Where's welfare reform?
June 27 | Editorial The Toronto Star
Three months ago, Premier Dalton McGuinty acknowledged that our welfare rules “stomp” people into the ground, hurting them and Ontario’s economy. He was right.
So where is the government’s promised review of our outdated and mean-spirited social assistance system?
Queen’s Park has been so silent on this matter – refusing to say how broad the review will be or even commit to a start date – that anti-poverty advocates held a forum earlier this week to try to breathe life into the government’s pledge.
Provincial officials are well aware of the problems with our welfare system, which forces people to strip their assets before they can receive assistance and then provides insufficient benefits for them to live with any dignity, let alone put their lives back together.
Children’s Minister Deb Matthews, who heads the province’s anti-poverty efforts, heard all about the inadequacy of welfare and income supports for the disabled during consultations last year. When she released the poverty reduction plan last December, she agreed that the rules-bound welfare system needed to be changed and said that work on it would begin early this year.
Now, some six months after Matthews’ pledge and three months after the premier expressed his own concerns, the community and social services ministry is still “determining (the) scope” of the review.
If it takes this long just to figure out the scope of what needs to be fixed, a complete overhaul of the system is evidently in order.
The rules are convoluted, confusing and punitive, and they often operate at cross-purposes.
Welfare is supposed to be the safety net that catches people and helps set them back on their feet. Yet there is ample evidence that the system we have traps people in poverty so deeply that many of them never escape it.
To get welfare, it’s not enough to lose your job and run out of employment insurance benefits (if you were lucky enough to qualify for them). The asset-stripping rules require people to get down to their last few hundred dollars.
Once there, the rules don’t get any easier. If a single woman, for example, happens to have a friend who wants to help out by regularly treating her to dinner, her monthly welfare cheque of $572 is reduced.
There are 228,000 Ontario households on welfare and 256,000 more on disability benefits. They suffer as a result of such absurd rules. And with the economic downturn, more people are joining their ranks.
So it is unacceptable that the spokesperson for Madeleine Meilleur, minister of community and social services, says there is no “set timeline” for even announcing a review, let alone for fixing the problems.
The government’s own poverty reduction plan notes that “the rules can at times inhibit the transition to independence.” That means the longer we wait, the worse off we all will be.
McGuinty needs to put his insight into action and start fashioning a welfare system that lifts, rather than crushes, those it seeks to help.
Read this editorial on the Toronto Star’s website
