What two internal briefing binders tell us about Ontario’s social services
I have been reading two heavily redacted briefing binders from Ontario’s Ministry of Children, Community and Social Services (MCCSS). One was prepared in March 2023 for a ministerial transition and the other in November 2024 for an incoming deputy minister. Together they run to more than 1,400 pages.
Having worked in the Ministry and its predecessors for 28 years, from 1975 to 2003, I found the documents both familiar and unsettling. The programs are largely recognizable, as are the perennial problems of budgets, administration, service delivery and accountability. What seems different is the way the Ministry describes its own performance and the risks it faces.
Reading the 2024 binder, I sometimes felt I was looking at the briefing book for the general manager of a professional sports team. There were priorities to deliver, results to achieve, risks to manage and successes to report. The Ministry appeared to be an organization expected to win.
But who was it playing against, and what counted as winning?
The earlier binder offers a disturbing answer. It suggests that one of the principal risks to the Ministry is the cost of fulfilling the responsibilities for which it exists.
On page 17 of the 2023 binder, we read:
Most ministry programs are “demand driven” which poses potential financial risks to the ministry that are beyond its control including Social Assistance, Residential Services for adults with disabilities and special needs for children (i.e. Autism).
The same observation appears on page 11 of the 2024 binder.
This is worth thinking about. The need for social assistance is a financial risk. The need for residential services for adults with disabilities is a financial risk. Children requiring autism and other special-needs services also create financial risks.
I understand why officials preparing budgets would use this terminology. Demand-driven programs are difficult to forecast, and governments must manage expenditures. But there is something peculiar about a social services ministry identifying the demand for its services as a risk to the institution responsible for providing them.
I spent much of my working life dealing with the financial and administrative realities of social programs. I don’t need to be persuaded that budgets matter. What troubles me is the possibility that we have reached a point where the financial interests of the Ministry and the interests of the people it serves are being treated as competing objectives.
The Ministry becomes the entity at risk, and the people it was created to help become the source of that risk.
The 83 per cent solution
One passage in the 2023 binder illustrates why this is crucial.
On page 320, the Ministry describes its Partner Facility Renewal program, which finances repairs, maintenance and improvements to buildings used by organizations delivering its services. These are the facilities in which vulnerable Ontarians receive support, care and accommodation.
The Ministry acknowledges that critical requests are consistently received from all its sectors. It then reports that, over the preceding three years, an average of 83 per cent of proposed projects went unfunded annually.
Eighty-three per cent.
This is not a statistic about a proposed expansion of the welfare state. It concerns the maintenance of facilities already being used to deliver existing services.
Not every unfunded project would necessarily have been urgent, and the document does not tell us that 83 per cent of buildings were unsafe. But the Ministry itself describes the program as critical to continuity, safety, quality and accessibility.
If 83 per cent of proposed repairs and improvements are going unfunded, is the Ministry managing its risks or manufacturing tomorrow’s emergencies?
I would have expected the incoming Minister to be told how much deferred maintenance had accumulated, how many requests had been repeatedly rejected, what the consequences were for service providers and whether any facilities were approaching the point where they could no longer be used.
Instead, we are left with an extraordinary figure and little indication of what the failure to fund these projects was costing the people who depend on the buildings.
The Ministry may have avoided an expenditure, but that does not mean it avoided a cost. Repairs postponed this year can become larger repairs next year. Agencies may have to divert operating funds to keep their buildings functioning. Services may be disrupted.
Someone eventually pays, and it is not necessarily MCCSS.
This is what happens when the financial risk of spending money is more visible than the risk of leaving necessary work undone.
Winning on the scoreboard
The 2024 binder sets out five strategic objectives. The first is to deliver on government priorities. The fourth is to be fiscally responsible, risk-informed and future-oriented. The others concern program design, effective service delivery and making the Ministry a workplace where employees are proud to work.
There is nothing inherently objectionable about these objectives. But they raise a question about what the Ministry considers an achievement.
Suppose the government announces a new social assistance delivery system. The Ministry implements it, trains its employees, meets its deadlines and reports that the initiative has been successfully completed.
That may represent a considerable administrative accomplishment. But if the people receiving Ontario Works still cannot afford adequate food, housing and transportation, what has been achieved in terms of income security?
We have improved the administration of an inadequate benefit.
The distinction is key because the Ministry can report successful implementation without demonstrating that the circumstances of recipients have improved.
The same applies to developmental services. A more efficient assessment system may improve administration without providing additional residential placements. A waiting list can be easier to navigate without becoming shorter. A modernized autism program can still leave children waiting for services.
I am not opposed to modernization. Much of it is overdue. What I question is the tendency to treat improvements in the machinery of government as though they were necessarily improvements in the lives of the people who depend on it.
After years of social assistance reform, we should be particularly wary of confusing the two.
A government can announce a transformation, complete the transformation and declare success while the underlying problem remains largely untouched.
And the Ministry gets another win on the scoreboard.
When savings become achievements
There is another revealing example in the 2023 binder.
