Twenty-five years later, ‘welfare diet’ less realistic than ever
Food prices have far outpaced rises in social assistance since Harris-era cuts, report finds
Twenty-five years ago this month, then Ontario premier Mike Harris slashed social assistance rates by 21.6 per cent.
In response to criticism of the cuts, Harris’s minister in charge of social services, David Tsubouchi, put forward ashopping list — later dubbed the “welfare diet” — to prove that welfare recipients could survive on the new lower rates by adhering to a $90-a-month grocery budget.
Tsubouchi’s list, which included nine servings of pasta but no sauce, and did not include butter, salt or other pantry staples, was widely ridiculed.
“It is totally out of touch with reality and is consistent with the stupidity and the ignorance of this minister,” Liberal MPP Dominic Agostino said in the legislature at the time.
A quarter-century later, social assistance rates still haven’t recovered and continue to lag behind inflation. Meanwhile, the cost of food, particularly good food, has risen sharply.
“It’s becoming harder and harder for someone who’s poor to eat a healthy diet,” said John Stapleton, a social policy analyst who worked in the provincial bureaucracy for nearly 30 years — including under Harris’s government — and now runs his own consultancy.
Stapleton has been shopping Tsubouchi’s “welfare diet” every year for the past decade and charting rising food prices. While Stapleton says Tsubouchi’s suggested diet is neither good nor healthy, he finds it a “useful benchmark” to measure the steep increases in food costs against modest gains in social assistance.
Stapleton’s report, which will be published Monday, shows that while inflation, as measured by the Consumer
Price Index (CPI), has risen 56 per cent since 1995 and social assistance has increased by 41 per cent, the cost of the “welfare diet” has nearly doubled. He also found that the cost of healthier foods, such as fruits and vegetables, has increased more than the overall cost of food.
With the “double whammy” of social assistance lagging inflation and food prices outpacing it, single social assistance recipients “simply can’t afford” a reasonable diet, Stapleton said. “Most of the talk that we have about social assistance is that people can’t pay the rent. We should also say that they can’t pay for food either.”
In Toronto, the Daily Bread Food Bank reported last month that visits to food banks in the city had increased by 25 per cent during the pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated food insecurity for low-income people, according to various reports. In Toronto, the Daily Bread Food Bank reported last month that visits to food banks in the city had increased by 25 per cent during the pandemic.
Valerie Tarasuk, a professor of nutritional sciences at the University of Toronto, said Stapleton’s report shows that social assistance rates should be indexed to something that reflects the actual costs of living.
“The adequacy of welfare incomes have been a problem for a long time in Ontario and I think this report suggests things are getting worse,” she said.
The monthly rate for a single person on Ontario Works today — $733 — is $79 lower in real terms than the $520 it was in 1995 after the Harris cuts, according to Stapleton’s report.
If the monthly rate were adjusted for inflation based on the amount before Harris’s cuts, it would be $1,053.93 today — a 44 per cent increase.
The Star sent questions related to this story to Ontario’s Ministry of Children, Community and Social Services, asking whether Minister Todd Smith believed current social assistance rates were appropriate, whether they should be indexed to some kind of cost-ofliving measure and when the ministry will be reviewing the rates. A ministry spokesperson ignored the questions and sent a 378-word statement, which says, in part, that the ministry is “working to build a more responsive, efficient and personcentred social assistance system that will get people back to work and help the economy recover from COVID-19.”
The province is developing digital applications and a centralized intake to streamline and modernize the application process, the spokesperson said. They are also working with the Ministry of Labour to “improve access” to employment and training services.
“These changes will transform the system so that it provides better support for our most vulnerable, allows frontline staff to focus on results for people rather than paperwork, and helps people get back to work and contribute to building a thriving Ontario economy.”
Tsubouchi, now 69, admitted in a recent phone interview that, as a rookie minister in Harris’s cabinet, he was naive and unprepared. His “welfare diet” shopping list and his infamous advice that welfare recipients haggle with shopkeepers on dented cans of tuna were evidence of that.
“Was I a good communicator at the time? No, clearly I wasn’t.”
Tsubouchi, who was the first Japanese Canadian elected to a Canadian legislature, said that as a “red Tory” who grew up in poverty, he was ill suited to be Harris’s hatchet man. But he said the cuts to social assistance were a key plank in the party’s platform and he had to implement them.
“I had to do the job … Did I agree with everything the government did? No.”
Pressed on whether, 25 years later, he believes the cuts were a good idea, Tsubouchi avoided a direct answer.
“I believed that we needed to do something to bring some sensibility in terms of running the government.”