In 1995, the Ontario Progressive Conservative government under Mike Harris cut welfare rates by 21.6 percent. David Tsubouchi, then minister of community and social services, was in charge of implementing the cuts.<\/p>\n
As \u201conly one small part of this government\u2019s commitment to helping people,\u201d as Tsubouchi put it in a letter to Opposition Leader Bob Rae, the ministry constructed a sample shopping list for a single person on general welfare, which demonstrated how one could get by on a budget of $90.21 for food each month.<\/p>\n
There were several problems with the shopping list, which was generally derided in the media. For one, the list seemed to assume that recipients were already in possession of many pantry staples. Bread was on the list, but no butter or margarine. Pasta was on the list, but no sauce. No coffee or tea. No salt or spices of any kind. And besides these obvious issues of palatability, journalists who tried the diet<\/a> pointed out that it made them feel ill and provided only about half of the daily calories recommended by the World Health Organization.<\/p>\n The so-called welfare diet of 1995 was neither a good diet nor a healthy one. However, it does provide a useful benchmark for comparing the food costs that social assistance recipients have encountered since 1995. Social assistance levels and how much food can be bought with them are an important policy issue to consider, as a Progressive Conservative government consumed with cost-cutting enters office and the spectre of a global tariff war might mean a spike in food costs.<\/p>\n Because subsequent governments have not offered an amended version, the 1995 list is used here as a proxy for the bare minimum a welfare recipient is expected to live on. The list has been shopped regularly since 2010 for the purposes of research, at supermarkets in the east end of Toronto. Shopping the list allows for comparisons of the cost of the welfare diet over time, with both the rise in inflation and adjustments to the social assistance rate for single persons.<\/p>\n The cost of that 1995 welfare diet now exceeds inflation by 65 percent and has increased by almost double the rate at which payments under Ontario Works (social assistance) have increased (figure 1). Inflation as measured by the consumer price index (CPI) has risen 52.4 percent, while the cost of the welfare diet has increased by 86.3 percent.<\/p>\n