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EXCERPTS
Ask the architects of Canada's national child benefit to rate their handiwork and they'll tell you it's the greatest social policy innovation since the 1960s.
Ask a single mother struggling to raise a couple of kids on welfare and she'll tell you it's hurtful and unfair.
They're both right.
The national child benefit, introduced in 1998, is a sophisticated income support program that lifts thousands of youngsters out of poverty.
It's also hugely discriminatory. A child whose low-income parents are employed gets $162.08 a month in Ontario. A child whose family is on social assistance gets $40.89.
To understand why this disparity exists - and how it became Dalton McGuinty's headache - a bit of history is necessary.
In the late '90s, former prime minister Jean Chretien decided the time had come to "turn the corner" on child poverty. The federal budget was balanced. The economy was strong. He wanted to leave a permanent legacy.
Federal bureaucrats set to work drafting a replacement for the post- war baby bonus program, axed by Brian Mulroney's government in 1992.
The task was tricky for two reasons. First, the design and delivery of social programs is a provincial responsibility. Ottawa had no constitutional right to implement its priorities in their jurisdiction. Second, the Mulroney government had put in place a child tax credit for low-income families. Dismantling that would be difficult and disruptive.
Using a model developed by Ottawa social scientist Ken Battle, policy-makers came up with a complex, but ingenious, arrangement.
The federal government would leave the existing tax credit in place, but add a new monthly supplement for all low-income people with children. To induce the provinces to allow this intrusion on their turf, Ottawa would offer them the option of reducing a family's welfare payment by an amount equivalent to the new supplement. The savings could be invested, as the provinces chose, in new services for children.
The offer was too good to pass up. The provinces signed on.
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Amid the fanfare, two weaknesses in the plan escaped widespread notice.
The most serious was that it did nothing for children living on social assistance. If a province chose to cut its welfare payments when the new federal benefit took effect - as Ontario did - the poorest youngsters in the province didn't get an extra cent.
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Initially, these flaws didn't attract widespread attention.
But as the size of the federal supplement grew - it started at $42 a month and has now quadrupled - the divergence between children with parents in the workforce and equally poor children with parents receiving social assistance became stark.
Campaign 2000 and other groups fighting child poverty demanded that the provinces stop clawing back money meant for needy kids. McGuinty, who was opposition leader at the time, backed their efforts.
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Three years into his mandate, he hasn't ended the clawback.
He has softened it. When the federal government raised its supplement by $12.50 per month in 2004, McGuinty let families on social assistance keep the increase. He did the same thing in 2005 and 2006.
But his government continues to skim off 75 per cent of Ottawa's money.
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Provincial officials will only say that they are working on a "new architecture" for social assistance.
Anti-poverty activists are watching Queen's Park warily. They've heard this kind of rhetoric before. They've learned that breakthroughs are often less benevolent than they seem.
- reprinted from the Toronto Star