plays a central role in determining how individuals and society view the dependent aged and the family’s obligations towards them. It was also argued that exactly what role the state has chosen to play has been determined by three factors: the degree of concern about the size of the aged population; beliefs about the level of need and dependency among that population; and the extent to which the state is concerned with fiscal restraint. In periods when the state fears a massive increase in the size of the aged population and...