Depending on who you ask, Canada’s social safety net has not held up to the test of COVID-19. And last Monday’s federal budget patched some (even many) of the holes, but did not radically reimagine what it means to support vulnerable communities or help them flourish. 

Sarah Schulman and Gord Tulloch are the authors of a new book called The Trampoline Effect: Reimagining Our Social Safety Nets. The book envisions a future where social safety nets don’t catch and trap the people who access them, but rather trampoline them back up when they’re ready. 

How might this future come true? Future of Good publisher and CEO Vinod Rajasekaran sat down with Schulman and Tulloch to find out. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Vinod Rajasekaran: There were hundreds of profound, provocative questions in your book. One of the most profound, for me, was ‘Do I matter?’ How has the pandemic shaped how people answer this question? 

Gord Tulloch: I think for folks who were on the margins who were already questioning the extent to which they mattered, they discovered that when push came to shove, they didn’t matter in terms of our triage ethics, where funding and resources were going, and so forth. But, like any sort of crisis or catastrophe, it creates a moment of pause in anyone’s life. Death or the threat of death, or the serious destruction to the usual flows of our lives creates a moment of contemplation — around what does it mean to be Canadian, what does it mean to build back better, and what does it mean to build a meaningful, purposeful life? I don’t think we’ve answered the question. 

Vinod: Let’s zoom out a bit. How do you characterize the social services systems in Canada? 

Sarah Schulman: Prior to the pandemic, it was stressed and strained and cracking and overburdened. It wasn’t able to make much movement. A worldwide catastrophe like a pandemic shows that there can be some level of movement — I guess it’s a question of where that movement is. We’ve seen resource flows and practices able to shift pretty quickly. We’ve seen the biggest change to benefits structures since the advent of the welfare state. 

One of the unique features of the Canadian welfare state is that so much of the delivery comes down not to government but to a very disaggregated system of charities and non-profits and organizations, and they all have to shift their practice overnight as well. Many have, overnight. So on one level, we’ve seen that it is possible to change, but changing practices and resource flows are the easy parts. They are the parts of the iceberg that you see and you can navigate around. The other layers are relationships and power dynamics, and I think there are some glimpses of changes in that within our Canadian welfare state, with the influx of mutual aid societies, the recognition that these horizontal relationships rather than these vertical relationships were part of the ways in which we needed to care for one another. But some of that has died down, and institutions have crowded that space. 

The layer that’s the hardest to see and therefore the hardest to change is values and beliefs and logics. If anything, I think the pandemic has strengthened the divide between safety and flourishing. On one hand, rightly so — lives were at stake — but we also don’t realize how isolation and loneliness also put lives at stake. There’s an existential crisis along with a physical crisis. We don’t realize how much of the things we do to keep people safe actually detract from their sense of self, their sense of being, their sense of belonging. 

Vinod: How does this show up in our social service organizations?

Gord: All care is mediated by relationships, so the quality of that relationship will determine in many ways what the outcome is. When we ask someone to show up to a professional relationship, we dehumanize the person we’re engaged with, as well as the practitioner. The outcome of that can be, rather than empowerment and growth and learning, it can be humiliation and shame. And I think the risk of professionalization is that it delegitimizes other roles. No one else is qualified now — there’s a professional there. And that’s deeply problematic, especially as the system grows and that of the everyday neighbourhoods and communities and families begin to atrophy, and all of the personal competence around what it means to live together in community. 

Vinod: I want to read out a quote from the book, something I didn’t think I’d hear: “Our social service system counts only certain needs: our safety, shelter, food, income, and physical care. It has few ways of assessing people’s needs for adventure, purpose, connection, or growth. Intake forms generally don’t include boxes people can tick to express their capabilities, skills, or hopes.” What do we lose when our social services don’t take these things into account?

Gord: We’re totalizing people in terms of their deficits, which is a shame-inducing process. If we’re unable to enter the fullness of a relationship with someone based on the wholeness that they present, in the same way that we want to be seen for the wholeness that we represent, then that relationship is going to become increasingly transactional, which is going to interfere with the outcomes that we want. 

To watch a video of the full conversation — including much more on the power dynamics in our current social safety nets and how this kind of transformational work might be funded — become a Future of Good member today. 

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