Rodney Haddow explains and compares the Canada Assistance Plan (CAP) and the Social Security Review, the two most extensive attempts by the federal government to reform Canadian poverty policy during the postwar era. Using previously confidential government documents and interviews with many of the important players, he examines the forces that stimulated the emergence and subsequent development of these two policy initiatives and the circumstances that determined their quite different fates.

Poverty Reform in Canada addresses a central theoretical concern in the contemporary study of public policy - the dichotomy between society-centred and state-centred perspectives on the modern state. Haddow makes the case that poverty reform during the 1960s and 1970s can be explained by combining insights from these seemingly mutually exclusive theoretical perspectives, arguing that the societal perspective explains the important preconditions of policy making, such as the impact of policy legacies, ideological beliefs, and accumulation strategies that reflect the historic weakness of working-class politics, while the statist perspective accounts for the impact of federalism and evolving structures of cabinet decision making.