There were more than 914,000 visits to Toronto food banks last year. While that’s down slightly from the year before, it’s a significant increase over the last decade — and more than double what it was when the Mike Harris government took an axe to welfare.

What happened after Harris slashed welfare rates and introduced workfare is particularly relevant now that another Progressive Conservative government is promising to overhaul social assistance, as early as this week.

In the Harris era, the government spoke about the rising costs of the system and the need to get people back to work. And nasty references were made to mothers on welfare spending money on beer and how the poor could economize by haggling over dented cans of tuna at the grocery store.

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This time around, Social Services Minister Lisa MacLeod is taking great pains to stick to a more compassionate-sounding message. Indeed, she has said “our government is very compassionate” and knows well that these programs serve “Ontario’s most vulnerable.”

Still, the Ford government does seem to be heading to rather the same place: There are people on welfare who should be working and we’re going to make that happen.

Few disagree with the principle that people who are able to work are better off working than collecting a welfare cheque. The challenge has always been finding the best way to support people who wind up on social assistance because of a crisis in their life and help them get back on their feet.

Nearly a million people are living in households sustained by Ontario Works or the Ontario Disability Support Program, and MacLeod would like them to believe that over the past 100 days she has landed on the solution to “lift” them all up.

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Based on her low-key review of social assistance the government now has a plan to help those who can work get jobs and provide “broader supports” for those on disability support, she says. There’s no need to be afraid of what’s coming and everyone will be “pleasantly surprised.”

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But the Ford government’s early moves suggest there is plenty of cause for concern.

It has already cut the planned 3-per-cent increase in social assistance payments in half; scrapped the basic income pilot project that was investigating whether there’s a better way to lift people out of poverty; and stopped a series of necessary changes to social assistance rules that would have made life better for people while they’re on welfare and made it easier for them to get off it.

Making someone who can’t pay the rent and put food on the table now even poorer, as the government has done, does not help prepare them for a job. And the fact that MacLeod has defended those moves as “compassionate” is yet more reason to be worried about what she’ll come out with next.

The minister also seems perfectly content to gloss right over the fact that many of today’s jobs don’t actually lift people out of poverty. And the series of retrograde changes that her government made to labour laws, specifically designed to benefit workers in low-paid precarious jobs, has only made that situation worse.

As the Daily Bread Food Bank’s latest annual report notes, the social assistance reforms in 1995 set “in motion a hunger crisis that continues today.”

Under 15 years of Liberal governments some improvements were made, but nothing came even close to compensating for the 21-per-cent cuts to rates under Harris and the effect of years of inflation. Ontario’s poorest are worse off today than they were before Harris reformed the system, claiming “the status quo is not working very well for them.”

Now they’re facing another Progressive Conservative government that claims the system isn’t working for them and also promises change is coming.

Little wonder they’re concerned. We all should be.