Abstract

Economic Outcomes After Leaving Welfare in Toronto

Ernie Lightman, Andrew Mitchell and Dean Herd

Little research has been conducted into the experiences of social assistance recipients in Canada in general, and specifically in Ontario (which has been in the forefront of work-based welfare reform). Research on the outcomes of welfare reform, including what happens to people when they leave the system, is more limited still. Studies into the experiences of former recipients are few in number, methodologically limited, and typically restricted to an analysis of the current circumstances of former recipients a short time after leaving assistance. Little is known about the long-term experiences of people as they enter assistance, navigate the systems and eventually leave assistance.

The Social Assistance in the New Economy (SANE) project was established to address some of these knowledge gaps using multiple perspectives and methodological approaches.

This paper reports on the results of a unique survey, conducted by the city of Toronto, which examines economic trajectories of people leaving social assistance in 2001. The city of Toronto is the only municipality in Ontario to attempt a large-scale sophisticated survey of this sort and the data have been made available to the researchers of the social assistance in the new economy project for extended analysis beyond that conducted by the municipality itself.

We shall report on our findings, including the major outcomes for people leaving social assistance in Toronto over time.

Bios

Ernie Lightman is Professor of Social Policy at the University of Toronto Faculty of Social Work and is Principal Investigator for the SSHRC-funded study, “Social Assistance in the New Economy (SANE)”. He received his Honours BA in economics and political science from the University of Toronto and his MA and PhD in economics from the University of California at Berkeley. After teaching at the London School of Economics, he returned to U of T where he has stayed ever since. He has published widely in both academic and popular venues and comments regularly to the press on policy issues of the day. He is particularly interested in the interplay between economic and social policy. In the early 1990’s, he was a one-person commission of inquiry investigating unregulated retirement and care homes in Ontario. He is also author of Social Policy in Canada (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2003).

Andrew Mitchell is the research coordinator for the Social Assistance in the New Economy Project (SANE) at the Faculty of Social Work, University of Toronto. Prior to that he was a Program Director at the Social Planning Council of Metropolitan Toronto (now the Community Social Planning Council of Toronto) since 1990. He has conducted research on poverty, the declining economic status of younger families and income security programs such as social assistance. He served on the Low-income Relief Working Group of the Ontario Fair Tax Commission and has published commentaries on Ontario’s income tax reductions. Most recently he was the coordinator of the Workfare Watch Project which has produced the only evaluation of the Ontario Works program yet undertaken.

Dean Herd is a postdoctoral researcher with the Social Assistance in the New Economy (SANE) project based at the Faculty of Social Work, University of Toronto. His research interests include the political economy of welfare reform and workfare, international policy transfer and the dynamics of urban poverty. Over recent years, he has worked as a researcher on a number of projects evaluating the local shape and impact of welfare-to-work programs in the UK under the New Labour administration, particularly the "New Deal Monitoring Project" and the "National Qualitative Evaluation of Prototype Employment Zones". In addition, between 2000 and 2001 he was an Honorary Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison conducting research for his doctoral thesis -- "Connecting Spaces: Trans-atlantic welfare reform and the re-regulation of the urban poor". As well as documenting the rise of workfare in the US, UK and Canada, this thesis explored three specific themes: First, the role of intensive case-management, personal adviser systems and technological innovations in the shift away from the traditional bureaucracy of welfare delivery at the local level towards a more active regime; Second, the role of decentralisation and localisation in workfare policy-making and the function of the national scale in the restructuring of welfare; Third, the extent and form of policy transfer between the US and the UK and Canada, and the degree to which UK and Canadian policy is influenced by American ideas.

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