By Zaid Noorsumar
Nicole Richelle smiles in quiet gratitude as she surveys the food available to her at the Parkdale Community Food Bank. Richelle, 22, and her partner, Vincent Francis, 24, have made their way downtown from Etobicoke in search of a food bank with adequate supplies.
The generosity on offer lights up the faces of the shy couple, as the staff member fills up their tote bags with sourdough, canned food, assorted vegetables and diapers for their infant daughter. For the food insecure family, such forms of largesse make the difference between sufficient nourishment and hunger pangs.
The couple is under severe financial constraints despite both receiving social assistance. Richelle’s meagre $637 payment through Ontario Works is far from adequate. Francis receives about $1,150 per month from ODSP. But after paying $1,100 in rent for their Etobicoke apartment plus hydro expenses, they are left with a pittance.
“[It leaves me] stressed,” Richelle says. “You’re worrying about how long this food is going to last; how you’re going to get through all your appointments this month; what are you going to do when you run out of food.”
The couple’s application for child tax credit got lost in the bureaucratic haze (“we have the screenshot showing the case number”) which meant they had to reapply for it. The payments should kick in from January, instead of November.
Ontario Works and ODSP rates were set to rise by 3 per cent this year – the first time since 1993 that they would have kept pace with inflation – before the Ford government reduced them to a 1.5 per cent increase. The Tories also made a slew of other negative changes in July.
Activists and policy wonks have long decried the insufficiency of Ontario’s social assistance rates, which have never recovered since Mike Harris’s Conservative government took an axe to the livelihoods of the province’s most vulnerable people.
After NDP froze social assistance from 1993-95, the newly elected Conservative government in 1995 swiftly slashed OW rates by 21.6 per cent. For the duration of their eight years in power, OW and ODSP rates remained the same. While the Liberals made modest improvements over 15 years, it hasn’t been enough.
In 1993, a single person on OW could receive a maximum payment of $663. Adjusted for inflation, that number would today be $1,035. Instead, it currently stands at a paltry $732.
The latest reforms
On November 22, the Ford government announced its welfare reform policy. Among other changes, Ontario will use the federal government’s guidelines to determine if a person qualifies for ODSP though current recipients won’t be affected. Critics say the federal definition is more stringent, leading to fewer eligible applicants.
“What they have done is that they have changed the definition of disability. So they put it to the federal level, which means you literally have to be dying on the floor to get ODSP,” says Valdene Allison, the coordinating manager at the Parkdale Community Food Bank. “That’s how they are going to screw people over.”
The government also made changes to the threshold for exemptions for both OW and ODSP recipients:
-OW recipients can currently earn $200 before seeing any additional income being clawed back by 50 per cent. The government has raised that threshold to $300 but will reduce subsequent earnings by 75 per cent. The Liberals had planned to raise the monthly ceiling to $400.
-ODSP recipients will be able to earn $6,000 per year before a 75 per cent reduction in additional income. Currently they can earn $200 with a claw back rate of 50 per cent above that amount.
Although these changes will be beneficial to people earning low incomes to supplement their social assistance, critics say they don’t offer a solution to averting poverty.
John Stapleton, social policy expert and former Ontario civil servant, says the new rules will make it much harder for people to work their way off the system as the incentive to work will be nullified at a certain point.
People on social assistance earning over $12,800 will see additional income being reduced by 87 per cent – 75 per cent through OW/ODSP and 12 per cent through Canada Workers Benefit (formerly WITB), says Stapleton.
“And if you’re in subsidized housing where your rent goes up, your tax-back rate is over 100 per cent,” Stapleton says.
Stapleton says that essentially means people will have to find full-time work as opposed to supplementing their welfare income with part-time work until they can establish themselves in the workforce.
“They have put all the incentives out the low end of earnings and they have disincentivized people working their way off,” he says. “The expression usually used is ‘make the leap’ into the full-time labour force, as opposed to working your way off.”
To its credit, the Ford government has pledged to provide better supports such as access to childcare and mental health programs, which have been welcomed by the Income Security Advocacy Centre. However, ISAC castigated the government for ignoring the fundamental problem of inadequate social assistance rates.
