Social Policy in Ontario

New safety nets needed for era of chronic inequality

Posted on April 15, 2015 in Social Security Debates

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TheStar.com – Opinion/Commentary – Why not ask Canadians living in poverty what kind of help they need before drafting solutions?
Apr 14 2015.   By: Carol Goar, Star Columnist

Everyone wants to re-invent the welfare state these days. Former bureaucrats top the list. Academics are a close second. Public intellectuals who catapult themselves into the spotlight with a timely idea are rapidly catching up.

They seldom consult the people who depend on social assistance, disability support, employment insurance, old age security or children’s benefits. Nor do they seek out the community workers who see the realities of poverty first hand.

Canadians are left to reconcile the lofty theories they hear with the deepening inequality they see. Most give up in bewilderment.

This dichotomy came into sharp focus last week. While the Toronto Star chronicled the lives of people whose basic expenses outstripped their earnings, three would-be reformers — two former mandarins and a globetrotting professor — delivered their social policy prescriptions.

The first was Peter Hicks, a career civil servant, whose 36-page essay, The Enabling Society, was released by a Montreal think-tank (the Institute for Research on Public Policy) on April 9.

The second was Munir Sheikh, former chief statistician of Canada, whose 28-page paper, Great Gatsby v. Zero Dollar Linda, was published by an Ottawa think-tank (the Macdonald-Laurier Institute) later the same day.

The third was Guy Standing, professor of development studies at the University of London and author of a bestseller entitled The Precariat, who headlined an April 10 question-and-answer session at the Spur Festival, which aims to be a “catalyst for change in Canada.”

They all offered similar diagnoses: The welfare state is a vestige of a bygone era. It traps people who want to lift themselves out of poverty. Tinkering won’t fix it. What is needed is a wholesale re-thinking of social policy.

But each put forward a different remedy.

Hicks’s was the most elaborate. The former assistant deputy minister of social development argued that a new framework was needed to replace the creaky welfare state. He then proceeded to build it, pillar by pillar, program by program. The centrepiece of his plan was to create an “individualized approach” to social policy through the use of “big statistics” (advanced technology combined with sophisticated data analysis).

Unfortunately, his essay was written in such abstruse language (“Many reforms to improve horizontal management have made things worse for vertical management — and vice versa.”) that only a government insider would have grasped the details.

Sheikh’s thesis was easier to follow. He compared the aims of the welfare state — the Great Gatsby model — to the actual impact — Zero Dollar Linda — using the case of a Toronto woman, Linda Chamberlain, who was better off staying on social assistance than working. (He relied on research done by social policy consultant John Stapleton.)

Regrettably, as many Toronto journalists have discovered, Chamberlain has a tendency to say what researchers want to hear. Accuracy is not her strong suit.

This weakened, but did not invalidate, Sheikh’s contention that the current system of transfer payments and taxes traps people and impedes social mobility. The more serious shortcoming in his study was that he offered no practical advice about how to design policies that “improve the ability of low-income people to acquire useful skills and be available for work.”

Guy Standing’s approach was by the far the most straightforward. He called for a guaranteed basic income for all. “Everybody should receive a dividend from the investment of past generations,” he told the Star’s Sara Mojtehedzdeh. “A basic income would be a modest way of redistributing income because we’ve got chronically unequal societies. There is no other way in which the precariat (the growing share of the population with unstable, low-wage jobs) could obtain basic security.”

Standing did not specify where the income floor would be set. Nor did he say which social programs and benefits would be replaced by the unconditional payment. These questions are critical. If the basic amount is too low, the precariat wouldn’t be able to afford housing, child care or prescription drugs. If it is too high, taxpayers would balk.

All three social scientists drafted their blueprints for an ideal world, neglecting the four-year lifespan of governments, the weak job market, the unwillingness of politicians to embark on high-risk schemes with a distant payback, and the circumstances of people who can’t make ends meet.

They did make a convincing case that other — perhaps better — social policy options exist. But all of alternatives were top-down models. What Canada needs are safety nets redesigned with — not just for — the people who need them.

< http://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2015/04/14/new-safety-nets-needed-for-era-of-chronic-inequality-goar.html >

Tags: budget, economy, featured, globalization, ideology, participation, poverty, standard of living, tax

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