Author: johnastapleton

Social assistance says it wants people to become more active and independent. Work a few hours. Take some training. Try self-employment. Share accommodation. Form relationships. Accept help from family. Save a little money. Find cheaper housing. Travel to improve opportunity. Participate in the community. Improve your circumstances. Then try doing any of those things. Earn some money and the system wants to know about it—not simply because it is interested in your progress, but because some of that income may reduce your benefits. Receive an honorarium and it has to be classified. Get help from family and the system may want to know whether it is a gift, income or continuing support. Change your living arrangements and questions arise about who lives with you, what they contribute and the nature…

When the Indian Ocean tsunami struck in 2004, some people saw the sea suddenly retreat and went down to look. Others ran. On the Indonesian island of Simeulue, people remembered smong, an oral tradition handed down after a devastating tsunami in 1907. The story carried a simple instruction across generations: if the earth shakes and the sea withdraws, get to high ground. In 2004, that inherited knowledge saved lives. It is a remarkable example of something human beings have been doing since before writing. We experience something, learn from it and try to prevent the lesson from dying with us. But we are not particularly good at it. Languages disappear. Oral traditions vanish. Libraries burn. Technologies are forgotten. Political ideas go out of fashion and are rediscovered generations later under…

There are many things we tell people on welfare to do that we don't actually make very easy for them to do. It belongs with the others I have been writing about: Get a job. Get some training. Save some money. Get help from your family. Find someone to share the rent with. Travel if that is what ordinary family life or opportunity requires. These are all perfectly normal things for the rest of us to do. In fact, they are mostly things we associate with becoming more independent. But there is another one that I think goes even deeper. Relying on other people. We don't usually say that one out loud. In fact, welfare programs tend to say almost exactly the opposite. Their great objective is “self-reliance.” The person…

There is a ‘secret’ about welfare that almost everyone who has spent time receiving Ontario Works understands. ODSP recipients too, know it well. It is not a secret because anyone is deliberately concealing it. It is a secret because the people who know it rarely get to design the system, explain it to the public, or frame the political debate. The secret is remarkably simple: Many of the actions we tell people on welfare they should undertake to become independent are the very things the welfare system penalizes them for doing. Get a job. Get some training. Accept help from your family. Find someone to share the rent. Save some money so the next emergency doesn't become a catastrophe. These are not radical ideas. They are the standard Canadian prescription…

Before asking when America last treated Canada this way, ask what the purpose of tariffs used to be before the advent of income taxation News reporters keep asking historians and economists a seemingly straightforward question about the latest American tariffs on Canada: When has the United States ever done this to us before? William McKinley usually appears somewhere in the answer. The United States imposed very high tariffs in the late nineteenth century. McKinley championed the famous tariff bearing his name in 1890, and as president remained a committed protectionist. Mr. Trump sounds like he wants to go back to the days of McKinley. In his February 24, 2026 State of the Union address, Trump said: “As time goes by, I believe the tariffs paid for by foreign countries will,…

I have just listened to Miracle and Wonder, Malcolm Gladwell and Bruce Headlam’s extraordinary audio portrait of Paul Simon. It is based on some 30 hours of conversation with Simon and sets itself the ambitious task of understanding how someone from Queens could produce “near-perfect songs” over a career of more than six decades. I enjoyed it enormously. But I kept waiting. Gladwell naturally spends time on the monuments: The Sound of Silence, The Boxer, Bridge Over Troubled Water, Graceland. They belong in any account of Paul Simon. But chapter after chapter, I waited for my Paul Simon to turn up. I was 16 when I first heard 'Like a Rock' - a song hardly mentioned - Gladwell was 7 when he first heard Bridge over Troubled Water -discussed in…

Sociologist Harold Garfinkel developed the concept of the “degradation ceremony” to describe institutional rituals that transform a person from a legitimate member of society into a suspect, deviant, or morally diminished figure. The purpose is not merely punishment. It is social instruction. The individual becomes an example through which institutions reaffirm the moral order. Viewed through this lens, the aftermath of pandemic benefits paid to individuals and welfare clawbacks begins to look less like administrative housekeeping and more like a modern bureaucratic degradation ceremony aimed disproportionately at the poor. At the beginning of the pandemic, governments urgently encouraged Canadians to apply for emergency benefits. CERB was delivered at unprecedented speed because governments feared economic collapse and social panic. The message was simple: stay home, stay safe, apply if you need…

Nobody sat down at Queen's Park in 1995 and decided that Ontario should spend the next thirty-one years progressively reducing the real value of welfare for its poorest residents. Mike Harris's decision was certainly deliberate. His government cut the rate for a single person by more than 21 per cent, from $663 to $520 a month. What happened afterward was different. The Harris government did not increase the rate again. Neither did Ernie Eves. Liberal governments gradually increased it from $520 to $733 between 2003 and 2018, but never restored what had been lost in real terms. Doug Ford has left the Ontario Works rate at $733 since taking office. The remarkable part of this history is not simply the decline of 43-44% in the rates. It is that no…

There is a question Ontario rarely asks about poverty. It is not whether we can afford to raise Ontario Works, whether food banks need more money, whether municipalities need another homelessness program, or whether employment services need better case management. The more fundamental question is this: How long can Ontario afford to maintain a system in which inadequate primary income support continually creates demand for secondary systems to manage the consequences? We have become remarkably inventive at treating the symptoms of inadequate income while remaining strangely incurious about the cost of creating those symptoms. Consider Ontario Works. A single person can receive a maximum of $733 a month for basic needs and shelter, an amount that has not increased since 2018. Try living on it. Then watch what happens. The…

We have all seen the television news item. Gasoline prices have jumped overnight. A reporter is dispatched to a filling station. The camera finds someone standing beside an SUV watching the numbers spin upward on the pump. "How is this affecting you?" The answers are remarkably predictable. "It's getting ridiculous." "I'll have to cut back somewhere." "We won't be taking as many trips." "Everything is getting so expensive." “I can’t fill my tank – I can’t afford it” Then another motorist says essentially the same thing. Perhaps a third is interviewed for confirmation. And the story is complete. I have wondered for years why virtually nobody at these gas pumps ever says anything else. Where is the motorist who says: "I don't like paying more, but perhaps gasoline has been…