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Only 1% of people on Ontario Works leave social assistance for employment in any given month, and one in five stay on the program for five years or more.

Half of those who leave wind up on it again and 80% of those return within a year.

The number of people on ODSP is growing by 3.5% annually, much faster than population growth.

Meanwhile, Ontario’s social assistance system is a bureaucratic nightmare and a bureaucrat’s dream.

There are 240 different income support rates and more than 800 rules governing social assistance.

The reforms announced by MacLeod make sense.

They are meant to allow people on both forms of social assistance to keep more of the money they earn, without financially penalizing them, while streamlining the bureaucratic mess that currently exists.

Critics will argue the previous Liberal government was promising more in increased benefits than the PCs are delivering.

But that’s because the Liberals were promising everything to everybody at the end of their 15-year reign, as they desperately tried to bribe voters with their own money in order to win re-election, which didn’t work.

That said, let’s not kid the troops.

Every Ontario government in the modern era — Liberal, NDP and PC — has promised bold new initiatives to reform social assistance and every one of them has stalled over time, with the same problems repeating themselves over and over again.

There’s also the reality that the financial resources to pay welfare are limited.

That’s because the Liberals left Ontario taxpayers with a $15 billion annual deficit, or, if you believe the Liberals’ claim the PCs have inflated that number, then the $11.7 billion deficit determined by Ontario’s independent, non-partisan, auditor general.

We agree with MacLeod that the best social program is a job,that most people on social assistance want to work and that the current welfare system is broken and broke.

And that reforms are needed because the status quo is not an option.