How best to support people in need is a vexing problem of public policy. Federal and provincial increases to child benefits have lifted many families above the poverty line and reduced pressure on social assistance. The majority of people dealing with deep poverty, however, and nearly three-quarters of those who receive income support, are single. Recent policy changes provide no benefit at all to these people.

Income support is only a small part of what is sometimes referred to as the “social safety net,” designed to catch people falling due to economic challenges or ill health or because they are victims of abuse or violence. The net consists of government programs, faith-based and other private charities (e.g., food banks, domestic violence shelters, immigration services, homeless shelters and children’s services), and family and friends. Wholly publicly funded components include medicare, employment insurance, the Canada and Quebec pension plans, old age security and workers compensation. Some aspects of the social safety net are in the form of regulations such as minimum wage laws and, in some jurisdictions, rent control.

The social safety net exists because as a society we believe we should help our fellow citizens. Philosophers have approached the question of what that help should look like by asking people to describe the society they’d prefer to be born into assuming they didn’t know their personal circumstances—whether they’d be born into a wealthy or a poor family, born in good health or ill, or what circumstances might later befall them. People tend to answer they’d prefer to be born into a community that supports the poor and the sick.

One of the most important parts of the social safety net provided by government is income support. The federal government and each province and territory provide such help, though in different ways.

Locally the provincial government has two programs for this purpose: Alberta Works (AW) and Assured Income for the Severely Handicapped (AISH). These programs are similar in size but serve different clients. AW offers income support to individuals and families who don’t have the resources to meet basic needs; AISH provides income and health benefits to Albertans with a permanent medical condition that prevents them from maintaining employment. In January 2019 AW maintained 59,940 cases, while AISH had 62,247.

To be eligible for either program, a recipient is restricted in the amount of wealth they can own. With AW, for example, a lone parent with one child is typically limited to about $5,000 in liquid assets beyond the value of certain basics such as a home, an inexpensive vehicle and up to $5,000 in RRSP savings. These are exempt to ensure that recipients who are eligible for ongoing benefits are not forced into total poverty, which would make it harder for them to eventually reduce their dependency on social assistance. Clients of AISH have a higher asset limit ($100,000) in recognition of their restricted ability to earn income. The value of a home, a vehicle and certain other assets are also exempt.

AW clients can earn a limited income without penalty. For example, a lone parent may earn up to $230 per month without losing benefits. Beyond that, their benefits are reduced by 75 cents for every dollar earned. Initially there’s an incentive to find employment while receiving income support, but a minimum-wage earner might see very little benefit in working more than 15 hours per month. The ideal system balances directing resources to those in greatest need while encouraging them to find employment. Determining the design of that ideal system is challenging.

An oddity of income support, not only in Alberta but in other provinces, is that benefits have generally not been indexed for inflation. Instead, they have been periodically increased, usually after their value has been seriously eroded by inflation. It is especially strange because Canadian governments have been careful to protect seniors from inflation by indexing CPP and Old Age Security benefits, and have protected income earners by indexing the tax system since the early 1970s. Why the most vulnerable Canadians shouldn’t receive this same benefit of indexation is a serious failure of public policy. In Alberta, income support clients (both AW and AISH) finally saw their benefits indexed for inflation this past January.

Support for the neediest Albertans has evolved greatly over the past 25 years. Beginning in the 1990s, the federal government stopped paying 50 per cent of the cost of social programs designed and implemented by provincial governments. This meant the provinces could no longer spend “50-cent dollars” on social assistance, causing them to rethink the design of their programs. Their budgets were also under pressure from rapidly rising healthcare costs. The provinces introduced measures that made their programs harder to access. As a result, the number of people receiving social assistance fell, sometimes quite dramatically, in all provinces.

In Alberta, for example, the number of people dependent on social assistance fell from 196,000 in 1993 to 109,000 by 1997 following provincial budget cuts. Today AW and AISH together support approximately 145,000 adults and children.

In the past two decades the federal government has found itself in a position to increase its role in funding social assistance. Its contribution, however, is very targeted and restrictive. Each of these features has important implications for people in need of income support.

