This paper exploits the fact that a confluence of events in the mid-1990s caused Canadian provincial governments to re-examine the design of their social-assistance programs. Three provinces in particular - Alberta, British Columbia, and Ontario - chose to introduce substantial changes to the administrative procedures by which applicants applied to gain, and maintain, access to social assistance. We identify the relative contributions of economic influences, cuts to social-assistance benefits, and new administrative procedures on the fraction of the population eligible for social assistance.

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Statistics Canada has stopped publishing data on Canadian provincial government budgets, leaving researchers without the ability to examine the fiscal policy choices of those governments. We present a data set describing the budgets of each of the ten provinces spanning the period 1980/81 to 2013/14. Our data are similar to those published in the Department of Finance's Fiscal Reference Tables but provide a finer breakdown of revenue and expenditure into major categories. We illustrate the value of our data set by using it to examine long-term trends in provincial budgets that can be understood only with access to a long time series.

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