Province Puses Cities on Workfare

Province pushes cities on workfare

Title	Province pushes cities on workfare: Tories threaten to claw back cash if quotas, not met
Byline	Caroline Mallan
Program/Newspaper Name	Toronto Star
Citation	The Toronto Star, November 23, 1999, First Edition
Section Head	NEWS
Publication Date	1999/11/23
Length of Fulltext	Short
Accession Number	TST199911231117790
Word Count	531

Fulltext:

Municipalities that fail to force local welfare recipients to
work for their monthly cheques could pay the price as early as
April, 2000, the Ontario government announced yesterday.

Community and Social Services Minister John Baird said the
province will begin to claw back welfare funding from cities and
towns that don't meet workfare quotas at the beginning of the
next fiscal year.

"My view is that the debate is over, the people of the province
of Ontario ... support workfare, they want to see it
expanded," he said in a warning to municipalities that have
launched only half-hearted efforts to find job placements of 17
hours a week for welfare recipients.

The minister would not say how much those financial penalties
would be, adding that it will vary from city to city.

The province also announced that it will double its target of the
number of welfare recipients expected to go to work from the
current 15 per cent of the caseload, to 30 per cent in the next
30 months.

Currently, less than 5 per cent of welfare recipients are working
for the cheques, a figure that has been a considerable source of
embarrassment for the Conservative government of Premier Mike
Harris, who campaigned on workfare in both 1995 and in last
June's election.

"The announcement today is meant to be a shot of adrenalin to
help us move forward with the expansion of community
placements," he said, adding that municipalities that exceed the
government's targets will be rewarded with extra cash.

For each welfare recipient who works for his or her cheque in
excess of the set target, the city or town will receive $1,000.

Baird said he hopes this incentive system, which begins in
January, 2000, will encourage municipalities to speed up the
process of finding job placements for their welfare caseload.

The minister said that currently, only eight to 10 of a total of
47 different provincial regions are meeting their workfare
target.

But Liberal Leader Dalton McGuinty said that without adequate
child care for welfare mothers, going out to a workfare
placement is just not realistic.

"This is a covert operation to remove even more money from the
welfare system in Ontario by imposing a responsibility on
municipalities that they simply cannot live up to unless this
government decides it's going to be serious and devote the
necessary funding," he said, singling out child care and
effective job training.

But Baird said the workfare participant in his own office manages
to fulfill the 17-hour requirement while her school-aged children
are in class. He added that welfare mothers with pre-school
children are exempt from workfare.

"I think we've got to be very careful that child care doesn't
become the excuse or the scapegoat," he said.

Baird also announced as part of his ministry's workfare plan that
more job placements will be available inside the Ontario Public
Service, a move which angered Leah Casselman, the head of the
public service union.

"If they need more people in the Ontario civil service, then
they can start recalling some of the thousands of people that
they have laid off," she said.