Ontario Works and Single Mothers: Redefining “Deservedness and the Social Contract”

Abstract

For the first time in Ontario, since the introduction of the Ontario Mother's Allowance (OMA) programme in 1920, single mothers in financial need will lose an important form of protection that has been associated with their entitlement to assistance as full-time childcare providers. On 1 May 1998, the Ontario Works Act came into effect along with its mandatory employment requirements for single parents. With nearly 200,000 sole-support mothers as well as their children affected by changes to "mothers allowance," the significance of these developments cannot be underestimated. Through an examination of key ideological and structural transformations internal and external to the social assistance system, this article argues that a redefinition of women's relationship to the employment market and to domestic labour is fundamental to the neo-conservative view holding sway in Ontario. By redefining single mothers' "deservedness" for financial assistance, traditionally viewed since 1920 as compensation for their contribution to society through child rearing, the Ontario government is legitimizing its broader withdrawal from social provision to those in need, and is compelling individuals to rely on their own private solutions to the systemic problems of unemployment, underemployment and the gender division of labour. Paradoxically, by making Ontario's social assistance programme harsher in its economic and moral regulation of sole-support parents, the government has assumed even greater regulatory powers over the lives of poor families and has effectively contradicted the "family values" it claims to uphold.

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