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V. 39, No. 1, F 2005, . 65–79

Rituals of Degradation: Administration as Policy in the

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Ontario Works Programme

Dean Herd, Andrew Mitchell and Ernie Lightman

Abstract
After the election of a neo-liberal provincial government in , Ontario was at the forefront
of work-based welfare reform in Canada. Many of the sweeping reforms carried out under the
banner of the “Common Sense Revolution” received widespread coverage: for example, reductions
in welfare rates, the introduction of the Ontario Works programme, the adoption of a zero-tolerance
policy for so-called welfare fraud, and changes to the rules relating to common-law spousal
relationships. However, much less attention has focused upon significant changes to the ways
welfare is delivered. This paper critically interrogates a number of key changes to the Service
Delivery Model in Ontario. After the passage of federal legislation in , national entitlements
to welfare have been terminated, replaced with local responsibility; this decentralization is chang-
ing not only the hierarchy of the regulation of poor people, but also the form and function of
provision. In particular, there is evidence of the reinvention of administration towards the micro-
regulation of job search and personal behaviour and the deterrence of welfare receipt as applicants
and recipients are bureaucratically disentitled. Although administrative practices have historically
acted as a secondary barrier to welfare receipt, the paper suggests that the current incarnation of
work-enforcing reforms could be especially significant as the worlds of welfare and work continue
to change.

Keywords
Welfare reform; Workfare; Welfare administration; Implementation; New economy;
Canada

“I was asked the same questions at the face-to-face interview as on the telephone,
but it was much more invasive and made me feel like a criminal . . . It felt like I
was being interrogated for fraud . . . The face-to-face interview was almost two
weeks after my phone call and they did not tell me on the phone everything that I
needed to bring in, so there were things missing and I was called back for a second
interview . . . Every month I have to attach photocopies of my bank book or any

Address for correspondence: Ernie Lightman, Faculty of Social Work, University of Toronto, 
Bloor Street West, Toronto, Ontario M A, Ca nada. Email: ernie.lightman@utoronto.ca

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ,  Garsington Road, Oxford OX DQ , UK and
 Main Street, Malden, MA , USA
 receipts . . . It’s degrading and humiliating and I think it’s that way on purpose . . .
It seems as though the system has been adapted to make people feel bad for using it.”
(Bruce, R#)

In , a relatively unknown politician named Mike Harris swept to power

in the Ontario (Canada) provincial elections. His radical neo-liberal plat-
form, marketed under the banner of the “Common Sense Revolution” and
imported from the United States, promised a fundamental break from the
consensus politics of continuity that had long typified political life in Ontario.
During the party’s years in office (–), there were numerous dramatic
changes in the political and social landscape of the province, but perhaps
central among these was the introduction of work-based welfare reform.
Associated with this policy were many sweeping initiatives, which received
widespread media coverage: for example, there were substantial ( per cent)
reductions in welfare rates; the Ontario Works (OW) programme was intro-
duced as the sole gateway to welfare receipt; a zero-tolerance policy for
so-called welfare fraud was implemented; and restrictions were imposed on
the rules relating to common-law spousal relationships. Much less attention,
however, was focused on the equally significant changes to the ways in which
welfare was delivered. There is evidence that administrative practices,
because they operate directly on those seeking and receiving welfare benefits,
can be experienced as demoralizing and humiliating (Lightman et al.
a, b). As such, they represent a significant, though understudied,
component of welfare reforms in Ontario.
This lack of attention to administrative practices perhaps reflects a popu-
lar misconception that policy is of primary importance in shaping people’s
well-being and that administration is simply concerned with implementation
(Henman and Adler ). With respect to welfare specifically, the highly
discretionary nature of the programmes has always ensured that administra-
tive practices strongly determine access. Indeed, a recent review of welfare
reform initiatives in Canada concluded that administrators use a range of
strategies such as quasi-contractual agreements, case plans and orientation
sessions to “scare” people away from applying for welfare (Human Resources
Development Canada ). Consequently, rather than receiving assistance
based on need, people may be denied welfare through bureaucratic disentitle-
ment: if, for example, they are unable to supply all of the information
requested or they are discouraged by the difficult and drawn-out application
process. In these circumstances, policy and administration become indistin-
guishable (Sossin ; Pottie and Sossin ). As Sossin () notes, the
form that the application process takes, the amount and scope of the training
staff receive, the degree of personal contact applicants have with staff, and
the nature and kind of documents which must be produced and verified are
all decisions which have profound effects on applicants and recipients. How-
ever, while changes to benefit levels take place in the name of a policy
mandate that must be defended to an electorate, administrative changes
typically occur without public scrutiny (Sossin ).
This paper critically interrogates recent changes to the delivery of welfare
in Ontario. We do so through recourse to the literature along with selected
 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 
comments from a panel of welfare recipients who were randomly selected
from the City of Toronto’s caseload, and whom we are following through a
multi-year research project. Work-enforcement, a central feature of the on-
going international shift from “passive” to “active” welfare, involves the refo-
cusing of administration in the direction of micro-regulating job-search and
personal behaviour and deterring welfare receipt. Although these trends are
evident internationally, specific strategies reflect national legacies and par-
ticular political and economic processes. After a brief review of the ongoing
transition from national welfare to local workfare in Canada, the paper shifts
to the local level and provides a detailed analysis of two key changes to the
service delivery model in Ontario and their impact on social assistance
recipients: the first of these is a new two-stage application process, consisting
of call centres and face-to-face eligibility interviews, and the second involves
implementation of ongoing eligibility verification, known as the Consolidated
Verification Process (CVP).
While harsh administrative practices have long been a part of social assist-
ance in Ontario as elsewhere (Little ; Struthers ), the paper argues
this current incarnation of work-enforcing reforms could be especially
significant as the nature of both welfare and of work are now very different
than in the past. Today, those seeking assistance are less likely to be viewed
as recipients on welfare, than as jobseekers moving through workfare (Peck
). Consequently, the destabilization of welfare receipt is more aggres-
sively and continuously pursued. Moreover, the ascendancy of workfare has
coincided with—and is also reinforcing—fundamental shifts in the nature of
work and in the organization of flexible labour markets, where polarizing
wages, rising inequality and contingent employment are increasingly the
norm.

