Raise the Hammer

I, too, thank you for this statement, and appreciate that it is solidly grounded in empirical evidence attesting to the ethically questionable state of social assistance in this province.
While the call for evidence is a neccessary one-giving backbone to the weighty claims that are all too often easily dismissed by evasive political maneuvering-I submit that besides calling for the evidence to speak for itself, it is also neccessary to question the ideological underpinnings of political shifts that underlie the logic of these increasingly fiscally conservative politics.

The ideas behind the latest dismanting of social programs map directly onto the political paradigm known as neoliberalism which sees "citizens" redefined as "citizen-consumers," and the ideas of social democratic politics eroded econo-centric, capitalist modes of doing politics.
Hamilton, for one, has always been a place where social democracy as a political ideal has flourished (i.e. where the general good of all citizens to claim equity and political voice were entrenched in structures like the welfare state; steady living wage employment, institutional care for the disabled, mentally ill, and elderly, the right to form unions, and the early Ryersonian approach to public education).
Increasingly, as governments adopt neo-liberal politics in Canada and around the world, limited government fosters the ease of corporate and private capital to create profit-and deliver the goods equally-to citizenconsumers who are defined primarily as economic beings-not as citizens who should have voice or dignity above the market-given freedoms. The erosion of public social assistance maps on to this model perfectly-as the government has less and less to do with protecting the rights of people directly, and more to do with providing space for corporate actors to accrue profit-this is the model of "development" that is steadily shifting politics leading to not just unrealistic assessments of social assistance levels, but unabashedly anti-poor legislation.

The assumption behind the call for evidence, is that such evidence will get our politics in line with a more humane, equal vision of economic distribution.

The sad case is that with such encroaching neoliberal political reforms, such goals of "adequate provision" simply aren't the goals of politics anymore.

So, while we need evidence, we also need the normative ethical clarity that is able to effectively denounce the market-driven, anti-poor politics of neoliberal political reform.