This week, as we count down to the Star’s 125th anniversary, we revisit stories that have inspired readers and changed lives.

WELLAND, Ont.—The first thing you notice about Jason Jones are his teeth. They radiate.

“I keep hearing, ‘You’ve got a gorgeous smile.’ Well, thank you, it’s totally fake, but thank you,” he says with a mischievous grin. “They’re all fake. All of them. Every single one.”

The admission, says Jones, almost always leads to the inevitable question for a 36-year-old with fake choppers.

What happened?

“Have you got 10 minutes? This will take a while.”

Toronto Star readers first met Jones in 2007 as part of a Star series that examined the issues surrounding poverty and possible reforms.

In a photo that dominated a Saturday front page, a smiling Jones stared out at the world, a bright-eyed, handsome man brimming with hope, except for one glaring, arresting detail.

He had no teeth.

Well, actually there were two decaying ones that stuck out hauntingly from his lower gums like a broken picket fence. He had the mouth of an old man. It was impossible not to stare back.

Accompanying the image, under the headline “He’s 25, Gregarious, Driven, Disciplined. So why is he out of work?” reporter Moira Welsh told the story of how Jones’s teeth had rotted down to the jawbone, largely because he was poor and could never afford to correct dental issues that plagued him since childhood.

The pain forced Jones to have his teeth removed, draining his wife’s $600 life savings. The oral surgeon left two bottom teeth as an eventual anchor for dentures but Jones was still in incredible agony — the remaining fragments felt like shards of glass poking through his gums.

He needed another $2,150 to pay for the final two extractions, tooth posts and dentures, the price quoted to him at a low-cost clinic. Jones was hoping to get a job and save for the dental work, but even when an employer would ignore his toothless smile and hire him, the pain would eventually force him back into unemployment.

Jones was trapped by his own poverty, subsisting by eating soft foods such as peanut butter sandwiches that he could “gum to death” or by “chewing” firmer items such as chicken with his fingers before putting it in his mouth.

While Jones’s story was heart rending unto itself, it exemplified a vital issue for the working poor. They didn’t — and still don’t — have access to affordable dental care. There is no public dental insurance in the same way that there is universal health care.

But on an individual level, Jones’s story remains a remarkable tale of how one man turned his life around once he was offered some help.

Star readers were so moved by Jones’s plight, they reacted with an outpouring of job offers, financial assistance — even a hand-knit baby blanket. Jones’s wife, Candice, was expecting their first child at the time.

Jones received more than a dozen job opportunities; offers to provide him with dentures numbered about four times that. More than 200 calls and emails came into the newsroom on the first day alone; caring Star readers just wanting to toss the young man a lifeline.

“I still don’t understand. I am still trying to comprehend this,” Jones says now. “I don’t understand why people just wanted to reach out and help me. I’m just little old me.

“People got angry, I guess, and said, ‘This is wrong, we need to help this guy.’ My reaction is why me? There are so many people (with similar issues.).”

That generosity caused Jones’s life to “flip-flop,” he says.

The one child on the way was eventually joined by four siblings. The “army” of blue-eyed, blond children now ranges from 6 months to 10 years old and the family lives in a house — they own both sides of a duplex — here in Niagara Region. Jones went from being chronically unemployed to having a unionized job and two cars in the driveway. He earns enough that Candice, who once worked in child care, can stay at home looking after their own gang.

For Jones the changes began almost immediately after the story appeared.

He combed through the offers of assistance and settled on Markham dentist Dr. Raj Singh, who volunteered his services for free, to further repair his mouth and fit him with dentures and implants to hold them in place. It was ultimately a $10,500 job.

As for work, he found an apprenticeship offer from the Boilermakers Association of Ontario the most enticing — Jones always enjoyed working with his hands — and signed on. He was eventually certified and still works in the trade.

It was Ed Frerotte, apprenticeship and training co-ordinator for the Boilermakers at the time, who reached out to Jones. He recalls being moved by the photo, taken by Star photographer Tony Bock, and how it put a face on poverty.

“He seemed to be smiling anyway, even though he was down and out,” says Frerotte now. “He just seemed like someone we could help and someone who would appreciate it. This is the best story of the time I spent (heading the apprenticeship program), by far.”

