Advocates pin hopes on budget for roadmap out of poverty
Pre-election budget could set the stage for reforms to welfare and other support for low-income Ontarians.

TheStar.com
March 26, 2018
Laurie Monsebraaten

Anna Costa has seen both sides of Ontario’s miserly and rule-bound welfare system and can’t understand why the province doesn’t fix it.

“The government should be setting people up for success, instead of failure,” said the Toronto woman who helps people on welfare navigate services in an Ontario Works office.

Costa’s position is part of a job-training program offered through Working for Change, a local organization that promotes employment and empowerment for people on social assistance.

“I’ve seen these welfare workers and they don’t have time to really help people, even though I know many would like to,” said Costa, 40. “But that’s not the way the system is set up.”

Costa and anti-poverty advocates have been buoyed by recent NDP and Liberal pledges on pharmacare and publicly funded dental care for low-income Ontarians.

But they are keenly awaiting Wednesday’s provincial budget to see if the Liberal government is prepared to move on a report last fall that sets out a broader 10-year blueprint for income security reform.

The 180-page “Roadmap for Change” report calls for a 22-per-cent welfare increase over three years, a portable housing benefit to begin in 2019 and health benefits for all low-income Ontarians, starting with prescription drug coverage in 2020.

It comes with an estimated $3.2 billion annual price tag within the first three years.

The roadmap was drafted by a provincially appointed working group of advocates, experts and Indigenous leaders whose mandate was to “fundamentally reform” social assistance by designing a system of supports and benefits for all Ontarians living in poverty, whether they are working or not.

Before she fell onto Ontario Works (OW) about four years ago, Costa was juggling four low-paying restaurant and clerical jobs with no benefits and struggling to cover rent, groceries and insulin to treat her Type 1 diabetes. Medication and blood-sugar test strips cost over $300 a month.

“I kind of fell apart,” Costa says of a “dark time” in her life when her health deteriorated, a close friend was murdered and several family members died.

She is grateful for OW benefits of $870 a month, including a special diet allowance of $150 to help manage her diabetes. But after paying monthly rent of $800, there’s little left for anything else. She relies on friends and food banks to survive and admits the “shame” and stigma of welfare takes a toll.

Her peer navigation position, which began in January and includes a $300 monthly employment support benefit, has been a “huge help,” Costa said. But that placement ends in July.

“I need a career with benefits or I’ll never get off OW,” she said.

Offering support such as child care, a portable housing benefit and drug, dental, hearing and vision care to all low-income Ontarians is a key component of the roadmap.

It would also be more cost-effective, advocates argue.

According to the Ontario Oral Health Alliance, people without dental benefits visit a hospital emergency room every nine minutes and a doctor’s office every three minutes at a cost of about $38 million a year. And yet doctors, who aren’t trained in dental health, can provide only antibiotics and painkillers, not treatment.

Under Ontario’s Healthy Smiles program, dental care is covered for children under 18 in families with net incomes of up to $23,000. Emergency dental care is covered for adults on social assistance. But there is no help for other low-income adults and seniors without private dental plans.

Self-employed writer, artist and web designer Brandi Jasmine is among about one in five Ontarians who can’t afford dental care.

The 54-year-old Welland woman says she lost six teeth in four years due to workplace stress and medication she was prescribed to combat anxiety and depression. Ironically, it was during a period when she was working for a call centre that included $500 in annual dental benefits, she noted.

“My teeth were just crumbling in my mouth,” she said. But her dental benefits didn’t go far. And once she left the call centre, she had nothing. A dentist estimated it would cost up to $6,000 to remove two of the worst teeth and replace them with dentures.

“I just didn’t have the money,” said Jasmine.

After telling her story to CBC radio in November, Markham dentist Dr. Zina Alwash filled several cavities and extracted Jasmine’s teeth at no charge while listener donations helped cover the cost of dentures.

“When you are living with a toothache for two or three years, it’s like being tortured,” she said. “It affects your mental health, your physical health, the way you work and interact with people. It affects your sleep and your overall sense of well-being . . . It’s like having the flu for two years.”

Pharmacare is also a concern for Jasmine, who hasn’t been able to afford her thyroid medication for the past two months.

“I could probably go on social assistance, (and get drug and dental care covered) but I want to be independent. I want to keep working,” she said.

“It would be great if the government would cover health benefits. I wouldn’t have the stress and anxiety of worrying about how to pay. My health would improve, I’d probably be more productive in my work and I’d make more money.”

The income security reform roadmap also offers financial hope for single people on welfare like Costa, who is gaining work experience so she can apply for jobs in the social service sector.

The report calls for an “urgent” increase to social assistance rates, starting with a 10-per-cent hike this year, an additional 7 per cent in 2019 and another 5 per cent the following year. If adopted, monthly OW rates would rise from $721 to $893 by 2020.

Rates for people with disabilities would increase by 5-per-cent a year for the next three years bringing monthly rates from $1,209 to $1,334.

Ultimately, the roadmap recommends the province set a minimum income “floor” for all Ontarians based on the provincial poverty line — currently about $22,000 for a single person — to be achieved through a combination of social assistance and benefits provided outside the welfare system, such as the proposed housing benefit. It suggests a more generous “assured benefit” for people with disabilities.

The report also tackles the design of social assistance, calling for the “basic needs” and “shelter” components to be collapsed into a single payment by next year. It would mean a homeless person, who currently receives only the “basic needs” amount of $337 a month, would see a significant boost.

Instead of policing those on social assistance, the roadmap wants welfare workers to focus on helping people get the supports and resources they need to escape poverty. This is something Costa feels many frontline staff would readily embrace if they no longer had to spend the bulk of their time enforcing hundreds of punitive and controlling rules and regulations in the current legislation.

Some of this new work would involve addressing personal barriers people may face, including past trauma, ill health and family violence as well as systemic barriers such as racism or colonialism faced by those with Indigenous heritage, the roadmap suggests.

“As a health-care provider, what excites me so much is that it is what we do everyday,” said Dr. Gary Bloch, a Toronto family physician and member of the income security working group that crafted the plan.

“It’s very much accepted I am there to help people reduce their barriers to health holistically,” he said. “I think we envision a social assistance system that would take a fairly similar approach. I would like to see a commitment in the budget to making those changes on the front line.”

Bloch says the NDP’s decision to put denticare in their election platform and the Liberals’ throne speech promise to expand dental care, bode well for the budget and the spring election.

“I’m really happy to see health benefits on the political agenda,” he said.

“The pharmacare move is good,” he said, referring to the Liberals’ pledge to extend full drug coverage to seniors.

Bloch and other members of the working group say the real test of whether the government is serious about income security reform will be what the budget says about welfare rates.

“There has to be some major movement on social assistance and for people living at the lowest end, such as single people living on Ontario Works,” he said.

George Thomson, the retired Ontario judge who oversaw the roadmap report, also believes the budget needs to tackle social assistance in a meaningful way.

“Moving to a flat rate, moving away from controlling rules and a rate increase are the three elements I would look for,” he said. “If there could be movement on those, I think that would be a strong signal.”