Canadian Context: (National) Welfare Settlement to (Local)

Workfare Experiments
In the early part of the twentieth century, the responsibility for welfare pro-
vision in Canada lay with the provinces and municipalities, which often
lacked the necessary financial resources (Struthers ). Some provinces,
including Ontario, responded by reducing (or suspending) relief payments
and imposing work requirements (Torjman ). However, with little money
to spend, implementation was uneven and largely chaotic.
In the post-World War II era, as part of an emerging ideology of nation-
building and Keynesianism, Canada embarked upon a “massive centralisa-
tion of responsibility for income security” (Banting : ). This process
culminated in the introduction of the Canada Assistance Plan (CAP) in ,
which represented the high point of welfare state development in Canada:
Ottawa offered / cost-sharing for welfare to the provinces and territories
on the condition that they provide assistance without qualification or con-
dition to all people judged to be “in need” or “at risk” of being in need.
Entitlement to benefits, at least in principle, was absolute, and the provinces
were prohibited from attaching any requirements (such as workfare) to the
receipt of welfare. In practice, provinces and municipalities required able-bodied
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd.  
recipients to look for work and to accept any job they were physically capable
of doing, but the formal implementation of workfare as “work-in-exchange-
for-welfare” remained ineligible for federal shared-cost support.
The political climate began to change in the s with crisis in the form
of economic “stagflation”. Along with other advanced industrialized nations,
Canada began to reduce social programmes, with reforms diverting funding
into active labour market programmes such as job-training (Pal ). These
early changes ultimately floundered amid federal–provincial disputes. How-
ever, the shift to a focus on the supply of labour, rather than the demand
for it, intensified in the s (McBride ) as successive governments, of
both major political parties, attempted to establish a leaner welfare state:
programme foci shifted from support to activation, aiming to keep as many
unemployed as possible off insurance, and simultaneously to deregulate and
intensify labour market competition. In addition, against the backdrop of
recession, “deficit-mania” and the increasingly dominant neo-liberal dis-
course, debates on the extent of federal involvement in areas of provincial
jurisdiction took on a heightened significance. After years of freezes and
cuts using technical changes, in  the federal government unilaterally
announced it was to place a limit on cost-sharing with the richer provinces
(Lightman and Riches ).
Notwithstanding these incremental cuts, it was the end of the Canada
Assistance Plan and the passage of the Canada Health and Social Transfer
(CHST) in  that fundamentally changed the philosophy and practice
of welfare. By collapsing federal payments for a range of programmes into
one unconditional block grant for health, education and welfare, CHST not only
reduced the total federal dollars the provinces received for health, education
and welfare, but also eliminated the national standards of CAP, which had
ensured basic income-related rights to all low-income Canadians receiving
assistance. Moreover, the decentralization implicit in CHST, with its associ-
ated end of unconditional entitlement, created the space for local workfare
experiments, as the focus of welfare reform shifted to the provincial level with
pressures to design and deliver local “solutions”.

