Wrong hill

Why is it that provincial Conservative governments so dislike poor people? It is disappointing, and bewildering, that among their first acts upon grasping the levers of power, is to seize upon the most fragile among us.

Freshly elected in 1995, Mike Harris slashed social assistance by 21 per cent among his first acts as government. Those living on the margins of society were suddenly forced to make do on a fifth less than they did the month prior. It seemed petty and mean-spirited. In a province where two files—health and education—consume 75 per cent of spending each year, targetting the six per cent spent on social assistance seemed, at best, misplaced.

Twenty-three years later, the Progressive Conservatives are back in charge—and, once again, it has taken aim at poor folks. Not nearly as callous as Mike Harris mind you, the newly elected Doug Ford government nevertheless announced last week it was cutting the proposed three per cent increase to social assistance in half and cancelling a pilot basic income project before any data had been collected.

This isn’t conservatism.

We spend about $7 billion on Ontario Works and Ontario Disability Support each year. Cutting the increase will save the province about $105 million this year. That is equal to about 0.8 per cent of what it will spend. For taxpayers it is an undetectable difference. To those who survive on this funding, however, it changes how they eat. When they eat. Where they sleep.

Conservatism suggests that if you are serious about ensuring taxpayer money is being spent well, you start with the files that burn through $56 billion, and $25.6 billion each year, namely healthcare and education respectively.

But those are hard fights. Against powerful people and organizations, battle-tested and ready to defend these expenditures, and their empires. Poor folks don’t have the same power. They barely have a voice at all.

So they become fair game to a fresh PC government. Swatted needlessly with a sly nod and a wink to a cranky base of embittered, grudge-bearing folk. It all seems so shortsighted.

This new PC government needs to resist these base instincts. It has done good things in its short time in office. Yet Doug Ford risks burying those achievements with needless attacks on the disadvantaged.

Voters who believe all that poor people need is a good kick in the arse, will never be convinced that any amount spent on welfare is worthwhile. They have extrapolated a single observation or an anecdote picked up at the coffee shop, and have cast it across a group of people they don’t know, have never met, who they see as manipulating a system designed to help them. They see folks on social assistance as ungrateful and scheming. Content to be in stasis.

I just don’t buy it. We live in a world where we are bombarded with unrelenting messages encouraging us to consume more, consume better, seek enhanced comfort and demand more and greater convenience. A flatter TV, a sleeker phone, a shinier car, a bigger home with acres of countertops mined from the marble quarries of Carrara.

The notion that folks subsisting on $721 per month (Ontario Works) are gaming our system seems ludicrous. That these people have resigned themselves, purposefully, to exist from day to day on the edge—so contented in inertia that any motivation to get ahead has been erased—seems a fundamental misunderstanding of how our fellow humans are wired.

Are there folks who fall in this category? Perhaps. But the number is likely to be small. To be otherwise requires a great deal of our community to be immune to the pervasive consumer messages flowing over us daily. To the deep-rooted motivation to get ahead, to move forward. To succeed. Do they exist? I expect they do. Are they representative of the cohort on social assistance? It just seems so implausible. In any event, it seems the wrong place to start.

Does it mean we shouldn’t review these programs? By all means, let us continually examine all programs that seek to redistribute income among us. They can be prone to mishap and abuse.

Ontario’s Children, Community and Social Services Minister Lisa Macleod made several valid arguments for such a review in her announcement last week. The ranks of Ontarians receiving Ontario Disability Support is growing at an inexplicable rate of about three per cent per year. Too many people, one in five, languish on Ontario Works assistance for more than five years. We should find out why this is, and what can be done to alter this trajectory.

There are valid issues to be examined. So let’s examine them. And then fix them. Don’t slash support for the most vulnerable before you do this. Don’t start by taking food out of people’s mouths. It makes you look insincere and small. Don’t waste your political capital on the petty stuff. You will need every bit of it in 2022.

Similarly, the decision to cancel the basic income pilot program in Hamilton, Brantford, Brant County, Lindsay and Thunder Bay seems equally petty and wrong. It was an experiment. With an end date. Even if your government had no intention of extending it beyond the test period, or to other communities, it seems wasteful to cancel it before it had run its course.

The data and information we would have gleaned from this experiment is now lost. And for what? To demonstrate to a small number of voters that this government will be tough on poor folks? That it doesn’t care to learn from a program that might have produced useful insights?

Conservatives are too frequently painted as shortsighted and narrowminded. It would be great if they could avoid feeding this cliché, when, every couple decades or so, they gain power.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca