Ontario government scraps basic income pilot project
Tories to also limit welfare increase to 1.5 per cent ahead of planned revamp
TORONTO — The new Doug Ford government is cutting a planned 3 per cent welfare increase in half and scrapping a basic income pilot program the Progressive Conservatives promised to keep during the spring election campaign.
Social Services Minister Lisa MacLeod said Tuesday the increase scheduled by the defeated Liberal government will be reduced to 1.5 per cent while the PC administration embarks on a 100-day revamp of social assistance programs serving almost 1 million Ontarians.
“They spent money the province didn’t have,” MacLeod said of Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals, whose illfated budget projected a multibilliondollar deficit this year.
Ford’s Conservatives did not mention any plans to trim the welfare rate increase during the campaign but did pledge $6 billion in spending cuts.
MacLeod described the 1.5 per cent increase as “compassionate” and said the basic income pilot program in three locations across the province was “quite expensive.”
“It was certainly not going to be sustainable,” she told reporters, promising details soon on how the
program will be wound down. “Spending more money on a broken program wasn’t going to help anyone.”
NDP Leader Andrea Horwath, also MPP for Hamilton Centre, said cutting the “meagre” 3 per cent increase “pushes those already at a disadvantage even deeper into poverty.”
Ontario Works now pays a maximum of $721 monthly while the Ontario Disability Support Program pays up to $1,151 a month.
Jodi Dean, an east Hamilton participant in the basic income program, tried to remain optimistic the new provincial government would keep the project going, at least long enough to measure its effectiveness.
About 1,000 people in the city living in poverty have been receiving a no-stringsattached base income. The three-year project has yet to complete its first year.
She said she “sat on pins and needles” at home waiting for an announcement from MacLeod, and when she heard the project was scrapped she felt overwhelmed with anger and also fear.
“Not so much for myself but others I know who will be devastated,” she said. “Basic income meant the world to them. I’m blown away by (the provincial government’s) audacity, to say this is wasted money.”
The pilot project received international media attention with reports in the U.S. and U.K., and journalists from South Korea visiting Hamilton last week to learn about it.
Dean, 45, has three children ages 19, 16, and 11, and her husband was injured on the job a year ago and is unable to work. She said basic income was the “hand-up” working- poor participants needed, “to pay for a pair of eyeglasses, get out of a horrible rental situation, afford to take the bus to work, or go back to school ... It was a game-changer for them.”
She says she knows about a dozen people in Hamilton participating and feels badly she encouraged some of them to get involved now that it’s ending, which will force them to resume with the existing social safety net and minimum wage.
But there were others, she said, who were too hesitant to participate from the start, their instincts telling them the program would not last.
She says she’s angry the government did not give it a chance.
“It hasn’t even hit Year 1; they were still taking new participants up until two months ago. And what angers me even more is that not once did (Premier Doug) Ford say during the election campaign that he would stop basic income. The bugs were being worked out, and it has been offering so many people so much.”
Green party Leader Mike Schreiner said the PCs are “breaking a promise” to keep the basic income pilot and leaving other welfare recipients shortchanged.
“People can barely survive today on social assistance rates.”
MacLeod said the current welfare systems design means “too many people are being trapped … it holds them down.”
Tom Cooper of the Hamilton Roundtable on Poverty Reduction, who had helped the previous Liberal government recruit people for the three-year basic income pilot project, was “deeply disappointed” by the announcement.
Some participants moved into better housing they won’t be able to afford if they are forced to return to welfare, while others went back to school, he added.
“The decision today by the Ford government is shameful, short-sighted and it’s a betrayal of those people they promised would be able to continue on the pilot,” he said.
Also put on hold by MacLeod’s announcement are regulatory changes that would have removed caps on the value of gifts or other voluntary payments people on social assistance could receive, along with plans to allow recipients to keep money in RRSPs and tax-free savings accounts.
The changes are particularly gutting for former family court judge George Thomson who helmed a two-year working group on income security for the Liberals that recommended sweeping multi-year changes last fall. Many of those reforms, including rule changes and welfare rate increases, were reflected in the Liberal’s March budget which earmarked $2.3 billion over three years to begin to streamline and simplify social assistance.
“All of the members of the working group were quite excited about the changes that were coming in September, particularly because they represented a very different approach to programs like social assistance,” Thomson said.
The goal was to reduce the poverty gap for people in deepest need, improve health, employment and social inclusion outcomes, and help provide a better quality of life for Ontarians, including Indigenous peoples, he said.