Social Provisioning in Crisis: A Feminist Economic Analysis of the Federal Policy Response to the 2008 Economic Crisis in Canada

The 2008 economic crisis and subsequent recession in Canada was among the worst since the Great Depression. Mainstream economists have credited Canada’s policy response to the crisis in avoiding the worst of its effects. However, many Canadians continued to experience the aftershocks of the crisis long after economists considered it over. Feminist economics challenges the foundational assumptions and values of mainstream economics and defines economics as social provisioning – how we meet our human needs for sustenance. Using social provisioning as an analytical framework, this paper demonstrates that Canada’s federal policy response to the 2008 economic crisis was firmly entrenched within a capitalist, neoliberal political economy that reproduces relations of inequality, and that the determination of what constitutes an economic crisis is informed by that inequality. This analysis reveals both an alternative policy response to crisis, and a caution for future crises if past mistakes are repeated.