A Sad Legacy
To fully understand Canada’s social assistance programs, often referred to as ‘welfare,’ and delivered by the provinces and territories in a bureaucratic nightmare of rules and ordinances, we have to travel back in history. These programs can be traced back to the Elizabethan Poor Law of 1601 in England and its legacy in conceptualizing and delivering income support to people, who for whatever reason were unable to provide for themselves.
The Law was the first legal acknowledgement of the duty of the state, assigned to the local
parishes, to provide for their destitute fellow co-habitants, and became part of the colonial legacy left behind. Each parish was only responsible for their own destitute, those who had been born there. Others could be ordered to return to their own parish of birth, even when they had lived in the parish where they fell into destitution for a long time.
Although in Canada, only the Maritime provinces formally adopted the Elizabethan Poor Law,
residence requirements remained an essential component of public relief provisions in Canada
until the Canada Assistance Plan of 1966 officially ended it. While the Poor Law’s commitment
of handing a lifeline to the destitute was a welcome expression of human fellowship, the way it was met left an unhappy and unfortunate legacy.
The ruling elites of the time knew how to play the game. They succeeded in presenting destitution not as a fate that could befall anyone but instead used the paying of the poor rates and needing to be supported on them to divide villagers into givers (rate payers) and paupers (anyone receiving support from the poor rates), in today’s language taxpayers, and welfare recipients, a social divide the Ontario government of Mike Harris (1995-2003) was able to exploit as recently as a generation ago.
Recipients on public support were stigmatized as ‘outsiders’ (others) and widely suspected of being work shy or drunkards, and undeserving of support, an unfortunate portrayal that still haunts them today, although at the time people fell into poverty mainly as the result of illness, disablememt, or the death of the family breadwinner circumstances for which they could hardly be held responsible. They were considered deserving of public support. This did, however, not prevent rate/taxpayer resentment against both groups despite support rates that did not provide more than mere survival.
The last and probably most devastatng legacy of the Poor Law came with the British Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 and the infliction of its disastrous principle of “less eligibility” that stipulated that relief/support levels could never exceed the lowest market wage so that people would always be in deeper poverty on public support than from the drudgery of a poorly paid job. Less eligibility,” known in today’s incarnation as work incentive, has remained a crucial and persistent principle in publicly funded income support programs for those made materially vulnerable by being unemployed and underpaid, by physical and mental health problems or by both. It served both the interest of employers and the state, for the former to keep wages low and for the latter to control public expenditure in an alliance to their mutual benefit but clearly to the detriment of the poor.
In Need of a Paradigm Shift
Leaving the humiliating and degrading spirit of the Poor Laws behind requires a significant
paradigmatic shift in the meaning and use of social assistance in the globalized economy, where capital and production are free to move wherever they like but have failed time and again to offer all Canadians a standard of living sufficient to meet their basic needs.
To transform social assistance requires a change in the life circumstances of people in poverty. Their poverty has not simply happened, nor does it simply exist. It has been created and shaped by the way people interact, how our social and economic systems function, and how they work within the natural environment. Poverty is in this sense a social construction and its impact on people a reflection of our prevailing social inequalities.
The specific forms in which this occurs and is played out changes over time and rooted in the deep-seated dichotomy between the search for individual enrichment and cooperative sympathy for each other’s well-being. The challenge for a more life enhancing approach to social assistance is to offer recipients genuine opportunities to reach their potential and achieve their goals as well as to make successful life transitions.
Transitions, the aptly named report of the Social Assistance Review Committee (1988) to change the principles and delivery systems of social assistance in Ontario was an innovative working project in this direction. The election of the Liberal government of David Peterson in 1985, ending four decades of consecutive Conservative governments attempted to put a stop to the endless tinkering with social assistance in Ontario. The new government set up a Social Assistance Review Committee to answer once and for all the crucial question what should be the guiding principles and objectives of social assistance.
At the heart of the principles endorsed were several strong assertions:
- All members of the community have a presumptive right to social assistance based on need.
- All residents of Ontario who are in need must receive a fair and equitable level of social
assistance, adequate to meet their basic needs for shelter, food, clothing, and personal and
health care. - Social assistance must be available to all those in need within the community.
