CHILD-CARE IN CANADA AND SWEDEN - POLICY AND POLITICS

An analysis of child cave arrangements provides a window into the vary ing gender assumptions that underpin different welfare states. This pa per examines policies affecting child care (both daycare and maternal or parental leave) in Sweden and Canada. Child cave arrangements in th e two countries differ in ways that the literature on welfare states l eads one to expect. It would be a mistake, however, to stop here with the ''liberal'' Canadian and ''social democratic'' Swedish models froz en in time and space. Child care arrangements are historical products, and unfinished ones at that. In this paper I analyze the politics sur rounding the development of postwar child care policies in Sweden and Canada. I argue that, although child care arrangements in the two coun tries appear to fit the models developed by theorists who focus on the relative strength and strategic capacity of national labor movements, feminists, organising in ways appropriate to the political conditions in which they found themselves, had an important role to play. The fi nal part of the paper examines the contemporary developments in both c ountries.