Ontario Works and the Business Transformation Project

After the provincial election of , Ontario pursued welfare reform with
“messianic zeal” (Ibbitson : ). Dramatic cuts to welfare rates, the
disqualification of certain groups and the introduction of Ontario Works
were all publicly announced and implemented. Less noticeably, in ,
significant changes were introduced to the way in which welfare is delivered.
As part of the turn to “managerialism” or “new public management”
(MacKinnon ; Whorley ), a “Common Purpose Procurement”
(CPP) agreement known as the “Business Transformation Project” (BTP) was
struck between the provincial government and Andersen Consulting (now
Accenture). Driven by a mandate to cut costs, the BTP sought to compre-
hensively redesign social assistance programmes, focusing especially upon the
introduction of new business practices and the technologies to support them.
This substantially altered the nature of public/private partnerships in the
 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 
province, allowing the private sector to become more deeply entangled in
what were previously deemed core government functions. This clearly rep-
resented a significant departure from prior practice, as the private firms now
acquired a direct financial interest in reducing welfare caseloads: decisions
about who should be eligible for welfare would no longer be questions of
public policy, openly debated in Parliament, but rather would follow from
the administrative practices of an unaccountable private-sector contractor.
“Need” was at risk of disappearing from the lexicon of welfare eligibility.
This new system has been in operation across Ontario since January .
We now look at two key elements in its implementation: the two-step intake
process and ongoing eligibility verification.

Restricting Entry: Intake Screening Units

The process of determining welfare eligibility has been divided into two
discrete stages. The initial intake process is composed of a “First Stage
Preliminary Assessment”, conducted over the telephone through seven call
centres called “Intake Screening Units” (ISUs). Most clients who appear in an
office wishing to make an application are directed to a telephone to call the
ISU first. The First Stage Preliminary Assessment is followed by a face-to-
face verification interview called the “Second Stage Full Determination”.
This stage can include more than one appointment, along with: an “employ-
ment information session”; the completion of a “participation agreement”;
the completion of the balance of an application; verification of information
gathered at both stages; and the signing of all forms. While social assistance
recipients were promised a streamlined, efficient and user-friendly applica-
tion process, the reality is a convoluted, unreliable and extraordinarily com-
plex one.
The application process begins by gathering preliminary information
about a person’s situation (Government of Ontario ). Based on this, an
ISU screener may inform the person that they may not be eligible and give
them an opportunity to discontinue the application. There seems to be
no purpose to providing this warning other than to provide an additional
avenue to divert people from completing a full application. Applicants who
continue are either referred to the local Ontario Works office to complete a
full application, or a “conclusion” of ineligibility is made. Not surprisingly,
given the use of the word “conclusion”, applicants can easily misinterpret the
suggestion that they may be found ineligible as an actual finding of ineligibility.
A preliminary finding of ineligibility is then transformed into a “decision”
that cannot be appealed against unless the applicant registers an “objection”.
The process to register an objection, however, is equally complex and
appears strongly biased in favour of diversion. Applicants must object in
writing, within ten calendar days of receipt, or they may object orally and
then follow up in writing before the second stage. Negotiating this process
depends upon a precise understanding of the requirements. The time limits
are short and the system-generated letters, which can take a long time to
arrive, are “not customer friendly” and “cause client confusion” (City of
Ottawa ). Application, therefore, has not only been made much more
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd.  
complicated, but also contains deliberate pitfalls that can improperly render
a person ineligible. There are unnecessary and complex steps and the
requirement that a person “object” to a “conclusion”, then later “appeal” a
“decision” seems particularly confusing.
Our respondents identified a number of concerns about the use of call
centres. Many reported having to call on numerous occasions to access the
system:

