The Social Planning Network of Ontario wishes to give notice that this site Poverty Watch Ontario will now be archived and we encourage all regular and new visitors to go to our new web site – Poverty Free Ontario.

Poverty Watch Ontario was set up in 2008 to monitor and report on activity in communities across Ontario to build and express support for policy approaches for input to the Ontario Government’s poverty reduction strategy released in December 2008.

In 2008 and 2009, Poverty Watch Ontario has tracked the growing cross-community momentum on the Put Food in the Budget campaign, growing numbers of people who Do the Math survey (The Stop Community Food Centre’s excellent resource tool) and the food hamper Diet Challenge and has provided other reports and resources to fight poverty in the province.

SPNO is committed to making not just poverty reduction but poverty eradication in Ontario within this decade as an important priority the upcoming provincial election campaign.  The Poverty Free Ontario initiative has been designed and is being rolled out to achieve that goal.

For that reason, the Poverty Free Ontario web site has been set up to keep a focus on the election campaign. It will also track developments with Put Food in the Budget and Do the Math as we move Poverty watch Ontario into archive status for the 2008-2010 period.

We encourage you to continue to follow cross-community activity and policy developments on poverty eradication on this new web site.

If you currently subscribe to the Poverty Watch Ontario mailing list, consider subscribing to the Poverty Free Ontario mailing list.

The Social Planning Network of Ontario (SPNO) plans to launch an initiative to build cross-community support for a Poverty Free Ontario by the end of this decade.

Social planning councils have a long history since the 1930s of advocating for low income people, whether welfare recipients or working poor. In recent years, the SPNO and its organizational members have assumed a lead role in urging the Ontario Government to adopt a poverty reduction strategy for Ontario. Specifically,

• In the summer-fall of 2007, SPNO mobilized cross-community support for poverty reduction in Ontario and released a report on “Ontario as the Child Poverty Centre of Canada”, which prompted Premier McGuinty prior to the October 2007 election to commit to the development of a poverty reduction strategy within one year of his Government’s re-election.
• SPNO strengthened its cross-community mobilization on poverty reduction by developing a Policy Framework and Blueprint for Poverty Reduction and by conducting two tours of the province visiting 30 communities prior to the release of the Ontario Poverty Reduction Strategy in December 2008.
• Since 2009, working with community leadership in Toronto and across the province, SPNO has focused on the Put Food in the Budget Campaign (PFIB), promoting the adoption of a benefit increase of $100 a month Healthy Food Supplement for all adults on OW and ODSP as the first step towards adequacy in benefit levels to enable all Ontarians to live with health and dignity.
• Partnering with The Stop Community Food Centre and guided by the PFIB Steering Committee, the SPNO has provided organizing and field support for the use of the on-line Do the Math survey tool (9,000 completed) and has engaged 20 communities across the province in the Do the Math Challenge.

2011 Provincial Election Year

The Ontario Government’s current commitment to poverty reduction focusing on a 25% reduction in child poverty ends in 2013. Since 2011 is a provincial election year, now is the time to begin a public discussion about where Government action needs to go to move from a partial and measured commitment to reducing child poverty to a full commitment to the eradication of all poverty in Ontario by the year 2020.

In May 2010, the SPNO leadership set policy development and cross-community mobilization for a poverty-free Ontario as a major provincial and community level priority for SPNO and its local and regional organizational members in 2011.

Mission

An Ontario free of poverty will be reflected in healthy, inclusive communities with a place of dignity for everyone and the essential conditions of well-being for all.

The mission of Poverty Free Ontario is to eliminate divided communities in which large numbers of adults and children live in chronic states of material hardship, poor health and social exclusion.

Securing a Legacy Commitment

2017 will be the 150th anniversary of Canada as a country and Ontario as a province. Poverty Free Ontario will ask the political leadership of all parties in the 2011 provincial election to commit publicly to a “legacy commitment” for the Sesquicentennial. That legacy commitment would be for the provincial government of whatever political stripe to have adopted and implemented a comprehensive plan by 2017 resulting in the eradication of poverty in Ontario by 2020. This plan should move beyond poverty reduction targets set by the current Government for children in 2013 to bring all children and adults out of poverty by the year 2020.

PFO Strategy for 2011

A.   A Policy Agenda for a Poverty Free Ontario

A new Policy Agenda for a Poverty Free Ontario would build on SPNO’s policy development work in 2008. Essentially, policy proposals will be developed and advanced in three key areas for the eradication of poverty in Ontario:

1. End Deep Poverty: Upgrade Social Assistance
2. End Working Poverty: Assure Basic Minimum Wages
3. Protect Food Money: Phase in a Full Housing Benefit

The Policy Agenda would link the strategy for eradication of poverty with a good quality of life for all Ontarians in order to build public and political support.  It must demonstrate that the interests of the poor and the broad middle class are indivisible.

