Ontario’s Poverty Plan: Have You Tried Not Being Poor?

There was a woman at the food bank last week. Let’s call her Janet, though that’s not her real name.

Janet is in her sixties, soft-spoken, the kind of person who sends Christmas cards with actual handwritten notes inside and keeps hard candies in her purse for “emergencies.”

Janet worked as a cashier for 30 years. Then she retired, got cancer, got better, got evicted, and now she’s here, standing in front of me, trying not to cry because we’ve run out of eggs.

“It’s okay,” she says, which is the kind of thing people say when it is absolutely not okay.

I think about Janet a lot. I thought about her when I saw the Ontario election results roll in — that blue wave of asphalt and $200 bribes.

The people of Ontario — at least the ones who bothered to vote — decided the best way forward was to keep plowing through everything soft and vulnerable, paving over the poor like they’re a wetland in the Greenbelt.

We know exactly what this government will do. We know they’ve throttled minimum wage and social assistance to the point where it barely covers a coffee and a pack of day-old Timbits.

We know rent is unaffordable and shelters are overflowing. We know the ERs are filled with people in crisis, not because they love the ambiance of a hospital waiting room but because there’s nowhere else to go.

And yet, Ontarians still voted for this. Or, more precisely, most of them didn’t vote at all, which is a kind of voting in itself.

So I have to ask: What does it say about us when we keep electing leaders who punish the poor for being poor?

Maybe the answer is something we don’t want to say out loud. Maybe it’s that Ontario — the polite, progressive province we imagine ourselves to be — just doesn’t care.

Maybe we’re just assholes.

Who is voting for this?

It’s easy to believe the world is fair when you’ve never had to choose between rent and groceries, or if your biggest financial stressor is whether to renovate the kitchen this year or next.

And if you look at who’s actually voting for this government, it starts to make a whole lot more sense.

The Progressive Conservatives dominate suburban Ontario — the 905 belt around Toronto, where middle-class homeowners live in detached houses with two-car garages and a Costco membership. These voters tend to prioritize tax cuts, infrastructure, and economic growth — things that make their lives easier but do nothing for people barely scraping by.

It’s not that they’re actively rooting against the poor. It’s just that poverty isn’t a crisis when you don’t have to see it. Their roads are paved, their neighbourhoods feel safe, and their paychecks cover the bills, so they keep voting for the guy who promises to keep it that way.

It’s the “I’m Fine, So It’s Fine” mentality.

It’s the suburban homeowners who worry more about their property values than about the guy sleeping in the park. It’s the comfortable retirees who shake their heads at “kids these days” struggling with unaffordable rent because “Back in my day, we just worked harder!”

It’s the small business owners who think $16 an hour is plenty to live on because they haven’t checked the price of groceries since Jean Chrétien was in office.

And if you’re reading this thinking, ‘Hey, I’m a suburban homeowner who actually gives a damn and understands how bad policy kills,’ then relax — I’m not talking about you. Just your neighbours. Statistically.

The idea that poverty is a personal failing and not a systemic crisis is one of the great, enduring fairy tales of our time, right up there with avocado toast is the barrier to home ownership.

Here’s the reality: full-time, minimum-wage jobs do not lift people out of poverty. Social assistance rates don’t even cover rent in most Ontario cities. The gig economy is chewing people up and spitting them out, and the food banks — dear God, the food banks — are seeing record numbers every single month.

But when this voting demographic hears these things, they don’t think, Wow, that’s awful. We should fix it.

Instead, they think, Well, I worked hard for what I have. Why can’t they?

As if life isn’t a game of snakes and ladders, with some of us born halfway up the board while others start at the bottom, with only a handful of snakes and no ladders in sight.

And this is why Ford wins. Because the people who are struggling? They’re often too busy trying to survive to make it to the polls.

And the ones who aren’t?

Well, they’re fine.

So it’s fine.