The reforms required
If there is a consensus on social assistance in Ontario among all three major parties, it is that the system is deeply flawed. Even the Liberals announced plans in 2017 to reform the system, though the realization perhaps dawned on them a touch late.
Among other criticisms, the system is notoriously complex and intrusive. Recipients have to report and prove to the government their housing costs, their contribution towards rent if they are sharing accommodation, the cost of their assets and even their financial arrangements with their spouse.
The lack of transparency in the application process and the denial of additional benefits are other notable problems.
Steven Swain, administrator at the Parkdale Community Food Bank, says in his experience helping people acquire entitlements, government case workers commonly deny benefits to people.
“A lot of people don’t know that there are a lot of participation bursaries that you are eligible for, for going to social assistance,” Swain says. “And if you ask for them, your [case] worker will sometimes brush you off and say no.”
“As a volunteer coordinator, I write a lot of letters to OW and ODSP about people needing benefits, like clothing allowances and all that. Some of these people get refused right on the phone and they don’t even fight for it [because they are unaware of their rights].”
The experience of Nicole Richelle in obtaining a humidifier for her daughter speaks to the challenges of navigating the system. She had assumed she would have to dish out $500 until her doctor told her it was covered under OW.
“I got it approved but my caseworker didn’t tell me that,” she says. “They will not tell you what services they can provide and they will not tell you what extra funding they can give or how you can get it. You have to figure it out on your own.”
Although the bureaucracy within system is a problem, the clamour among some for a leaner government overlooks the problem, according to John Clarke, a long-time organizer for the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty.
“While the elements of policing and bureaucracy need to be withdrawn and job descriptions need to be changed, there’s a great need to provide services for people,” Clarke says, defending the jobs of public sector works.
Pivoting the focus of front-line workers from policing the system to providing support for welfare recipients was among the changes recommendations by the government-commissioned Income Security Reform Working Group in 2017.
The group advocated case workers should be more directly involved in addressing the critical needs of people as opposed to policing their lives.
The 189-page report also recommended a 22 per cent increase in welfare rates over three years, a substantial investment in housing and expanding access to core health benefits for low-income earners.

Work or welfare
According to Lisa McLoed, the Minister of Children, Community and Social Services, the “best social program is a job.” That might sound ironic considering this government’s attack on minimum wage earners. But perhaps social programs – however they are defined – are not meant to get people out of poverty.
John Clarke from OCAP sees a connection in the explosion of low-wage, precarious work over the past two decades and the lack of social assistance.
“If they provide an income that’s adequate, it undercuts their ability to pay low wages, so social assistance is about feeding the capitalist job market,” he says.
For Richelle and Francis, finding work has been an arduous task since they fled the lack of opportunities in their hometown of Fredericton last year for Toronto. After initially living in a tent in a park (“it was either become homeless there or become homeless here”) and being ‘evicted’ by cops, they found an apartment to rent through a local non-profit.
Francis, who suffers from anxiety and depression, initially did drywalling for a few months at a minimum-wage job where overtime work went uncompensated.
“He didn’t teach me any of the safety rules and he treated us real rough. I got worked like a dog,” he says.
After that, Richelle and Francis found work through a temp agency, packaging products for Walmart at a warehouse in Vaughan. But less than two weeks later, they showed up to work after a two-hour bus trip on a freezing day to learn they no longer had work.
“They didn’t even tell us we were laid off. We went there [one day] and they were like, ‘Yeah we don’t need you anymore,’” says Francis, who ultimately wants to finish his GED and enroll in college to become an electrician.
For the couple from New Brunswick, life currently revolves around staying healthy and staving off hunger: doctor’s appointments for their infant, visits to Francis’s psychiatrist and finding nourishment at food banks when their government cheques run out.
While proponents of low social assistance rates say they want recipients to find work, driving people into destitution can hardly have the desired effect.
“If you deprive people and make sure they don’t have enough to eat, and they become modern hunter-gatherers on $733 a month, are they going to be able to find meaningful work? Probably not,” Stapleton says.
Incredibly, that’s the type of common sense that continues to elude Ontario’s politicians.