Remembering a victim of the Harris government
Kimberly Rogers succumbed to welfare cuts. Are we headed for another vendetta against the poor?
“I ran out of food this week. I am unable to sleep.” — Kimberly Rogers to the Ontario Superior Court, May 2001
Eighteen years ago on Aug. 11, the body of Kimberly Rogers was discovered by her boyfriend in her stifling Sudbury garret. She had died several days earlier, 40 years old and eight months pregnant. For most of the week daytime highs had soared above 30 degrees. Kimberly had no air conditioning.
The circumstances surrounding her death made Kimberly Rogers the most publicized victim of the Progressive Conservative government’s obsessive campaign against the poor. Convicted of fraud in April 2001 for taking out student loans while on social assistance, Kimberly was sentenced to house arrest and under a newly-enacted section of the Ontario Works Act — a three-month benefits ban.
On May 31, 2001, the ban on Kimberly’s benefits was lifted by a justice of the Ontario Superior Court. After rent and deductions to recover the unauthorized student loans, Kimberly was left with $18 a month for food and other expenses. An inquest begun on Oct. 15, 2002, determined that Kimberly, in despair, had committed suicide.
The figure ultimately responsible for the persecution of Kimberly Rogers was a neo-liberal politician named Mike Harris — a former teacher, golf instructor and university dropout — who in 1995 had led the PCs to a majority in the Ontario election. Harris routed the incumbent New Democratic Party, which under the stewardship of the feckless Bob Rae had alienated not only the general public but the party’s core constituencies.
You could not call Mike Harris a dogwhistler: for years he had trumpeted his visceral hatred of welfare recipients. In November 1994 he told Parliament that the province was a “welfare haven” and its social assistance system “one of the worst (in the world) for abuse and fraud, one of the easiest to rip off.” A Harris government would force able-bodied layabouts to work or go to school for their benefits.
The PC victory left many Ontarians ecstatic. At last the welfare “leeches” would get the swift kick they needed to raise their butts out of their sprung couches and take their hands from the pockets of productive citizens. Almost immediately, Harris cut Ontario’s inadequate social assistance rates by 21.6 per cent and began paring hundreds of thousands of families and individuals from the assistance rolls. His Minister of Community and Social Services, David Tsubouchi, calculated that claimants could live on $90 per month and advised them to enhance their buying power by haggling with merchants for dented cans of tuna. Explaining his government’s cut of a $37 per month nutritional allowance for pregnant women, Mike Harris stated: “What we are doing is making sure that those dollars don’t go to beer.”
After two terms in office, the divisive policies of the Harris government proved too much even for many of his former supporters, and in the 2003 election the Ontario Liberals seized power from the PCs. Still, the most vulnerable Ontarians saw little change in their circumstances — until mid-2017 when the self-styled “social justice premier,” Kathleen Wynne, embarked on a flurry of progressive legislation possibly unprecedented in Ontario. Wynne unveiled comprehensive welfare reforms designed to infuse the system with more money and more hope. And she announced a three-year Basic Income pilot project which rapidly enrolled 4,000 low-income Ontarians and attracted the excited attention of governments and media from around the world.
But this past June, in a stunning repudiation of Wynne and her progressive policies, the PC party under a newly-minted populist leader, Doug Ford, reduced the Liberals to a rump and reclaimed the reins of power. In two months, the new government has gutted assistance reform and terminated Basic Income, leaving participants desperate and scrambling. The Ford strategy is ripped from the Harris playbook. As former Harris cabinet minister John Snobolen wrote in 2015: “Lesson one from the Harris days is to cut deep, quickly.”
It is too early to tell if some version of the Kimberly Rogers story will be repeated, or how often.
Socialist scholar Peter Lyman called anger “the central political emotion.” I urge that readers upset by Kimberly’s story invest their energy and passion not in quiet seething but in political or charitable activities designed to prevent such a tragedy from occurring again.
It is a great way to remember Kimberly. And the best way to help those currently at risk.