[LINK] "Cost of Ontario’s 1995 ‘welfare diet’ soars amid inadequate rates"

[rfmcdonald]

Laurie Monsebraaten's Toronto Star article looking at the inadequacy of provincial welfare rates is depressing.

Twenty years ago this month, Harris’s social services minister David Tsubouchi suggested a single, able-bodied person on welfare could survive on a monthly food budget of $90.21.

His shopping list was ridiculed for including bread but no butter, and pasta but no sauce. Critics also noted the food contained less than half of the calories recommended by the World Health Organization.

Officially, inflation since then has been 45 per cent. But when Toronto social policy expert John Stapleton took Tsubouchi’s sample shopping list to the grocery store recently, he noticed the cost of the so-called “welfare diet” had spiked by 107 per cent, to $189.91.

Meantime, welfare rates — including November’s 3.8-per-cent hike for singles on Ontario Works — have increased by just 31 per cent, to $681 a month.

If rates had not been slashed in 1995 and had kept pace with inflation, a single person would be receiving $962 per month, Stapleton says in his report, titled “The Welfare Diet 20 years later: The growing nutrition crisis for Ontario’s poorest people.”