On page 309, the Ministry describes using data science and machine learning to identify anomalous payment patterns involving more than 7,000 social assistance recipients, service providers and vendors.
The resulting work is reported to have reduced social assistance expenditures by $3.5 million, with another $13 million in reductions anticipated.
I have no objection to identifying incorrect payments. It is an entirely legitimate responsibility of public administration. But an anomalous payment is not necessarily a fraudulent payment, and a reduction in expenditure is not, by itself, proof that a person was receiving assistance improperly.
What interests me is how precisely the savings are reported.
We are told how much expenditure was reduced. We are not told, in this account of the initiative, how many people had payments interrupted incorrectly, how many successfully challenged decisions or how many experienced hardships while their cases were reviewed.
Those figures may exist elsewhere, but they are not presented alongside the financial results.
If the Ministry can calculate savings to the dollar, it should also be able to account for the consequences of the processes that produce them.
A reduction in social assistance expenditure can be reported as an administrative achievement. Whether it represents a social achievement requires evidence about what happened to the people affected. That evidence should be part of the same report.
The costs that government does not count
The central problem is that there are two sets of finances involved in almost every social program: those of the government and those of the people or organizations expected to manage with the assistance provided.
When Ontario Works rates remain unchanged while living costs rise, the government avoids additional expenditure. But the recipient must somehow find the money to pay higher prices for food, rent and transportation.
When an adult with a developmental disability cannot obtain residential support, the Ministry avoids a new financial commitment. But an aging parent may have to continue providing care that can no longer reasonably be sustained.
When a facility repair is deferred, the Ministry may remain within its allocation while a community organization inherits a growing maintenance problem.
These are not necessarily savings to Ontario. They are costs transferred from the public accounts to households, families and service providers.
Indeed, some of those costs will eventually return to government through emergency services, health care, homelessness programs or more expensive interventions.
Others will never appear in any government account because they are absorbed privately by people who have little choice.
This is why I find the description of demand-driven programs as financial risks so revealing. The Ministry is expected to identify the risk that more people will require assistance, but where is the corresponding calculation of the risk that people who require assistance will not receive enough of it?
The two risks are related, but they are not the same.
A ministry can reduce its own financial exposure while making the lives of its recipients less secure.
What should a new Minister be told?
To be fair, the binders contain many references to improving outcomes, preventing crises, providing person-centred services and helping people navigate complicated systems.
The 2023 binder even acknowledges that transitions between programs are among the weakest points in the social services system, that gaps have serious consequences and that costs continue to rise without significant improvements in outcomes.
These are important admissions. They suggest that the Ministry understands at least some of the problems that its financial and administrative arrangements can create.
But an incoming Minister needs more than a description of programs, financial pressures and planned initiatives. The Minister needs to know where the Ministry is failing to meet the needs of the people it serves.
I would want to know how many people receiving Ontario Works cannot meet their basic needs, how many adults with developmental disabilities are waiting for support, how many families are approaching the limits of their capacity to provide care and how many children are missing opportunities for early intervention.
I would want an account of the maintenance backlog in facilities that the Ministry already funds, and an explanation of what happens when those facilities deteriorate.
I would also want to know whether people leaving social assistance are becoming economically independent or simply disappearing from the caseload.
None of these questions is answered by knowing that a program stayed within budget or that a government initiative was successfully implemented.
In fact, some improvements in social outcomes would almost certainly require additional spending. If more people receive the disability supports they need, the Ministry’s expenditures may rise. If social assistance benefits become more adequate, the budget will increase.
Would those developments be counted as financial failures or social successes?
That is the question the briefing binders leave hanging.
Who is really winning?
The extensive redactions prevent us from knowing everything that senior officials were told. There are legitimate reasons for withholding some Cabinet advice, legal information and personal details. We should not assume that the visible material represents the whole of the Ministry’s thinking.
But the material that has been released is sufficient to raise a serious question about the way the Ministry defines its own success.
I am not suggesting that public servants should abandon financial controls or stop measuring administrative performance. Nor am I suggesting that the people preparing these briefings are indifferent to the welfare of Ontarians.
I am suggesting that something has gone wrong when the ordinary responsibilities of a social services ministry are framed as financial risks without an equally prominent account of the consequences of failing to meet them.
The Ministry should maintain two risk registers. One would describe the financial, operational and legal risks facing the organization. The other would describe the risks facing the people who depend on its programs. Ministers should be able to see where reducing the first set of risks increases the second.
And the Ministry’s scoreboard should distinguish between delivering government priorities and actually improving social conditions.
A sports team can win by preventing the other side from scoring. A social services ministry cannot legitimately claim victory by containing expenditures if the result is that people who need assistance remain without it.
The people receiving social assistance, waiting for disability supports or depending on children’s services are not the opposition. They are the reason the Ministry exists.
What troubles me about these two briefing binders is not that the Ministry wants to win or that it worries about financial risk. It is that the Ministry appears to have developed a way of describing success in which fulfilling its responsibilities can become a liability, while failing to fulfill them can help produce a favourable financial result.
That is not simply a problem of language. It is a problem of public administration, and it deserves to be explained to the people of Ontario.