Just one year after the Wynne government got serious about income security with a road map for reform and a basic income pilot project, Premier Doug Ford’s government has scrapped them with a promise to come up with a new plan for both in just 14 weeks.

As a member of the previous government’s income security reform working group, I am deeply saddened that the new government decided to revoke the pilot and all 19 changes that were planned for this fall.

But I am also mystified. Social Services Minister Lisa MacLeod, in her statement of Tuesday, said:

“1 in 5 stay on Ontario Works for more than five years.”

“The number of single people using the program grew 57 per cent in the last 15 years.”

“When people leave the program, almost half return; and of those, 90 per cent are back within a year”

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I am mystified as a number of the 19 changes her government revoked were set to break the poverty trap that social assistance rules currently enforce. For example, TFSA and RRSP accounts were to be exempted as assets that must now be drained before applicants for social assistance become eligible for help.

And the rule that allows social assistance to deduct assistance from extended families and friends was also revoked along with new exemptions that incentivize work along with a shorter time period for those incentives to kick in.

Assistance from friends and family is an expectation of Ontarians when a loved one falls on hard times. Such assistance often helps people to escape poverty. Similarly, retirement savings and savings for a rainy day help to ensure people spend fewer years in poverty. Revoking a rule that would allow them to save prolongs poverty, the exact problem MacLeod says she wishes to address.

The purpose behind these important rule changes was to stop social assistance from forcing people into complete destitution before they become eligible for help. It is this entrenched destitution model that keeps people on social assistance for years.

The rule changes that would help to dismantle that model are now being revoked. As a result, MacLeod can now expect to see a costly set of programs become even more expensive as recipients continue to face the same long road out of destitution.

MacLeod also said:

“Between 75 per cent and 90 per cent of time spent by front-line caseworkers goes into paperwork instead of getting people back on track. That’s unacceptable.”

Her response was to kill the basic income pilot which had as one of its core purposes to greatly simplify the issuance of assistance to low income individuals and families. We will never know how much Ontario could have saved by reducing the massive clogs of paper we generate to convince ourselves that low income people are poor. We will not know how many people would have escaped poverty by being free of a system that watches their every move.

In the following months, instead of being freed up to help people get back to work and improve their lives, workers will be forced to redouble their efforts to chase down small RRSP and TFSA accounts while monitoring the extended families of social assistance to make sure that they are not handing their poorest relatives an extra few bucks to help with groceries or rent.

Finally, I am mystified when the Minister says:

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“They (the Liberals) … rammed through a series of rushed regulatory changes that had more to do with scoring political points than actually helping people.”

Allowing people to keep small retirement accounts and permitting the extended families of social assistance recipients to help their poorest relatives doesn’t appear to score many political points. Neither does increasing work incentives or reducing the time period for those incentives to begin. These rules just made sense and it was high time that they be implemented

The real reason they are aborting the basic income pilot and scrapping all of the 19 fall changes is that the changes have a Liberal pedigree. And that appears to disqualify any of them as being good ideas.

John Stapleton is Innovations Fellow at the Metcalf Foundation and a former social assistance policy analyst with the Ontario government.

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