To some he’s a modern day Robin Hood, using his job to help the poor; to others he’s just a Toronto doctor who overstepped his responsibilities and scammed the system.

Dr. Roland Wong was found guilty of professional misconduct last December for exaggerating allergies to help patients on welfare access special diet allowances and even though a committee sympathized with his motivation, it wrote advocacy “should not trump one’s professional integrity.”

His penalty hearing ended this week and it’ll likely be months before a specific penalty is decided upon, but Dr. Wong — who is alleged to have continued to beef up allergies on the forms throughout his hearings — has no regrets, remaining adamant that poor people need more help: “I know the benefits are not enough to live on.”

While some experts would agree and while many anti-poverty activists praise him, saying welfare alone isn’t enough to eat properly, not everyone believes his activism was well-founded, or appropriate.

The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario said it wouldn’t comment as to the advocacy role doctors should play in food security issues pertaining with health implications.

The College launched the investigation against Dr. Wong after receiving a complaint from the Ministry of Community and Social Services and from then-mayoral candidate Rob Ford.

“A doctor is there to be a doctor, not to advocate for the poor, or to be the official opposition in government through taxpayer’s money,” Ford told the Canadian Medical Association Journal in 2010.

Dr. Wong’s supporters have since seized upon those words, using them as a rallying cry to get people out to hearings and to make it clear that, to them, Dr. Wong’s hearing was very much about poverty.

Almost 900,000 adults make use of Ontario’s social assistance system, with 464, 159 people using welfare and 430,858 using disability support as of June 2013.

But the system isn’t designed to ensure people can afford all the food they actually need, said Valerie Tarasuk, a professor of nutrition at the University of Toronto and co-author of a recently released report highlighting food insecurity — the inability to obtain adequate food due to financial constraints — as a public health issue.

Making sure those people have enough money to obtain adequate food is in fact a doctor’s issue, Tarasuk said.

“Many, many, many of the people that are food insecure are the people that have chronic health problems,” she said. “Doctors and other health professionals are at the front line.”

The report found more than 12 per cent of Canadian households, or 1.6 million, experienced some form of food insecurity in 2011 and that there were 450,000 more Canadians facing food security issues in 2011 than there were in 2008.

Individual adults on welfare get just $230 a month for their basic needs and $376 for shelter, although the allowance for basic needs will increase to $250 starting Oct. 1.

For many, the extra money (capped at $250 each month) gained from the special diet allowance forms Dr. Wong signed off on, was a huge help.

For that, John Clarke, an organizer with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, said the doctor deserves “a medal and keys to the city.”

“One decent man stood up to ensure that people lacking the basic necessities of life could get nutrition and health and to punish him would be to intimidate anyone else who might follow his example,” Clarke said.

Critics say the way in which Dr. Wong advocated for his patients was problematic. He billed the government $1.8 million over a four-year period for the forms without the appropriate notes to back up his diagnoses.

“This guy is no Robin Hood,” said Candice Malcolm, Ontario director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. “We’re all taxpayers, so when you rob taxpayers you’re hurting everybody.”

Malcolm said she understands the desire to advocate for what you believe in but he should have worked to convince people a change was necessary.

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“(The public) has an expectation for where this money is going when we pay our taxes,” she said. “He wasn’t helping everyone across the province by trying to change the rules . . . he was just helping a select group of people in his community.”

A spokesperson for the ministry said the government is working to make the system more effective. Social assistance rates have increased by 16 per cent since 2003 and welfare for individuals has gone up by 18.7 per cent since then. The 2013 budget also added an additional $400 million in social assistance over the next three years.

Regardless of what happens in the future, Dr. Wong said he has no regrets: “It is done and a lot of people benefited from it.”