On July 22, 1995, The Honourable Ernie Eves announced that Ontario Works benefit rates would be cut by 21.6% as of October 1, 1995. Almost immediately, there was a huge fanfare and a massive blowback from the whole of the antipoverty community.
The government defended their cuts by introducing ideas for recipients to buy food more cheaply by purchasing dented cans of tuna at lower prices. They published a welfare diet that purported to show how a single person could survive for a month on less than $100 of a maximum monthly allowance of $520. They suspended assistance to people who quit or were fired from their jobs. They introduced a lifetime ban on receiving assistance for those convicted of welfare fraud. They introduced workfare.
The fireworks were both bright and deafening. Demonstrations at Queens Park were chaotic. Protests at the public gallery of the legislature were noisy and disruptive.
So it’s curious that things are very different this time around even though the outcomes are similar.
Indeed, Ontario Works rates were frozen, not cut. Earnings exemptions were left alone. No major reforms were announced.
The system appears to have been largely untouched since Mr. Ford’s arrival.
But this is wrong.
Why? Because sometime during 2027, a repeat of the Harris cuts of 1995 will take place. Rates will be reduced by 21.6% – not by a rate cut – but through price inflation since 2018.
Inaction cuts welfare
Imagine, for a moment, a 2018 Cabinet submission proposing the following: cut the real value of benefits by 20+ per cent; reduce the share of earnings recipients can keep before clawbacks begin; and push people off assistance earlier in their earnings trajectory.
No government would table such a proposal.
Instead, they simply left the program alone. Call it ‘policy by inattention’ or ‘policy by default’.
Start with the most visible element: the basic single rate. In 2018, a single person on Ontario Works received a maximum of $733 per month. In 2026, that figure is still $733.
Had the rate merely kept pace with inflation since 2018, it would now be $917 a month. Instead, recipients have absorbed a real loss of roughly 20 per cent — a cut comparable to the reductions of the mid-1990s, but delivered silently, without announcements.
At the same time, the cost of living has surged. Rents across Ontario have climbed dramatically. Food prices spiked, especially after 2021. Transportation, utilities and basic goods all increased steadily. Costly phone and data plans emerged while becoming life necessities.
What looks like stability on paper is, in practice, a steady erosion of purchasing power.
Quiet transformation of earning rules
The same quiet transformation has occurred with earnings rules.
In 2018, recipients could earn $200 per month before clawbacks began — about 14 per cent of monthly minimum-wage earnings at the time. Today, that $200 exemption remains unchanged, but minimum wage has risen to $17.60 an hour. The exemption now represents closer to 11 per cent.
Nothing changed in the regulations. But the effect is clear: more earnings are clawed back sooner. Work pays less than it used to.
The “breakeven point” — the level of earnings at which benefits are fully eliminated — tells the same story. It remains fixed at $19,992 annually, exactly where it was in 2018.
But in 2018, that amount represented roughly 73 per cent of full-time minimum-wage earnings. Today, it is closer to 58 per cent.
Recipients are pushed off assistance earlier despite facing much higher living costs.
Letting inflation do the work
When a government chooses not to index benefits, not to adjust earnings exemptions and not to recalibrate thresholds, it is making decisions. It is deciding that inflation will do the work of retrenchment.
The political advantage is obvious. There is no press conference announcing cuts. No legislation changes to defend. No demonstrations. No sit-ins. The program appears unchanged.
But the outcomes tell a different story.
Taken together, these shifts amount to a structural redesign of Ontario Works. Benefits buy less. Work pays less. The distance between income and basic needs has widened.
And the consequences do not stay within the welfare system.
They show up in growing reliance on food banks, rising housing instability, pressure on shelters and increased demand on emergency services. When income supports erode, costs do not disappear — they are displaced, often into more expensive parts of the system.
It is tempting to say that Ontario Works has been frozen since 2018.
A more accurate description is that it has been steadily reshaped by the decision not to change it.
Ontario Works today is not the program it was eight years ago just as it was not the same program after being cut by 21.6% in 1995.
But this time, not because it was cut back- but because it was left alone.