Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives
The word “poverty” has been conspicuously absent from the Ontario government’s 2025 budget and any plans to “protect Ontario” from tariff-related uncertainty. This is bad news for the increasing number of Ontarians who live in poverty.
Given the silence from the top, you’d never know that we already have a plan on the books—the Ontario Poverty Reduction Strategy (PRS), which is the province’s central framework meant to assess and address poverty and its drivers, such as food insecurity, homelessness, income insecurity, and discrimination. Unfortunately, according to the government’s recently released PRS 2024 annual review, Ontario’s approach to poverty reduction is not working.
The major problem with the current strategy is that it relies heavily on employment as the primary poverty reduction tool, while ignoring everything else that makes gainful employment possible, like stable housing or affordable transit. The failing results of this narrow approach are starting to show up in the data for those receiving Ontario Works (OW) and Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP), many of whom face multiple challenges to employment.
Despite the government’s goal to move 60,000 people off of social assistance by 2024, only 34,994 transitioned to employment—a lower number than in 2019. The 2024 report also shows that the number of OW recipients reporting employment earnings dropped significantly—in 2019, just over one in eight recipients reported income. In 2024, just over one in 14 recipients did.
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