B.    Critical Milestones

Simultaneously with the framing and promotion of a Policy Agenda for a Poverty Free Ontario, there are specific actions and resource allocations that can and must be taken now and over the next year or more to kick-start a longer term commitment to eradicating poverty. These actions constitute Critical Milestones that would:

The Put Food in the Budget Campaign advocating for a $100/month Healthy Food Supplement for all adults on social assistance is an immediately doable action. This measure could be implemented as part of the Government’s commitment to Social Assistance Review, which at the moment is focusing on long-term overhaul of the income security system rather than action possible immediately using the existing social assistance system.

Proposing specific measures for ensuring income adequacy beyond the first step of the HFS, Poverty Free Ontario would constitute an important policy development link to the immediate social assistance increase that the PFIB campaign is advocating.

For more information, go to http://www.povertyfreeontario.ca

Response to Toronto Star editorial

Re: Welfare Reform: Breaking the cycle of poverty, Editorial, Dec. 4

In her announcement of the social assistance review, Social Services Minister Madeleine Meilleur unfortunately refers to reform that will “empower low-income Ontarians, including social assistance recipients, to break out of the cycle of poverty,” which the Star picked up as the title of its lead editorial.

The notion of a “cycle of poverty” suggests poverty that is transmitted from generation to generation and implies something inherently deficient in poor people rather than placing a focus on basic living conditions, which are the root causes of inequality and poverty in our society.

It is misleading to suggest that intergenerational poverty is the primary source of poverty in Ontario and Canada. Research evidence is clear that, compared to the United States and even the United Kingdom, the rate of poverty passed from one generation to the next in Canada is very low.

The structural conditions that produce high rates of poverty are:

• Income support programs that provide woefully inadequate benefits for those unable to work.
• Wage levels that keep people in poverty and the lack of good jobs.
• The lack of affordable housing and other social supports such as child care.

If governments would address these conditions with investments and action and not just long-term studies and plans, they could take credit for acting to end poverty rather than trying to explain it away in intergenerational terms.

Peter Clutterbuck, Social Planning Network of Ontario

TORONTO, June 14, 2010 /CNW

The Social Assistance Review Advisory Council Report released Monday morning at Queen’s Park promotes a bold new vision for income security in the long run but is weak on what it asks the Ontario Government to do to help people on social assistance meet their basic daily living necessities now. The Review panel recommends a consultation and system overhaul process that will take 12 to 18 months.

“A bold vision for tomorrow does not put food on the table today,” says Marvyn Novick, retired Professor Emeritus in Social Policy at Ryerson University and contributor to the Social Planning Network of Ontario (SPNO). “The Ontario Government has ignored the needs of the most vulnerable in the province. It sets up a panel on social assistance and shortly thereafter cuts the Special Diet Allowance, reneges on the dental program for adult recipients, and reduces the woefully inadequate real income of recipients by 1% in the latest budget. While the panel claims to promote long-term reform, the real situation with people on the ground is deteriorating rapidly.”

“Minister Meilleur needs to listen to people like me,” says Nadia, an Ontario Works recipient in Toronto, “who are making the choice every month between paying for my children’s needs and buying healthy food and not listen to those who would trade real change today for promises in the future.”

“The report lacks a sense of urgency because many are in crisis right now and it ignores the short-term recommendation of $100 a month Healthy Food Supplement for those on welfare,” says Tom Pearson, Chair of the Poverty Action for Change Coalition in York Region, “The Healthy Food Supplement would put money in people’s pockets instantly and it is widely supported in communities across the province.”

“The Advisory Council acknowledges the urgency facing single adults with inadequate income support,” says Peter Clutterbuck, SPNO Coordinator. “But it is weak on the immediate measures that could be taken to address that issue. The community would support the panel’s proposal for a well-designed and adequate housing benefit in an overhauled income security system in the long run. But, in the meantime, measures like the Healthy Food Supplement could be easily implemented using the existing social assistance benefit system. People who do not know where their next meal is coming from do not have the luxury of time.”

The SPNO has been working with community partners across the province in the last year on a campaign called Put Food in the Budget. The campaign calls for the immediate introduction of a $100 a month Healthy Food Supplement for people on social assistance as a first step toward setting rates at a level that allows them to live with health and dignity. SPNO and its community partners urged the SARAC panel to make this recommendation to the Minister of Community and Social Services along with proposals for long-term income security reform. They are disappointed in the panel’s failure to do so.

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For further information:

Peter Clutterbuck, SPNO/PFIB
Tel. (416) 653-7947
Cell (416) 738-3228

PDF Version of Media Release

The ODSP Action Coalition is requesting individuals and groups to endorse their Disability Declaration.  The Declaration sets out some of the rights that people with disabilities have according to the UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities, and then states what changes the Ontario government needs to make to ODSP to fulfil those rights.  Although Canada has not yet ratified the Convention, the Coalition believes it is important for people with disabilities and organizations that work with them to use it in articulating how and why their needs must be met.

For more information and to download a copy of the declaration go to

ODSP Action Coalition