“They always put you on hold and you have to listen to some stupid music . . . I’d
rather talk person-to-person. I don’t like talking to machines . . . I could have been
there (at the office) in five minutes and I had to call and get stuck on the phone.
Another time my worker put me on hold so I went down there. He says ‘I’ll tell you
on the phone.’ I said, ‘I’m here. You put me on hold, how long can you leave me on hold?
I want to talk to you face to face. I don’t want to talk to you on the phone.’”
( Richard, R#)

Once they got through, many found the process drawn-out and difficult; they
complained of long delays before they were connected to a screener and
interviews lasting up to  minutes. Such problems are compounded for
those who do not have regular access to a telephone and who are frequently
the most in need. Significantly, a large number felt uncomfortable talking
on the phone and disliked the impersonal nature of telephone applica-
tion. In particular, they felt it was easier to ask (and answer) questions
face-to-face.
There were also more fundamental concerns about the “social distance”
of the new system and the suitability of this application method for many of
those on assistance. A call centre system necessitates a move to a more
standardized set of questions. Under this “one size fits all” approach more
complex, but legitimate cases risk being turned away. The adoption of tele-
phone pre-screening reflects a broader move away from interpersonal, “soft”
social services to more automated “hard” services. This may be a suitable
business practice, but it raises serious difficulties for many applicants. In
particular, people with poor English language skills, low educational attain-
ment, and physical and mental health problems often require personal sup-
port to navigate bureaucracy and risk being further marginalized. Those
without telephones in their residences were likewise seriously disadvantaged.
Moreover, as Sossin () notes, call centres tend to be quantity- rather than
quality-oriented. “Time per call” and “number of call” targets mean that
callers are less likely to be offered assistance. In addition, the fact that calls
are recorded also acts as a deterrent. Applicants are discouraged from sup-
plying “off-the-record” information which can be crucial to a fuller under-
standing of their circumstances, while under constant monitoring screeners
may feel further pressured into limiting help.
Crucially, there are indications that from the Province’s perspective the
problem was not that eligible people were being discouraged, but that too
many applicants were getting through. According to one report, it was origi-
nally projected that  per cent of requests and inquiries would not proceed
to the second stage (City of Ottawa ). However, the actual percentage
 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 
of applicants proceeding to interviews averaged  per cent between Novem-
ber  and April . Indeed, a  provincial review identified two
major problems with the intake screening units: too many applicants ( per
cent) were bypassing the ISU and applying directly; and “only”  per cent
of applicants were being screened out at the telephone pre-screening stage
(Government of Ontario ). Suggested strategies for increasing the
screen-out rate included instructing screeners to make conclusions of ineligi-
bility “for as many applicants as possible”. In other words, screeners were
directed to err, not on the side of the person in need, but rather on the side
of determining ineligibility.

Accelerating Exits: Continual Surveillance

As well as making it harder to access welfare, administrative changes have
also focused on exerting greater pressure on people to leave the system.
Central to this is the introduction of the Consolidated Verification Process
(CVP), which requires the rigorous and ongoing review of every aspect of a
recipient’s case history. Previously, reviews were time-based. With CVP, case
reviews are prioritized on the basis of the “risk” of committing fraud. One
of the predetermined criteria that trigger “risk”, for example, is high shelter
costs in relation to benefits. Any case in which shelter costs exceed  per
cent of net revenue is flagged as a risk. While social assistance benefit levels
have been frozen since , recent years have seen rents rise rapidly across
much of Ontario. Over time, rising rents will mean increasing numbers of
applicants, and recipients will be automatically pushed into higher-risk
categories when their circumstances have not changed. Of around ,
cases reviewed through the CVP, the province reports that  per cent had
no change in their benefits;  per cent had their benefits cut; and  per
cent saw an increase (Daniels and Ewart ). The remaining  per cent
(over , cases) either withdrew from assistance or were terminated
completely. The fact that almost three-quarters of cases had no change in
financial status suggests that for the vast majority of programme participants,
the intense scrutiny and embedded rules merely result in unnecessary
intrusion.
Our respondents highlighted three main areas of concern: the amount of
information required; the process and frequency of providing information;
and inefficiencies and inappropriate requests for information. The overall
impact is to create a climate of suspicion and surveillance and an associated
deterrent effect. The sheer volume of information that is required is over-
whelming and seems to go far beyond what is required to determine eligibil-
ity. As social assistance is a non-contributory programme of last resort, it is
not unreasonable to expect rigorous scrutiny to determine eligibility. But in
practice, the array of requirements, and the process by which these require-
ments are imposed, can be onerous and unfair to the point where they
exclude people genuinely in need. For example, satisfying the income
verification requirements can mean producing any of the following: support
court orders, divorce settlements, affidavits, cheque stubs, bank records,
appeal letters from other income sources, tax slips from Revenue Canada,
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd.  
Income Tax assessments, childcare receipts, pay stubs, sponsorship agreements
or payments, student loan assessments, fire insurance settlement documents,
and any other verification as applicable (Government of Ontario ).
Moreover, for those who are destitute, fleeing abusive relationships, have
health problems or addictions, or even for those who have been forced to
move repeatedly as rents spiral beyond their budget, being able to retain and
provide all of this documentation is simply unrealistic.
For the majority of our respondents the new bureaucratic requirements
left them feeling that the system was dominated by suspicion and a mentality
of policing:

