Back in 1995, the minister overseeing social services in the Common Sense Revolution of Ontario Premier Mike Harris David Tsubouchi caused a stir when he recommended haggling to get a 69-cent price on dented cans of tuna for those who had their welfare cut back.
It gained him no points on the empathy scale.
Tsubouchi also claimed that single mothers on welfare now had ample time to find jobs, after having been given a three-month warning of a 22% cut in benefits.
To make matters worse, Tsubouchi then put out a sample menu which listed affordable food purchases for those whose welfare rates had been reduced. His menu was found to have less nutritional value than the diet served to prisoners in Ontario jails.
Naturally, there were multiple calls for his resignation.
Now, decades later, we are being forced again to watch five Ontario NDP MPPs pledge to live on a “social assistance diet” for two weeks to prove a 5% increase in Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) payments is not enough.
The five Opposition MPPs – Chandra Pasma, Monique Taylor, Lise Vaugeois, Jessica Bell (University—Rosedale) and Joel Harden – will allegedly eat only what they can buy with $95.21 for two weeks, which works out to an average of $47.60 per week.
Their advocacy coincides with the 40th anniversary of former NDP MPP Richard Johnston’s “welfare diet” in 1982, wherein the MPP supposedly lived on a social assistance grocery budget for one month.
It achieved nothing, just as this stunt will achieve nothing.
This effort is meant to draw renewed focus and urgency to address the inadequacy of ODSP and Ontario Works rates and help amplify the experiences and voices of people who live this every day.
The 5% increase to ODSP by the Ford government, which comes into effect this month, amounts to an additional $58 per month, at most, per recipient. Meanwhile, Ontario Works recipients have had their rates frozen at $733 per month.
“Nobody can live a decent, healthy or dignified life on $733 or $1,227 a month,” Pasma said. “We’re using our platform as MPPs to amplify how Ontario’s social assistance rates are callous, unhealthy and undignified.”
The problem with publicity stunts like this, however, is that they are just publicity stunts. They go nowhere.
The stunts, themselves, are undignified.
Besides, the average salary for these five NDP MPPs ranges from $147,983-$160,799, which is not exactly chump change.
The true place to protest is to debate the social assistance rates on the legislative floor at Queen’s Park and in op-eds.
You get what you pay for with the NDP, which is not much beyond template left-wing rhetoric.
Feigning a poverty diet for all of two weeks is almost laughable coming from such privileged Dippers.
Only in Ontario, with its left-leaning legacy media, would such a stunt get any positive publicity.
But it doesn’t make it less laughable.
