workfare

[Victor Milne]

One fact can't be ignored: Workfare's a failure ``Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.'' - The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Brooks Adams, 1907  ABOUT A YEAR before the last Ontario election, communications aides in the Harris government attended a weekend seminar to identify their core constituency and to fine-tune their messaging. At it, they were told that far and away the single most popular government initiative to that point had been workfare. And when you think of it, that's astonishing. How many among us have ever actually witnessed a workfare crew or project in action? How many of us have seen or experienced the results of such labours? Probably very few. But people still seemed to love the notion of it. By then, the Conservative government was absolutely certain of what a backroomer told me it had learned during the 1995 campaign that brought it to office - that playing the welfare card was like shooting fish in a barrel, that the Premier simply couldn't be tough enough on social-assistance recipients to suit his supporters. How intriguing then to hear news yesterday that the government is now in receipt of a consultant's report that says Ontario's highly popular, but faltering, workfare program requires substantial spending (most especially on child care) if it's to produce real, as well as political, success. From the outset, the facts made this plain. But the facts were, in the words of Henry Adams, conveniently ignored. For as Michael Kinsley wrote in The New Yorker a week before Mike Harris was first elected, ``the passion behind Draconian welfare reform exceeds any rational assessment of what it is likely to achieve.'' There could be only three purposes for workfare. One, to cut costs; two, to create work for those needing it; three, to capitalize on its puritanical appeal by punishing welfare recipients and appeasing angry taxpayers. From the start, we knew workfare was bad economics. The cheapest way to provide social assistance is by mailing a cheque. A serious work requirement - one that wasn't just, as Kinsley put it, ``a euphemism for cutting people off'' - would cost more, not less, than existing systems, chiefly in child care and administration. We know that workfare has largely failed at creating work. We can safely conclude this because the government has been able to trot out only anecdotal evidence of success, the odd personal testimonial by individual clients and no statistics that support more extensive claims. We know this as well because of the Premier's pleadings lately for municipalities to help with his workfare program and his recent desperate threats to turn social-assistance recipients into farmhands. What he's apparently discovered is what most other jurisdictions who've tried workfare found earlier: that it is riddled with inefficiencies and contradictions, that at best it might lift people out of welfare but not poverty, and most particularly that, done right, it costs. For all that, there's no denying that workfare succeeded on the third score, the punitive aspect. Otherwise, how is it that a program so largely invisible and inconsequential to the general public, so obviously disappointing in results to its most ardent proponents, could remain so exceedingly popular? As old Henry Adams also said, ``knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.'' And beyond doubt the Harris government understood something of human nature. What it played to with workfare is what the New York Times Magazine last year called ``the new American consensus'' - ``government of, by and for the comfortable.'' In other words, it didn't much matter that the program didn't work - only that it produced benefits to the comfortable and/or made them feel better. In this, though, it might be prudent to again consult Adams, who said that ``simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.'' The simplicity of workfare, as retailed by the Harris government, was a deceit. This latest report will merely add to the body of evidence that it's a complicated and costly business. It will be interesting to see if the government is serious enough about making workfare work to spend the money required. But I think we already know the answer to that. For to invest would mean relinquishing one of two irreconcilable claims made about workfare - that it at one and the same time saves money and actually helps people by providing ``a hand up.'' And, more than anything, this government knows its constituency. Jim Coyle's column usually appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.