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Poor children still wait for fair deal
Mar. 27, 2006. 01:00 AM

http://tinyurl.com/g9z6j

When anti-poverty advocates accuse Queen's Park of stealing food right out
of the mouths of hungry children, most Ontarians tend to dismiss their
claims as hyperbolic "lefty" rhetoric.

Surely no government is that callous.

Yet that is, in effect, what happens because of the province's clawback of
the National Child Benefit Supplement, a federal cash benefit that was
intended to improve the lot of poor children throughout Canada.

While most people would agree that a poor child is a poor child, the former
provincial Conservative government decided there were, in fact, two kinds
of poor children: the deserving children of the working poor and the
undeserving children of social assistance recipients.

So the Tory government cut families' welfare benefits back by the amount
they would receive from Ottawa through the child benefit supplement. The
government said it would use the "clawed back" money to fund new children's
programs. What happened, though, was that many of Ontario's poorest kids
were going hungry to pay for these programs, which primarily benefit the
children of the working poor. The government was robbing the children on
welfare of an average of $1,450 a year.

In the last provincial election in 2003, Liberal Leader Dalton McGuinty
said it was wrong to treat any poor child this way, and promised to
eliminate the clawback in his first mandate.

As premier, though, McGuinty has failed to act on his promise.

What he has done is to allow children on welfare to keep the increases in
the supplement that Ottawa has provided since 2003. That extra $20 a month
is certainly better than nothing. But the government is still withholding
the $122-a-month base cash benefit. That is money to which these children
are entitled. Even McGuinty said so during the election.

Now, the Liberal government's excuse for not doing more for the poorest
Ontarians is that it cannot solve every problem at once.

True enough. But why should these poorest of children have to go without
proper food and clothing while the Liberals spend hundreds of millions of
new dollars on a new subway and on road and bridge repairs?

Surely, with its $3 billion budget windfall, the Liberal government could
have moved both on its transportation initiatives and on cutting the
clawback by at least half. Reducing the clawback by just 50 per cent would
have cost $100 million — a small amount in an $87 billion spending plan.

The fact is children on welfare have three strikes against them, which may
explain part of the indifference with which they are treated by governments
of all stripes at Queen's Park: First, they are children; second, they are
poor; and third, their parents are on welfare.

None of that is their fault, and it is certainly no reason to keep
punishing them by taking away money that was meant to improve their lives.
Before the next budget, McGuinty should end this unfairness and start
living up to the commitment he has made to the children.