The Liberals are willing to fight the next provincial election on the strength of sweeping welfare reform and support to Ontario’s most vulnerable residents, says Social Services Minister Helena Jaczek.

The journey to get there began Wednesday, when Jaczek appointed former Ontario Provincial Court judge George Thomson to lead a working group of community advocates and experts to craft a new income security system “based on fairness, adequacy and simplicity.”

“I feel fairly confident we are going to be making a commitment to vulnerable Ontarians in the 2018 budget,” Jaczek told a gathering at the YWCA in downtown Toronto.

“If the election, which I anticipate in June 2018, occurs, I will be particularly proud to stand by the commitment,” she added.

The income security working group will produce a “roadmap” for reform within 12 months, including a fully-costed, multi-year implementation plan, Jaczek said.

She wants the group to tackle the current “confusing, complicated and intrusive” welfare rules that condemn recipients to poverty and throw up barriers to employment.

“That means looking towards a broader income-security approach — one that considers housing, child benefits, health benefits, training and employment supports,” she said. “The ultimate goal is to make programs as effective as possible for the people who require them.”

This is Thomson’s second crack at provincial welfare reform. In the late 1980s, he headed the Social Assistance Review Committee for David Peterson’s Liberal government, which resulted in generous rate increases and new policies aimed at moving people out of poverty and into employment. Mike Harris’s Conservative government scrapped the plan in 1995 and made the deepest cuts to welfare in Ontario history.

The current exercise will be different, Thomson said, because the mandate is broader.

His group will work closely with the province’s basic income pilot, a form of guaranteed annual income, being designed this summer by former Conservative senator Hugh Segal.

“We will be thinking about what we should be doing if that pilot is generalized to something broader and what we should be doing if it isn’t,” Thomson said.

Advocates appointed to the working group were anxious to get started and encouraged by the mandate.

“Looking at the broader income security system is something we advocated in 2009,” said John Stapleton, a former provincial social services bureaucrat and policy consultant who was part of an earlier advisory panel on social assistance.

“So I’m pleased we are finally going to get a chance to do that work.”

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