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.