Making the Welfare State Work for Extraction: Poverty Policy as the Regulation of Labor and Land

Although the welfare state has been widely theorized as a mechanism for the management of capitalist crisis, these analyses have often pivoted on the problem of social regulation. Drawing on the case of Canadian resource extraction, this article builds on these theories by interrogating the geography of welfare state regulation. Analyzing the history of the Canadian welfare state in relation to specific historical geographies of extraction, I argue that Canadian welfare policy has been a powerful tool in state efforts to make and regulate labor markets for resource extraction. The postwar period in Canada marked not only the heyday of welfare state expansion but also the intensification of industrial resource extraction and an overarching state anxiety about national productivity and waste. During this time, poverty policy emerged as a key mechanism for the state coordination of surplus: on the one hand, surplus labor; on the other, surplus land and production capacity. Drawing on interviews and governmen...