The federal government’s contribution to social assistance is almost wholly by way of children’s benefits. Providing support this way has proven attractive to Conservative and Liberal governments alike over the past 20 years. Whereas two decades ago 15 per cent of total social assistance benefits (provincial and federal combined) provided to an Alberta couple with two children was in the form of child benefits, today it is over 43 per cent. Alberta recently hopped on the bandwagon of providing income assistance via child benefits with the Notley government introducing an Alberta Child Benefit in 2016. (The ACB is about one-seventh the size of the federal child benefit.)

The federal government delivers its support by way of the tax system. Twenty years ago 80 per cent of the total income support provided to an Alberta couple with two children came in the form of a monthly cheque received after proving need to a provincial caseworker. Today that has fallen to 50 per cent. Half of the income support provided to this family now comes in the form of benefits that are obtained only by completing tax forms. These include federal and provincial child benefits, the GST rebate, carbon tax rebates (until recently), and additional, smaller benefits. Obtaining these requires the ability to accurately complete increasingly complex tax forms. Growing evidence shows that a significant number of needy people are failing to do so.

What’s more, relying on the tax system to deliver benefits subjects claims to challenge by the Canada Revenue Agency. This is proving increasingly difficult for families seeking support for children with disabilities. Applications for certain benefits are less often determined by the considerations of a caseworker following an interview with applicants and a review of medical files and more often by the impersonal judgments of the Canada Revenue Agency.

Finally, many of these benefits, such as the GST credit, the Alberta Child Benefit and the carbon tax rebate, are paid quarterly, meaning that families must bridge those payments over the intervening three months. For families living hand-to-mouth, this can be challenging.

The ever-growing emphasis on providing income support via child benefits is most problematic, however, because the person in need is more often than not someone without young children. Researcher Dan Dutton, in a study released by the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy in 2019, shows that nearly 7 out of every 10 Albertans experiencing deep poverty are single. These people don’t get child benefits, of course, and so receive considerably less income support. A single Albertan receiving social assistance must try to get by on just under $9,000 per year from the province and less than $300 per year in the form of quarterly GST rebates from the federal government. If that person had a child, their benefits would jump to over $20,000 per year. (AISH, for comparison, provides just under $24,000 per year to a lone parent with two children.)

In other words, the drive to provide social assistance via child benefits, while politically attractive, has meant largely abandoning single people and couples without children.

The Notley government, in addition to indexing income support to inflation, increased rates for both AW and AISH. Albertans without children (expected to work; in private housing), for example, saw their monthly support through AW increase from $627 to $745. An AISH recipient in the same situation saw their monthly cheque go from $997 to $1,293. Benefits had not been increased in Alberta since 2009.

These amounts, however, remain sadly inadequate. In real dollars the Alberta Works rate is less than an unemployed Albertan (single; considered employable) would have received in the early 1990s, while housing costs have risen much faster than inflation. And the problem of inadequate income support for people without children is likely to worsen. Alberta’s economy is undergoing a great deal of change. The oil and gas sector is shrinking and is unlikely to recover to past employment levels. This sort of industrial readjustment can be disastrous for middle-aged people whose schooling and skills make retraining for an equivalent career unlikely. To subject them to extremely low levels of support because they are single or don’t have children is a failure of the social safety net.

Because governments, including Alberta’s, have abandoned single people when it comes to income support, many of them are forced to rely on emergency homeless shelters. The vast majority of shelter users in Alberta are single males. The combination of a very low level of income support and high rents is a key driver of single people into homelessness.

Income support in Alberta is also not sensitive to where one lives. An individual or a family receives the same level of support whether they live in Calgary or in rural Alberta. This is important because the cost of living in Calgary, especially for housing (the largest element of most household budgets), is much higher than in most Alberta communities.

In her research for the School of Public Policy, Margarita Wilkins refers to this as the “small town advantage” of social assistance. She calculates that a lone parent with one child receiving social assistance and living in a one-bedroom apartment in Medicine Hat is able to devote an extra $250 per month toward food, utilities and other necessities relative to what she could spend were she in Calgary. This difference could encourage social assistance recipients to remain in smaller communities, away from employment opportunities, or force those in large cities to make hard choices between paying rent, utilities or food. Social assistance benefits could be made sensitive to local costs of living; the cost of such an effort is surprisingly modest.