- Social Assistance must provide a broad range of opportunities to promote personal
growth and integration into the community. - The social assistance system must enable individual to assume responsibility for
themselves and must ensure individual choice, self-determination, and participation in
community life. - The social assistance system must respect the rights of individuals as guaranteed in the
Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and other laws. It must guarantee a clear and
impartial decision-making process, including the right to due process, access to
information, and the protection of privacy. - The social assistance system must support and strengthen the integrity of family life
while remaining sensitive to the needs of individual family members who may be at risk. - Social assistance must respect the diversity of cultures and religions in Ontario and must
recognize the unique identity of Native communities.
The Committee made these principles the cornerstone of its work. Its underlying philosophical approach is revealed by the very title of its report: Transitions, describing “all social assistance recipients, like all members of society, as people in transition” (p.4). “To be poor depends on the kind of us,” wrote Zygmunt Bauman (2001:1) This was a powerful affirmation of social inclusion, recognizing that “…individual survival (I would prefer well-being) depends on his/his relationship with others” (Ugo Mattei, 2012:113).
The decisive cornerstones of the Report marked a significant departure from the traditional
approach to social assistance which had focused mainly on the determination of support levels which “must be lower in goods or income than those available for the self-supporting” (Marsh, 1973:60), regardless to whether they actually covered living expenses.
Transitions tried to overcome the traditional inadequacies of support levels (less eligibility levels) with the application of the ‘market basket’ approach as a measure of adequacy for all items except shelter. This approach was to “incorporate reference to expert opinion and actual expenditure patterns” (Report of the Social Assistance Committee, p.37). But it avoided actually defining fair and equitable support levels for specific household units by specific dollar amounts.
Since Charter of Rights and Freedoms does not impose positive obligations on governments (Amber Eliot). support levels for non-contributory social programs, such as social assistance, housing and childcare have been political decisions by the provincial/territorial governments. Its two-thronged approach to economic security for recipients through equitable income support levels and on employment opportunities to strengthen their self-esteem constituted a significant departure from previous social assistance thinking.
But perhaps the most outstanding aspect of the report was its emphasis on the dignity of
meaningful work. Employment is a defining feature of people’s lives. The report clearly recognized this, pointing out that it was the responsibility of the state “…to maintain high levels of employment, which we believe to be the best method of providing income security and of facilitating full participation in the life of the community” (op.cit.23).
Similar to the Zapatista movement in Mexico at a later date, Transitions thought to reclaim dignity and creativity in daily paid work without the dissatisfaction underpaid people in poor working conditions often have to face in profit-driven market societies. To achieve these goals required two different types of support workers, an income support worker to ensure recipients have their material needs met, and an opportunity planner to work on strategies in co-operation with recipients to develop job skills and successfully re-enter the job market.
Insisting that it was necessary in some instances, when recipients resisted to use the opportunities offered to them, to impose conditions on them, was met with serious criticism and strongly rejected by some anti-poverty groups who saw it as being at odds with the philosophy of the rest of the report. They also rejected the notion that recipients, given the opportunities to become productive members of their communities, would refuse to do so.
A further far-sighted proposal that come out of the Transitions report but was actually put
forward by the Minister’s Advisory Group on its implementation failed to gain either interest or resonance. This was de-coupling housing from all other living costs. Housing, the group
suggested, should be fully paid up to a ceiling based on average community housing costs. This is already the case in a number of European countries in order to protect recipients against discriminatory renting practices. Canada can learn from their experiences to avoid recipients having to choose between paying their rent or feeding themselves.
The Transitions Report has been collecting dust on the shelves for over 30 years. Nonetheless, it has made an exceptional contribution to seeing social assistance in a different light. It showed that the program could do more than allowing recipients to barely stay afloat in their poverty but rather give them a real chance to overcome the barriers, holding them back from fully contributing to their own well-being and that of Canadian/Ontarian Society. Its lasting impact was astutely summed up by Susan McGrath (2021): Transitions was the best social assistance program that Ontario never had.
A number of studies and reports since then tinkered with social assistance reform but none
presented as broad a framework or was as forward looking a vision as Transitions. The policy
focus of Ontario governments shifted from the elimination and prevention of destitution back to its alleviation at the least possible costs.
