Social assistance rates keep recipients in poverty

My mother grew up in a poor family in the interior of Brazil, and raised four children just a few blocks from one of São Paulo’s largest slums.

On her first visit to Ontario, she was taken aback by a lack of visible poverty. I spared her my social science student rants and simply replied there was less of it than back home and people didn’t like talking about it. Not even during elections we hear much about it, I said.

Right now in Ontario, 863,000 people in 571,000 households live in deep poverty while receiving social assistance. There are many more people living in poverty in Ontario, but these households have jumped through all the hoops — and there are many — to qualify for income support. The government knows where they live, and knows how to contact them. It knows that the money they receive is not enough to pay rent, buy food, take transit or dress warmly.

Unlike places in the world beset by political and natural disasters, Ontario has the means to provide adequate supports to all of these families. We could do it overnight, if we wanted to. But year after year, election after election, we choose not to.

And we are about to not do it again.

A single individual considered employable receives $733 a month on Ontario Works (OW).

A person with a documented disability may qualify for the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) and receive $1,169 a month.

Ontario’s Poverty Reduction Strategy states that people living on less than 75 per cent of the official poverty line for their region are experiencing deep poverty.

The deep-poverty threshold (for a one-person household) ranges from $1,310 in rural Ontario to $1,555 in Toronto.

In other words, according to the province’s own definition, all people on social assistance live in deep poverty.

Families with children receive federal and provincial child benefits that substantially increase their income, but these are not sufficient to bring them out of poverty.

Over the next weeks, Ontarians will hear a lot of about affordability, except that those conversations will not focus on those among us who can afford the least.

In 2018, the PC government slashed an approved nine per cent increase in social assistance rates to 1.5 per cent.

The 2022 budget, the party’s de facto platform, makes no mention at all of OW or ODSP rates. But on Monday, in what seemed like a flip-flop move, Premier Doug Ford promised to increase ODSP rates by five per cent and index it to inflation.

The indexation is a welcomed measure, but the $58.45 increase will not lift anyone from poverty.

The NDP promises to bring ODSP and OW rates up by 20 per cent. That would help, but it would still leave people far behind. Social assistance rates would remain below the poverty line everywhere in Ontario.

The Ontario Liberals are promising to increase ODSP and OW rates by 10 per cent in 2022 and by an additional 10 per cent in 2023.

The Greens promise to double rates if elected. This seems to be the right approach, but the party is unlikely to be in a position to implement its promise.

This means that no matter who wins this election, people who need social assistance will find themselves in the same place they were in before the election, and the election before that.

They will still be in deep, deep poverty.