Making adequate income support dependent on a recipient having children is bad policy. So long as the federal government prefers merely to expand child benefits, change will fall to the provinces. Addressing deep poverty and homelessness requires that Alberta increase its support to the nearly three-quarters of Alberta Works clients who don’t have children. Likewise, we must make income support sensitive to local costs of living, so that recipients aren’t dissuaded from living in cities, where there are more jobs.

Both efforts would better honour our society’s commitment to help those fellow citizens in greatest need. In the meantime it will be left to the rest of the social safety net—including charities and other non-government organizations—to fill the holes.

Ronald Kneebone is scientific director of social policy and health and a professor of economics at the U of C.

The post Where Social Assistance Falls Short appeared first on Alberta Views.

The Statement of Principles of the Alberta Progressive Conservatives says, “The family is paramount in the development of social responsibility and a sense of self-worth. The family, as defined by its individual members, is of vital importance to our communities.” However, many of the Klein government’s policies do not address the needs and variety of Alberta’s families, and do not allow families to define themselves. While the Progressive Conservatives pay lip service to families and their importance, the current government has not supported those statements with policies to strengthen Alberta’s families.

Funding programs are flawed because provincial policies are biased against certain Alberta families, including those on Aboriginal reserves and those with disabilities. Sometimes the government doesn’t even attempt to hide its prejudices. The province’s adamant stand against same-sex marriage, and Klein’s repeated threats to invoke the notwithstanding clause, clearly do not allow same-sex-couple families to be “defined by their individual members.” Klein’s position reveals a hypocritical truth: Alberta supports only a particular kind of family.

Despite an increase in the number of people living alone (in 2001, 23 per cent of Alberta households were single people) the majority of us still live in family arrangements of one form or another, whether that be married or common-law couples, parents with children, or single-parent families. Families are changing and our social policies need to support the new reality of family life. They also need to account for the effect on families of a broad range of policies including not only family services but also education, child care and health.

Perhaps the most serious disconnect between the Klein government’s claims about their support for families and the reality can be found on Aboriginal reserves. According to the 2001 census, 156,220 Albertans identified themselves as Aboriginal, of which 37,495 lived on reserves. In the Hobbema area, there has long been a tug-of-war between local Aboriginal bands and the provincial government when it comes to funding family-based programs and counselling centres for families in crisis. What’s needed, contend family experts, is a new system to help individual family members and link them to supports capable of offering relevant counselling for victims of domestic abuse or those with addictions.

“There are some ‘family centres’ [in  Hobbema],  but you really need a trained family  therapist  who’s familiar with Aboriginal issues,” says Jan Gordon, president of the Canadian Registry for Marriage and Family Therapy. She notes the provincial government’s funding arm for Aboriginal family programs in Alberta is often restrictive and doesn’t provide services from professionals, such as emerging family therapists, who may be helpful in family crises. Without access to comprehensive services, families on reserves struggle.

Accessibility is also a problem for Alberta families with members with a disability. The government has funnelled provincial dollars into Assured Income for the Severely Handicapped, or AISH, and plans to pour $488-million into the program this year for Albertans who are over 18 and have a permanent physical, sensory, mental or developmental disability. However, classifying AISH as a disability issue, rather than a family issue, overlooks the fact that families must pick up where government programs end.

Even the toughest Klein critics say AISH funds have helped those with disabilities fare better now compared to 30 years ago, before the program existed. But when you break down AISH’s big-budget figure, you see that only a small percentage trickles down to each recipient. The government recently agreed to bump AISH’s maximum monthly payouts to $1,000 (from $850). But the benefit is still not indexed to inflation. For an entire decade, AISH benefits increased by only 4.9 per cent, while the rate of inflation was more than 20 per cent, according to Tracie Matthiessen, coordinator for the Alberta Disabilities Forum, an Edmonton-based organization representing 35 not-for-  profits that help Albertans with disabilities. Beginning in 2007, a government committee is scheduled to conduct biannual reviews of the benefit rate. However, Matthiessen notes, the review process “does not confirm the AISH benefit will increase.”

