‘Charity begins at home’: studying the legal transplant of English welfare laws and ideologies in colonial Canada in the 18th and 19th centuries
 

Abgeschlossenes Forschungsprojekt

Ideas about regulating the poor in England and Wales began in the 16th century, with the first legal regime of locally collected and administered funds appearing in the 1601 Act for the Relief of the Poor. The Act reflected the prevailing moral sensibilities of the time regarding the ‘deserving’ and the ‘undeserving’ poor, and welfare responsibility. The Poor Laws ensured that relief would only be granted to those with solidaristic ties to the local area and only when family and kin could not provide aid, adding a legal quality to the maxim ‘charity begins at home’.

This project appraised the legal transfer of the English Poor Laws, and the ideologies underpinning them, in two Canadian provinces during the mid-18th and 19th centuries. Most Canadian jurisdictions witnessed a rejection of English Poor Laws, with Upper Canada even explicitly legislating against any transferral of a Poor Law. However, in 18th-century Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, measures nearly identical to the Elizabethan Poor Laws were adopted. This unusual choice provided ground for interesting comparative research between the English and Canadian experiences of the Poor Law system of relief. In particular, the project sought to understand how a predominant feature of the English system – the variability of its local implementation – worked outside the English parish system, and whether the application of the law was as diverse across Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Second, the project questioned whether the rigour of welfare reform in 19th-century England, born from intense political and social disdain for the Elizabethan Poor Laws, was replicated in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Dissent and dissatisfaction with the poor law system by ratepayers was found in the legislative and court records of early Halifax, NS. An assessment of welfare reform in the Canadian localities provided insight into the development of the law in context, as well as the development of societal views about the poor and the role of government.

Elements of this project are still ongoing, relating to the relationship between financial assistance and residency in the poor relief systems established in maritime Canada. English parishes jealously guarded their relief funds against strangers via a system of recognised settlement, so claimants for the funds had to be well-versed in how to answer the legal questions about settlement that would give rise to their relief. Nova Scotia produced a residency-based approach to the right to poor relief in 1771. In New Brunswick the legislature enacted similar provisions on settlement for access to poor relief in 1876. An interesting differentiation in the maritime provinces is the existence of widespread migration alongside a residency-based system of financial support. The ongoing parts of this project now turn from a macro overview of legislative development and implementation to consider more individual case studies regarding on-the-ground workings of the Canadian welfare system for those who fell outside the scope of the poor laws. This seeks to understand the effect that migration and transience had on the adoption, interpretation and development of the maritime Canadian welfare regime. Whilst the adoption of poor relief measures could allow for monetary funds to be raised by and given to local inhabitants with economic or familial connections to the individual townships of maritime Canada, little could be done for the number of shipwrecked persons, sick travellers or transient paupers appearing in the province during the 18th and 19th centuries. This next stage of the project considers provincial and colonial records and correspondences, records of the justices of the peace, and Treasury accounts to map the reaction of the maritime Canadian authorities to the challenges caused by this mobile, irregular and poor population.