“It’s dehumanizing having someone go line-by-line through your bank statement,

wondering where you are spending your money and asking you to explain this deposit
and that deposit. It’s none of their business if I spend $ in Shopper’s Drug
Mart, or if I happen to have a coffee at Starbuck’s . . . The whole system needs to
be revamped. It shouldn’t just assume people are fraudulent. There’s fraud in any
system. How many people are really committing fraud? Maybe  per cent? MAYBE.
Is it necessary to treat every single applicant as though they are a fraudulent criminal?
No! It’s not.” ( Jane, R#)

The highly pressurized context in which all of this takes place is paramount:
more information is demanded, more often, with less time and occasionally
high cost to obtain the documentation, all under the threat and fear of
cheques being suspended or cancelled. There is, at the very least, a perceived
inequity between the demands placed upon clients and an administrative
system that all too frequently falls short of their expectations, with requests
for duplicated information and inappropriate requests. Evonne, for example,
listed all the documents she now has to supply every three months:

“They ask for bank statements updated for the past  months, accommodation
verification, hydro bills, property tax statements, insurance policies, condo expenses . . .
They want birth certificates for me and my children . . . If you’re divorced, they want
a copy of the divorce decree. They have that on file at least three times. They also
want verification of school attendance, report cards from my kids. I have to bring all
this information to every meeting. I don’t understand why they have to see my divorce
decree again when I never remarried and I’ve been divorced for eight years. What is
the real need for this repetitive information? How many times do they need to see the
same divorce paper? How many times do they need to see the same birth certificate?
They already have this on file and this information hasn’t changed. Why do they
need to see it all again?” (Evonne, R#)

Evonne’s questions and concerns go right to the heart of the Ontario Works
philosophy. Seen from the perspective of our respondents, it is hard to con-
clude anything other than that the repeated requests for documents, just like
all the other bureaucratic requirements, simply provide another barrier to
assistance and another opportunity to delay and suspend payments. For
them, rather than monitoring eligibility, the new system is one of continual
surveillance. Again, Jane’s experiences prove insightful:
 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 
 “I have to say that with each person I have talked to, the intake worker on the
telephone, the first worker that I had, then the woman that replaced her, and then the
new worker when I moved, I have had to take in all my paperwork. That’s every-
thing three times in six months! I call that harassment . . . They have asked me for
every piece of documentation possible. It’s extremely invasive. Extremely invasive for
a little bit of help.” ( Jane, R#)

