Dependents' Allowances

In the pile of letters sent to Smallwood in 1949, there is one from a mother asking for help for her son.¹⁴ She said that the young man could not work. He had been born with disabilities. He could not go fishing with his father. He depended on his parents for everything. Was there any help he could get?

In 1949, the Newfoundland government brought in a special kind of allowance. It was meant for people like this young man. It was for adults who could not work because they were disabled. A doctor had to sign a form saying the person could not work because of a disability. It could be mental or physical.

There were many problems with this allowance. It was hard to decide who should get it. The government tried ways to make it work better. There were still people left out. No one knew how or where they fit into the social welfare system.

Mothers' and dependents' allowances were not around for very long. By 1955, they were part of a larger program.

When we look back on this time, we may wonder why the government tried so many things. It started programs, then changed them to other ones. It broke things into groups, then put them back together. There may be two reasons for this. One reason is simple: the government did not have any real answers about how to create a good program of social services. It tried things; if they didn't work, it tried something else.

There is another reason why so many things were done in such a hurry. Before Confederation, J.R. Smallwood had made many promises. Now he had to show people that his government was really changing things. He had to have "something to show" in order to get people to vote for him in the next election.

We can see the same thing happen today. Sometimes, the programs we get are not the best ones. Governments may not wait until they have the best programs they can put together. If they do wait, we might think they are doing nothing. We might vote them out of office.