Programs force couples to live apart while worsening the housing crisis
Ontario’s welfare system is like a rickety old rust bucket that can no longer keep up with traffic while its brakes are both loud and prone to locking. Recasting this punitive and outdated model would achieve two laudable goals: bestow a kindness on the province’s marginalized people who have suffered for too long, and free up much needed housing.
During the past fourteen years, I was both a paid and a volunteer “facilitator” with a non-profit called Working for Change (defunded in November by the province after decades of support, and I’ll come to that). I met regularly — some fifty to sixty times — with individuals receiving either welfare (Ontario Works, or OW) or a disability pension (Ontario Disability Support Program, or ODSP). Prior to the pandemic, our meetings were always in the Parkdale Activity and Recreation Centre (PARC) at 1499 Queen Street West. It’s a bustling gathering place where hope and despair co-exist, and where clients get what help they can as they wrestle with myriad issues — addiction, hunger, homelessness, poverty.
My task ideally was to help individuals navigate their way into employment without losing their eligibility for social assistance. “I’m a single mother: what benefits am I entitled to?” “I’m a disabled person working part-time: how much can I earn before the income is clawed back by the government?” But, more recently, another question increasingly came to the fore: “What if I were to move in with a partner or a friend?”
My own deep dive into the current welfare system in Ontario, coupled with what I learned from welfare recipients at PARC, suggests that while cohabitation should make financial (and certainly psychological) sense, the system is embedded with powerful incentives to keep welfare recipients single and living apart. Let’s take the case of Avril and Ahmed (an actual couple here given pseudonyms). Each receives an OW monthly cheque for $733. They each live in the same rooming house where they occupy separate rooms, both paying $400 a month. They would like to share one room, and their landlord even agreed to slash their rent ($500, not $800), but the welfare system would consider them “married” and their combined monthly income would not be two times $733, or $1,466, but $1,136 — a drop of $330 a month. We did the math, and Avril and Ahmed decided they would be worse off financially with less personal space, so they live apart. Others have also done the math: where I live, in suburban Toronto, only three per cent of those on welfare live as couples, while forty per cent live alone.
The premier of the province appears not to grasp the challenges facing individuals trying to live on $733 a month. In a speech last summer, Doug Ford remarked: “I always say, if someone’s on ODSP, I’ll support them for life . . . What drives me crazy is people on Ontario Works — probably three [hundred thousand], 400,000 — that are healthy . . . sitting at home, collecting your hard-earned dollars. We need to encourage them to contribute back to the province and find gainful employment.” All this, he says, when the province “has never seen more jobs.”
A reality check is in order. First, the actual number on OW is closer to 239,000. Second, some twenty-eight per cent of those on welfare report poor health (that estimate is extremely conservative). Third, some sixty-six per cent of those on OW are immigrants and only twenty per cent are Caucasian; imagine the impediments. Finally, no one on OW is “sitting at home.” They are like hunter-gatherers, constantly on the move to food banks, drop-ins and meal programs. Even to get a job at Tim Hortons, you need an e-mail address and a telephone number. If you can’t afford a transit pass or decent shoes or to get your teeth fixed, you certainly can’t afford a device.
If those on welfare do get jobs, only the first $200 does not immediately reduce their OW payment — an amount that has not changed in eleven years. Ergo, no incentive to work.
How did we get here? The roots of an unjust system, as they often are, can be found in historical precedent. In the 1930s, a single person on welfare in Ontario received $1.95 as a weekly food allowance; a second person in the household got half that. Governments simply assumed that two or three could live much more cheaply under one roof, and they cut back support accordingly and drastically. Those assumptions were baked into the system, and they’re still being made today. The system is also haunted to some extent by moral fervour, this lingering outrage that poor people were having sex “on the public dime.”
In 1975, I was a twenty-something policy analyst with the Ministry of Community and Social Services and interested in the history of poverty. I came across a file from 1965 that stays with me. A woman on mother’s allowance had been spotted walking with a man through the “Ladies and Escorts” entrance of The Linsmore Tavern in the city’s east end. “Deemed unfit,” was scrawled on her file; she lost her allowance. Governments thankfully no longer spy on or judge welfare recipients but welfare rules still bear the whiff of that legacy, and they may even be contributing to the housing crisis.
What if those rules were changed, with disincentives to cohabitation removed? How many affordable housing units might be freed up? Imagine, for example, that the rules were recast so that poor couples could live together while to some extent pooling their incomes and benefits (equivalent to a modest 1.5 per cent overall rate increase to the system, at a cost of $210 million a year). If even a small number (let’s say, nine thousand, for argument’s sake) were to leave their housing and live with a partner, that would be nine thousand affordable housing units the government would not have to build. The total cost to build that number of units? $1.7 billion.
One final note. Working for Change, the aforementioned non-profit that started out in 1994 as a way of generating employment opportunities for psychiatric patients and which has been the umbrella group overseeing my volunteer work since 2010, lost its provincial funding in November, leaving it a barebones outfit bereft of its ability to educate the city’s poor and advocate for them. Three staff and twenty volunteers: gone. Working for Change had a predecessor program called Voices from the Street; its premise was that if people could speak confidently in groups, they would become more employable. It worked very well because all the CV-prep training in the world doesn’t help you at the interview stage. I later met many of the people — most of them survivors of mental illness — who had taken the course and secured jobs. It was all very heartening.
In our place is WCG, a for-profit multinational company that ironically also started out in 1994 — as a small HR consulting firm. It has no skin in this local game, a game in which success (hello well-paid work, goodbye welfare) is exceedingly rare because the cards are so stacked against recipients of social assistance. They call it “a welfare wall” for a reason.
The welfare system in Ontario is in desperate need of wholesale and compassionate change. The government’s decision to sign this ideologically-driven, long-term contract with WCG is both disappointing and symbolic: the rust bucket remains on the road.
https://openpolicyontario.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2024/12/DECOUPLED-Dec11-v3-2.pdf
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