If you’re treading water on welfare in Doug Ford’s Ontario, you’re slowly sinking

Posted on April 27, 2026 in Social Security Debates

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TheStar.com – Politics/Opinion
April 25, 2026.   Martin Regg Cohn, Political Columnist

There are awfully big numbers in the $244-billion budget that Doug Ford’s Tories pushed into law this week, over public objections.

But here’s one awful budget number that got almost no public attention:

Basic welfare rates in Canada’s richest province are stuck at a rock bottom $733 monthly. No news there.

That number hasn’t changed ever since Ford’s Progressive Conservatives took power in 2018. That’s when they decided the poor didn’t much vote or count for much.

If you’re treading water on welfare, and the rates freeze over for eight years, you’re slowly sinking. That’s because the steady erosion of inflation has relentlessly cut the purchasing power of monthly Ontario Works cheques by more than 20 per cent since 2018.

Imagine if our populist premier had proclaimed a 20-per-cent cut upon taking office eight years ago. He’d have been pilloried in the press, just like another Progressive Conservative premier who once played populist.

Three decades ago, Mike Harris provoked protests and recriminations with an unprecedented, punitive cut of 21.6 per cent. Now, all these years later, history is repeating itself.

Yet almost no one is paying attention. Why no public protests or media maelstrom?

Unlike the fiercely confrontational Harris, the earnestly folksy Ford did it quietly, silently, sneakily, insidiously. Instead of taking an axe to welfare payments in one fell swoop, he relied on the death of a thousand cuts in the form of a forever freeze.

This year, the opposition and the media are fussed about the other distractions and detractions in the budget, with nary a word for welfare cuts. But the numbers tell the story.

When Harris came up with his bizarre 21.6 per cent welfare cut in 1995 — from $663 to $520 — he had a brutally bureaucratic rationale: The Tories calculated the average of welfare rates in all other provinces, then bumped it up by 10 per cent in a faux gesture of generosity.

John Stapleton, a welfare expert who worked at the ministry of community and social services, has updated the math using figures from the Maytree Foundation. If the Ford government were to apply the same formula as the former Harris government, the updated welfare rate would be $1,049 monthly — or $316 more than the current $733.

While Harris once hid behind the pretense of equalizing Ontario’s rates to the lowest common denominator among other provinces, the Ford government “now lags them decisively — by a margin that would have been politically indefensible when the benchmark was first set” in 1995, Stapleton argues. With such low payments, “shelters fill up, encampments proliferate, emergency wards are overrun, food banks exploded, poverty-related deaths metastasize.”

When the Liberals took power in 2003, first under Dalton McGuinty and then Kathleen Wynne, they raised Ontario Works payments for single recipients from the low point of $520 under Harris to the current $733 in 2018, Wynne’s last year as premier. That’s when the Ford freeze came into effect, picking up where the Harris slash and freeze left off.

In a budget that’s brimming with boasts about Ford’s pet projects — expanding the island airport’s runways for jets (accommodating the premier’s ill-fated private plane), or digging a tunnel under Highway 401 — the risk of rising welfare payments has the government worried. The average caseload for Ontario Works is now 305,452 people, but a one per cent increase in recipients would cost the government an extra $35 million, the budget warns on page 187.

Think about that. The budgetary bean counters are fretting about a $35 million welfare increase, yet they didn’t bat an eye over the $30 million allocated for Ford’s new Bombardier executive jet (until he cancelled the order under public pressure this week).

By the end of this budget’s 2026-27 fiscal year, the projected inflation rate of two per cent will have further eroded the purchasing power of Ontario Works payments by more than 22 per cent cumulatively, since 2018. That will put Ford in a league all his own — stingier than Harris.

We’ve come a long way since the Harris years, and yet we haven’t. While Ford has now matched — and is poised to exceed — the Harris cuts that people have long forgotten, it’s worth remembering that the high water mark for welfare was in 1993, under the NDP government of Bob Rae, when the rate was $663 a month.

If that figure were indexed to inflation today, it would be $1,303 a month, some $570 (78 per cent) more than the current rate of $733 under Ford’s Tories.

They say that the more times change, the more they stay the same. If you’re on welfare, the words sound the same but the numbers feel a lot worse.

https://www.thestar.com/politics/political-opinion/if-youre-treading-water-on-welfare-in-doug-fords-ontario-youre-slowly-sinking/article_a8107e3c-76a8-4784-a297-eb26e3da3a08.html?source=newsletter&utm_content=a02&utm_source=ts_nl&utm_medium=email&utm_email=0C810E7AE4E7C3CEB3816076F6F9881B&utm_campaign=top_34838

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