Looking back, Jones believes he “probably would be dead” if he didn’t get assistance. His family doctor had pointed to that as a possibility; poor dental health has the potential to damage much more than the mouth. Candice says she once had to take her husband to the hospital “because he was so sick and so dehydrated from not being able to eat or drink anything.

“He was unconscious and on IV for hours and that was just from an infection in his mouth.”

As for the bigger picture and the long-term impact of Jones baring his soul and toothless smile to the world, Ontario’s working poor are still waiting for affordable dental care a decade later.

Jacquie Maund of the Association of Ontario Health Centres says Jones’s story did raise public and political awareness of the how a person’s life can be affected by declining oral health.

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That led to Healthy Smiles Ontario, a free dental care program for children younger than 18 from low-income families.

But for impoverished adults, unless a person is on social assistance, “they have to rely on charity” just as Jones did, says Maund.

“There are many, many desperate cases of people who, through no fault of their own, do not have access to any kind of oral health service,” she says. “That, unfortunately, has not improved since (the Star) did the story 10 years ago.”

The College of Dental Hygienists estimates that between two and three million Ontarians did not see a dentist in the last year, mainly due to the cost. OHIP does not cover teeth and gums.

“I think (Jones’s) story was really the impetus for the Liberal government to take more seriously the issue of access to oral health,” says Maund.

She did anti-poverty advocacy work at the time and says the coverage played “a pivotal role” in the government initially committing $45 million to an oral health program for low-income people.

“They subsequently realized that wasn’t enough for a full program to deal with both children and adults so they basically decided to focus on children because their poverty reduction strategy was focusing on children,” she said.

Even that wasn’t perfect. Research by Maund in 2013 found many of the children who should have benefitted from the program did not because of the strict qualifying criteria. Some unspent money was then siphoned off to other initiatives, such as sport development and antismoking campaigns. Funding for the dental program dropped from the promised $45 million to $33 million.

A streamlined Healthy Smiles was expanded and relaunched last year as a $100-million program offering free dental checkups, cleanings, fillings, X-rays and urgent oral health care for about 460,000 children in low-income families.

In the 2014 budget, the Ontario government pledged to extend dental care to low-income adults by 2025.

In mid-October, community health leaders gathered at Queen’s Park. Along with NDP health critic France Gélinas, they called on Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals to act more quickly.

“People today with a toothache or mouth pain are forced to go to the emergency room . . . and all they’ll get is painkillers,” said Gélinas. “Those emergency room visits are not free. They cost Ontario $30 million a year but don’t address the problem.

“Why is this premier refusing to provide dental care to every vulnerable Ontarian who needs it now?”

Health Minister Eric Hoskins said it’s “a costly exercise” but one the ministry is working with its partners on. He said the government is “absolutely committed” to the 2025 target.

Maund said advocates pushing for health equity will try to make accessible dental care an issue in next year’s provincial election.

“It’s not about having a nice smile, it’s about having a healthy mouth,” says Maund. “If you have an infection in your mouth because you have gum disease or you have rotting or decaying teeth, that affects your whole body, it affects your overall health. It puts you at higher risk for diabetes, for oral cancers, and it obviously makes it very hard to eat. Why is it that if I break my arm, I can go to the hospital and get it fixed but if I crack my tooth or I have an abscess on my tooth and I can’t afford to go to the dentist, there’s no help for me?”

Jones recalls that, for him, the agony was so bad he once gripped one of his rotting teeth with pliers and thought about ripping it out.

And exposed nerves caused searing pain in his mouth, he recalls. It was debilitating, and he “felt totally useless.”

Then at the urging of his physician, the late Dr. Peter Charlebois, he went public.

Candice says her normally outgoing husband was becoming a miserable person, “but since everything happened, he’s always had a huge confident smile on his face.” If he didn’t get help “I definitely don’t think that we would be anywhere close to where we are today, nor have the family that we have.”

Jones said he still contacted by media to comment on oral health issues, and he hopes his story continues to serve as an example of what can happen when a person in need gets help.

“Maybe it’ll persuade (people) to pressure their government a little more. Why don’t you help more people? Actually help them,” he says. “I was given the ability to better myself by one simple thing — fixing the problem.”

Read more on the Star’s 125th anniversary in Saturday’s special Insight section and at https://www.thestar.com/anniversary.html