Welfare at Work: Regulation, Degradation and Disentitlement

While harsh administrative practices have long been a part of social assist-
ance in Ontario, as elsewhere (Little ; Struthers ), the changes
described here are noteworthy for a number of reasons. First, to overlook
such far-reaching changes because welfare recipients have always been sub-
ject to regulation and surveillance risks minimizing the current impact upon
recipients. As we have seen, welfare recipients in Ontario are subjected to
administrative practices which they describe as dehumanizing, degrading
and demoralizing. Moreover, the eligibility obstacles—the myriad rules, reg-
ulations and bureaucratic demands—appear to have been raised so high and
have to be met so often, that it is only a question of time before any given
individual is disentitled.
Second, these changes provide new insight into the latest elements of the
old story of regulation and surveillance of welfare recipients. Heightened
scrutiny is achieved in part through new administrative models and “tools”.
Most significant among these, perhaps, are the central presence of the
private sector and business models in the administration of programmes; the
use of centralizing technologies to standardize policy at the same time that
programme delivery has been ostensibly decentralized; and, related to both
of these, the increased “social distance” between “customers” and welfare
providers.
Third, and finally, it is possible that the most significant aspect of these
administrative reforms lies in the context of fundamental changes to the
nature of welfare and work. Here, reforms provide vivid, concrete evidence
of the shift to a more active system in which administration is more boldly
utilized to bureaucratically disentitle, as well as evidence of institutional
experimentation as part of the search for new regulatory strategies suitable
for the “new economy”. After briefly noting the history of regulation and
surveillance within welfare, the remainder of the paper focuses on this
possibility.
Notwithstanding political statements about responding to needs and
alleviating poverty, historically, the prime function of welfare in a market
economy has been to regulate the lives of the poor and reinforce dominant
notions of work, family and motherhood (Fraser and Gordon ; Gordon
; Handler and Hasenfeld ; Katz ; Mink ). Essentially, by
rationing access to non-wage income, welfare regulates labour and enforces
work incentives within capitalist labour markets. Administrative processes
have always performed a key role in this regulation by imposing secondary
barriers to receipt and continued eligibility resulting in the “bureaucratic
disentitlement” of applicants and recipients (Brodkin ; Handler and
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd.  
Hasenfeld ; Lipsky ; Piven and Cloward ). Lipsky (), for
example, describes the use of obscure and hidden bureaucratic rules to
restrict access to welfare and terminate assistance. Piven and Cloward (),
meanwhile, note that while some people are disqualified from receiving
assistance by legal restrictions, many more poor people are made ineligible
through what they term “rituals of degradation”. These “rituals” inevitably
involve bureaucratic barriers which operate to deter welfare receipt: for
example, some may not apply either because they are never informed that
they can receive help or because they believe they will receive so little that it
is not worth the hassle of application; others who successfully apply are so
degraded that they either withdraw or are discouraged from seeking assist-
ance in the future.
Similar administrative practices have long been a part of Canada’s, and
specifically Ontario’s, social welfare system (Moffatt ; Little ; Struthers
; Ursel ). In his detailed historical analysis, Struthers (: )
notes the “unrelenting inspection and regulation” of the postwar period, with
welfare applicants in Toronto subjected to an exhaustive investigation at the
district office, followed by requirements to complete a detailed application
form and provide letters from their previous employer along with medical
certification. Little (), in her analysis of the Ontario Widows Allowance,
notes a history of intrusive and intensive moral scrutiny of applicants and
recipients, who had to continuously prove their moral worth. As a result, they
were subject to intense supervision, including monitoring of seven aspects of
their daily lives such as finances, sexuality, cleanliness and attitude.
Such accounts demonstrate the long history of regulation and surveillance
within Ontario’s welfare system. It is certainly possible that the administra-
tive reforms explored here represent a continuation of that story. However,
it is also possible that as the worlds of welfare and work continue to change,
these reforms are essential elements of a newly emerging paradigm of
regulation.