Imagine a woman with Down’s syndrome who lives in a small town such as Redwater, for example. Her monthly AISH income, even if raised to the maximum allowable, will still leave her below the national poverty line. Everything from groceries to medications climbs in price, while her AISH payments remain stuck at the same level. Even if disabled couples who are cohabiting or married combine their monthly AISH benefits, they still fall below Canada’s poverty line. And these are best-case scenarios calculated for AISH recipients who qualify for maximum benefits—many are not eligible for that amount, Matthiessen says. Making up the shortfall often falls to the families of people with disabilities.

Deana Simkin’s 20-year- old daughter collects AISH, but lives at home because she “has the mentality of a five- year-old,” Simkin says. Her daughter grew up with provincially paid support services that provided mental and physical stimulation. However, even though the provincial PCs contend that family members should define their own family, “once your kid turns into an adult—chronologically—it’s all left up to you,” Simkin says. No wonder so many parents become frustrated at the province and overwhelmed the moment their son or daughter turns 18; it’s not necessarily about the dollar change in funding—it’s what that funding can be used for. Many developmental programs cater to children and not adults, even if they still mentally function much as children. A child like Simkin’s daughter, for example, may be considered an adult at 18, but developmentally she is not. Simkin says the current AISH funding isn’t enough to pay for the day programs her daughter needs to develop further. Instead, she attends a vocational program where she works on an assembly line, packaging plastic forks and spoons with salt and pepper.

Parents who have children with an “invisible,” or non- physical, disability also encounter obstacles with Alberta’s family policies. Over 40 per cent of families with a special-needs child experience financial burden due to associated care costs. Many fear their funding could be pulled if they openly criticize the government, which is why none of the families interviewed wanted their last name divulged.

Clare’s 14-year-old son has autism spectrum disorder and attends a special-needs class at a junior high school in Calgary. She says she believes “you can’t depend on the government for everything.” However, she and other parents have signed cost- sharing agreements with the government to pay for programs the families simply can’t afford on their own. Clare relies on provincial funding for a 10-hour-a-week, speech-based behavioural modification therapy for her son, then pays out of pocket for therapeutic equipment and supplies and after- school enrichment programs. “If you have normal kids, you have a choice not to send them to hockey,” says Clare. “But this therapy is absolutely necessary for him.”

Given the complexities of taking care of a child with a disability, many parents reduce their workloads, or quit their jobs altogether, to ensure their child is looked after when he or she is not in school. Clare and her husband took salary cuts so that they could work part time and ensure someone would be home after school for their son.

“It’s really a full-time job,” noted one mother, after returning from an emergency trip to the hospital with her daughter. She quit her job to wade through psychological assessments, funding applications and the medical system—and to become a lifelong advocate for her daughter.

Marginalized parents are not the only ones being adversely affected by Alberta’s policies. Surely a government that espouses support for the family would maintain the highest standards of parental leave. But Alberta is the only province that entitles mothers to just 15 weeks of maternity leave. Women in the rest of the country receive at least 17 weeks. When you look at the combined maternity leave and parental leave, Alberta again falls behind. This province is one of three, along with New Brunswick and PEI, which give only 52 weeks of joint maternity and parental leave. Families in Saskatchewan, for example, are eligible for up to 89 weeks of parental leave between two parents. Alberta and Nova Scotia are also the only two provinces that require parents to work for their respective employers for a full 12 months before they become eligible for maternity or parental leave. British Columbia, New Brunswick and Québec do not require any specific period of continuous employment for maternity leave eligibility.

In Alberta, despite the rhetoric, it is not families that come first. Progressive Conservatives mouth platitudes about the importance of the family to Alberta while working against the strength of the institution they claim to value.

Neil Parmar grew up in Wetaskiwin and currently reports for Smart Money: The Wall Street Journal Magazine.

The post Whose Family? appeared first on Alberta Views.