Despite the province’s 2008 poverty reduction plan, the women’s plight and that of almost 158,000 other single adults on welfare or Ontario Works is getting worse, according to a new report on social assistance being released Monday.
For this group, the poverty gap has jumped by almost 200 per cent since 1993, says the analysis by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
If the province is serious about fighting poverty, it should raise welfare rates as well as tax credits such as the Trillium Benefit, a monthly payment to all low-income people that provides relief for sales tax, property tax and energy costs, she says.
“Both are necessary,” she says. “One would be investing to ensure that people are receiving enough money to get by regardless of their employment status. And another would be to improve the social assistance rate structure.”
Tiessen compares welfare incomes and their relation to the poverty line since 1993, the year social assistance rates hit a high water mark in Ontario.
That year, welfare incomes for single parents, families and the disabled were slightly above the Low Income Measure (LIM), after taxes, the province’s official poverty line. (The LIM is an income 50 per cent below the median income.)
Welfare incomes for singles were still about 20 per cent below the LIM in 1993. At that time, a single person on social assistance received $663 a month, the equivalent of about $995 in today’s dollars.
Two decades later, in 2014, after severe welfare cuts by the former Mike Harris government and despite modest improvements to rates and other supports by the Liberals, single people on welfare received $656 in monthly Ontario Works payments and about $75 a month in Trillium benefits and federal GST credits.
Today, the maximum Ontario Works rate is $681 a month.
https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/20...erty-gap-soars-as-welfare-rates-stagnate.html
For this group, the poverty gap has jumped by almost 200 per cent since 1993, says the analysis by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
If the province is serious about fighting poverty, it should raise welfare rates as well as tax credits such as the Trillium Benefit, a monthly payment to all low-income people that provides relief for sales tax, property tax and energy costs, she says.
“Both are necessary,” she says. “One would be investing to ensure that people are receiving enough money to get by regardless of their employment status. And another would be to improve the social assistance rate structure.”
Tiessen compares welfare incomes and their relation to the poverty line since 1993, the year social assistance rates hit a high water mark in Ontario.
That year, welfare incomes for single parents, families and the disabled were slightly above the Low Income Measure (LIM), after taxes, the province’s official poverty line. (The LIM is an income 50 per cent below the median income.)
Welfare incomes for singles were still about 20 per cent below the LIM in 1993. At that time, a single person on social assistance received $663 a month, the equivalent of about $995 in today’s dollars.
Two decades later, in 2014, after severe welfare cuts by the former Mike Harris government and despite modest improvements to rates and other supports by the Liberals, single people on welfare received $656 in monthly Ontario Works payments and about $75 a month in Trillium benefits and federal GST credits.
Today, the maximum Ontario Works rate is $681 a month.
https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/20...erty-gap-soars-as-welfare-rates-stagnate.html