The cost of indifference

Poverty isn’t just cruel — it’s expensive. You can ignore it, pretend it’s not your problem, tell yourself it’s unfortunate but inevitable.

But it’s still coming for you.

We’re already paying for poverty. We just insist on doing it in the most inefficient, inhumane way possible.

Poverty costs Ontario billions — not because people are ‘milking the system’ (they can’t even afford rent), but because when people can’t survive, they end up in ERs, shelters, and jails. And that costs exponentially more than just giving people enough to live.

Poverty isn’t an accident. It’s the result of deliberate policy choices.

And the bill just keeps getting bigger.

Faith communities: helpers or enablers

For a long time, churches, mosques, synagogues, and temples have been quietly holding up the corners of Canada’s fraying social safety net — handing out food, shelter, and mercy while the government shrugs and reroutes funding to something shinier.

We were only ever meant to be a stopgap, not the whole damn system.

And we know the charity model is deeply flawed. It keeps people in cycles of dependency, often forces folks to perform gratitude for scraps and robs them of agency over their own lives.

We don’t like it. We know it shouldn’t be this way.

But this is the system we have right now, in this moment, when people are dying.

So we keep showing up, keep handing out meals, keep trying to hold back the tide.

But the more we scramble to patch things up, the easier it is for the Ford government and those who support them to pretend things aren’t that bad — to step over a growing humanitarian emergency like it’s just another crack in the sidewalk.

At what point does our compassion become a get-out-of-jail-free card for the politicians to do their **** job?

What can be done? (if we actually cared)

It turns out, if you want to fix poverty, you have to do radical things like… give people enough money to live.

We could start with livable social assistance rates — not “just enough to keep you from literally starving” rates, but amounts that allow people to have a roof over their heads and food in their fridge. Even better, on a federal level, we could implement a Guaranteed Livable Income.

We could bring back real rent control so that landlords can’t jack up prices however much they want on newer homes or between tenants. We could build actual affordable housing instead of pretending that “affordable” means 80% of market rent, which in most Ontario cities is still absurdly unaffordable.

And while we’re at it, how about a healthcare system that works — not just for the comfortably middle-class, but for the people who show up in the ER every week because their untreated mental illness has nowhere else to go?

These are not new ideas. These are not pie-in-the-sky, idealistic fever dreams. These are basic human decency policies, things that would save money in the long run.

And yet, every election, we pretend we have no idea what to do. We sigh, ‘It’s complicated,’ then vote for the guy who hands us cheap alcohol and a three-cent gas cut.

Who’s getting it right?

Some countries have figured this out — not perfectly, not without flaws, but in ways that actually give people a fighting chance.

Take the Nordic countries — Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Iceland. These places have built social safety nets that actually catch people instead of letting them hit the pavement.

Finland has invested in Housing First policies that recognize people need stable housing before they can even think about getting a job or improving their situation.

Homelessness has plummeted.

It turns out that when you actually give people what they need to live, they tend to do better.

Will We Choose Compassion or Convenience?

I don’t believe most Ontarians are bad people. I don’t believe we want our neighbours to go hungry, or to die in the streets, or to be shuffled from shelter to shelter until there’s nowhere left for them to go.

But I do believe we have made peace with it. That we’ve convinced ourselves this is just the way things are. That it’s too complicated, too political, too impossible to fix. That it’s somebody else’s problem.

But it’s not. It’s ours.

Every budget cut, every closed shelter, every frozen social assistance rate — those aren’t just numbers. Those are people.

People like Janet, who are exhausted, who are done, who are waiting for the rest of us to give a damn before it’s too late.

So we have a choice. We can keep pretending this is normal. We can keep voting for leaders who promise us convenience, $1 beer, and a few extra coins in our wallet.

Or we can decide, once and for all, that we are not okay with this.

Because if we truly believe in compassion — if we truly believe that people deserve dignity and the opportunity to flourish…

then it’s time to act like it. 🦢