Poverty stuck on back burner
Nearly one million Ontarians are on social assistance, but you wouldn’t know it from the lack of attention they get.
Yes, that’s an enormous number of people. No, it doesn’t translate into one million votes.
Low-income people tend toward lower election turnouts, poor children aren’t voters and welfare families can’t afford campaign donations. But the bigger reason why poverty remains a low priority for politicians is the cost — political and fiscal.
Allocating too much money for welfare risks antagonizing other voters who fret about waste or dependency. And who want their own needs taken care of first — like hydro rate reductions, child-care subsidies or middle class tax cuts.
No one likes the problem of poverty, but they rarely love the solutions, either. Perhaps that’s why almost no one paid attention this month when a massive review of the province’s poverty challenges yielded an ambitious prescription for what needs to be done.
My Toronto Star colleague Laurie Monsebraaten, who has been tracking this issue all along, was the first journalist to report on the story.
And perhaps the last, for virtually no one else picked up on the news buried by the Liberal government in an avalanche of other announcements lest it attract unwanted attention.
It’s often said that no news is good news, but poor news can be bad news for politicians. Especially when the report, A Roadmap for Change, calls for a more than 22per-cent increase in welfare over the next three years, costing an estimated $3.2 billion a year by 2020.
The last time the governing Liberals tackled poverty, they recruited ex-NDP cabinet minister Frances Lankin. The 2012 report she coauthored called for a radical overhaul of the system, undoing the legacy of ex-PC premier Mike Harris who had sliced and diced welfare payments in the 1990s — segregating the so-called “deserving” disabled from the seemingly “undeserving” poor.
Lankin’s report yielded some lowhanging fruit, quickly harvested by Premier Kathleen Wynne: The government heeded her advice to let people in dire straits keep a modest amount of money and assets without being unduly penalized by clawbacks (previously they had to be destitute before qualifying, and lost 50 cents for every dollar they earned). But Lankin’s more ambitious reforms sparked resistance from bureaucrats and anti-poverty groups worried about disruptions to existing programs.
Lacking buy-in from the poor, unable to sell it to the better-off, the Liberals did what politicians do. They ordered another study, by another adviser who had already done one decades before.
This time, they recruited ex-judge George Thomson, who first blazed a trail — if not yet a road map — for David Peterson’s Liberals in the late 1980s. All these years later, Thomson is trying to avoid repeating history yet again.
Leary of brainstorming in isolation, he brought together key players in the social services sector and huddled with bureaucrats in government to get everyone on the same page. Those pages still make for difficult reading.
It’s not just that fighting poverty is expensive, but exceedingly complicated thanks to a maze of programs and criteria that could keep a highpriced tax lawyer busy for months. Asking a social assistance recipient to fathom the rules, let alone follow them, is a form of torture. Ordering a welfare worker to enforce those rules, by shadowing and shaming poor people, seems no less cruel — and costly.
Thomson tries to finish the job Lankin started. He goes beyond cash infusions to look at social supports — a housing allowance akin to a voucher, pharmacare and dental assistance — for the working poor as well as the welfare poor, proposing a rock bottom “poverty line” of $22,000 for a single person (30 per cent more for the disabled).
Under ex-premier Dalton McGuinty, Lankin’s mandate was to make do without extra funds, whereas this report has landed in better economic times.
The government has asked for feedback on the recommendations, but Wynne’s Liberals have already burned through cash to pay for pharmacare and hydro reductions while balancing the budget as promised.
Even if the Liberals sign on for some of it, past reports have demonstrated that road maps run into roadblocks, for there is no natural political constituency for poverty. Thomson’s first effort in the 1980s was shredded by Harris a decade later; if the Progressive Conserva- tives return to power in the 2018 election, Thomson could see history repeat itself if they sideline his recommendations.
Either way, the takeaway from this report is that our social assistance supports are not just unsustainable in their present form, but barely understandable. Logic (and humanity) demands a single, simple, basic income program that consolidates the tangle of existing rules into a more coherent and cost-effective form of social support, now being tested in a pilot program in parts of the province. With so many road maps and zigzags along the way, all roads are pointing to a streamlined basic income program for all saving all of us money in the long run. Martin Regg Cohn’s political column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. mcohn@thestar.ca, Twitter: @reggcohn