Changing Worlds of Welfare and Work

In recent years traditional welfare settlements in North America, Europe and
beyond have been fundamentally restructured (Lightman ; Lodemel and
Trickey ; OECD a, b). As individual and cultural theories of
poverty and unemployment have cast welfare as the bearer of, rather than a
solution to, poverty and “dependency”, supply-side policy solutions have
sought to “activate” the “passive” welfare poor (Fraser and Gordon ;
Gordon ; Little ; Murray ; Mead a, b). Though these
policy solutions reveal national and local variations, the clear trend is on
moving people into the labour market and off income support. As part of
this transformation, the scale and significance of “workfare” has changed
enormously. Workfare has evolved from an experimental modification of a
limited number of welfare programmes in a small number of US states
(where broader notions of welfare state entitlements were never embraced
historically), to a federal framework for reform in America and, finally, to an
international post-welfare alternative (Peck ).
 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 
 Where welfare states were founded on principles of universality, needs-
based eligibility, and rights and entitlements, these various emerging work-
fare replacements reflect a new consensus around market-based selectivity,
social contracts and rights and responsibilities (Herd ). The emphasis
is on compulsion rather than voluntarism, sanctions rather than incentives,
and individualized obligations rather than collective rights. Understood in
this way, workfare encapsulates the transnational restructuring of social and
labour market policy towards work activation, employability-based program-
ming and market-tested welfare provision (Peck ). Standing in direct
opposition to the previous welfare norms of entitlement and needs-based
provision, workfare therefore signifies an alternative approach to labour
market and social policy as well as a fundamental change in the structure
and strategic orientation of the capitalist state ( Jessop ).
In this context, the shift from national welfare states to local workfare
programmes is not only changing the hierarchy of the regulation of poor
people, it is also changing the form and function of provision. Specifically,
after two decades of eroding and dismantling, the implementation of the
Canada Health and Social Transfer (CHST) proved to be the final nail in
the coffin of Canada’s postwar welfare state (Evans ; Lightman ;
Pulkingham and Ternowetsky ; Shewell ; Shragge ). Under
CHST, provincial and municipal governments can refuse assistance to
people for any reason they determine is appropriate. In addition, unlike the
previous legislation, the Canada Assistance Plan, welfare applicants and
recipients have no right of appeal (Little ). With no enshrined right to
welfare, no national standards and no right of appeal, the welfare framework
that administrative practices are set within has been drastically rewritten.
The shift away from traditional welfare delivery to more active local
regimes is evident in a plethora of administrative responses focusing upon
close supervision, individual job plans, and the overall micro-regulation of
job-search and personal behaviour. The reform of administrative practices is
emerging as a defining feature of this welfare–workfare transition. Hence the
increased intensity and frequency of eligibility requirements and the search
for new tools and practices with which to enforce regulation and surveillance
even more effectively. In Ontario, the administrative practices identified here
both reflect and sustain that on a daily basis.
Crucially, the ascendancy of workfarist policy-making in Ontario, as else-
where, has coincided with—and is also reinforcing—fundamental shifts in
the nature of work and in the organization of labour markets. It is of the
utmost significance that the context for increasingly harsh and restrictive
welfare regimes is a labour market characterized by polarized job opportu-
nities, with a particularly adverse effect on the lower tiers of the labour
market where social assistance recipients tend to compete. The presence of
contingent jobs facilitates the deregistration of welfare recipients, which in
turn supports the belief that workfare is successful. In this context, enforcing
work legitimates and normalizes labour market participation on detrimental
terms, as work opportunities for welfare leavers are typically dominated by
underemployment, low pay, insecurity, and poor-quality service sector jobs
(Canada West Foundation ; Lightman et al. c; Lightman et al. ;
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd.  
Mitchell , ). As much as possible, welfare is removed as an option
for those deemed employable. Moreover, the ability to claim welfare is
significantly destabilized, producing instability and hardship so that people
are more likely to drop off the rolls. The impact in both cases is to further
reduce wages and conditions at the lower end of the labour market as former
welfare recipients are compelled to accept whatever the market makes avail-
able to them.

Conclusion
Away from the headlines proclaiming welfare reform in Ontario a resound-
ing success amid huge caseload declines, and closer to the ground, Ontario
Works looks and feels very different. The new delivery model promised to
enhance programme integrity and improve client services. Instead, a delib-
erately cumbersome and complicated application process, excessive and
inappropriate requests for information, and deliberately confusing proce-
dures and language have combined to create administrative pretexts for
restricting access and accelerating exits. As we have stressed, surveillance and
deterrence have always been features of welfare. However, given the chang-
ing nature of welfare and work these changes could also have an added
significance at this time. Understood as part of the ongoing transition from
the values and practices of the national welfare state to those of emerging
local workfare states, harsher administrative practices form part of a complex
process of restructuring state institutions and developing alternative regula-
tory systems suitable for flexible labour markets and the enforcement of low-
wage work, which remains the staple of the new economy for the majority
of welfare recipients.

Notes
The authors are grateful to the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of
Canada (SSHRC) for their support of the Social Assistance in the New Economy
(SANE) programme of research. (http://www.utoronto.ca/facsocwk/sane)
The qualitative data in this paper are based on the first round of panel interviews
with  individuals who were in receipt of social assistance in Toronto in the Fall of
. A second round of interviews took place in Fall , and as many of the panel
as possible will be interviewed each Fall over several years to provide an in-depth
understanding of the welfare and post-welfare experiences of our sample of social
assistance recipients. While the sample of claimants who were sent a letter of invita-
tion to participate in the study was randomly drawn from the total City of Toronto
caseload, those who chose to participate are not necessarily representative of the
larger group.
The authors are grateful to Terry Patterson, John Gal, Gilles Seguin, Jamie Peck
and Pat Evans for helpful comments on an earlier draft.

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