This week, Ontario Premier Doug Ford called an election for Feb. 27.
Ford has said he wants a renewed mandate to support Ontarians in the event that the Trump administration does impose 25 per cent tariffs on Canadian goods.
Ford is right to worry about the Ontarian workers and consumers who are likely to be affected by the tariffs.
But it would be responsible for the Progressive Conservative Party to show greater concern for the low-income Ontarians on Ontario Works, a program that provides eligible recipients money for food, shelter and basic living costs.
The Ford government — and recent predecessor conservative governments — have a poor track record when it comes to this program.
The Ford government has not increased basic welfare benefits in the nearly seven years it has been in power. Ontario premiers Mike Harris and Ernie Eves equaled that record from 1995 to 2002, before being defeated by Liberal premier Dalton McGuinty, who began modest increases in 2003.
In fact, premier Bill Davis was the last conservative premier to increase Ontario Works. He did this 40 years ago, in 1985, when he awarded a six per cent hike to benefits.
The successor Harris government reversed this progress. In 1995, it cut the single-person welfare allowance from $663 to $520 a month — a drop of 21 per cent.
And it introduced a welfare diet, a controversial plan to show how much a single person receiving welfare could afford to spend on food and still meet basic nutritional needs.
In 1995, the original welfare diet priced the cost of a number of food items at $90 a month. This notional basket of food included products like corn flakes, carrots, milk and eggs.
However, this original diet was deeply flawed, as the food items included in the basket were judged by food experts to be unbalanced and inadequate. The diet also did not contain condiments like salt, pepper or sugar.
I recently updated the welfare diet first introduced by the Harris government. In a shopping trip in late 2024, I spent $216 to purchase the same basket of goods included in Harris’ welfare diet. This represents a 139 per cent increase from when the first welfare diet was published in 1995.
Overall price inflation has also increased between 1995 and 2024, although by 84 per cent — much less than the welfare diet increases.
But the Ontario Works single-person allowance has increased only 41 per cent in this same period, from $520 in 1995 to $733 in 2024. All of these increases were implemented by four Liberal governments between 2003 and 2018.
In other words, Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation has increased by more than double the rate of Ontario Works increases, while food inflation has increased at 3.5 times the rate of increase in Ontario Works allowances for single people.
If the single-person allowance had been raised in line with inflation since 2018 (when Ontario Works was last increased), the allowance would now be $887 a month — $154 higher than it is now.
When we think of increasing food insecurity, homelessness, encampments and the massive rise in the use of food banks in Toronto, the real drop in Ontario Works allowances show us the stark arithmetic behind the numbers.
Premier Ford has repeatedly said that he wants Ontario Works recipients to take on the many jobs he says are available across the province.
But the $733 a month maximum allowance for a single person without a job or other resources is not enough money to rent a room, buy clothing, eat a threadbare diet and pay for the smartphone and basic transit required to communicate with a prospective employer and travel to find work.
Governments can starve people into taking any work available. But hunger is not necessarily the best employment readiness program.
We can do better.
Absolutely shameful of our government as usual
No mention of ODSP in this article. Nothing about the shamefully low rates for people who are medically unable to work and have extra medical expenses. You talk about politicians starving people into working, but no mention of the fact that they’re starving disabled people into dying.
In this country, politicians at all levels of government have decreed that if you’re medically unfit to work, you don’t deserve to live, then their media mouthpieces sweep this form of genocide under the rug. Hurry up and die if you can’t work, and if you don’t expire fast enough, the politicians will be happy to murder you and sell your organs at a profit.