OW Payment to City vs. Direct Benefit Payment to Recipient

Requested By: Arthur
Tagged: ontario-works-direct-benefit-payment

I am looking for the amount of OW paid by the Province vs. the amount of OW in cash paid to the recipient. For example, 5% is the usual cost for administiring a program. All the other expenditures for ERCs, programs and city employees overtime etc. vs the actual cash payment to the recipient.

There are 5 comments:

Danyl Sobolev
posted Nov 4, 2009
what's OW?
Mark Kuznicki
posted Nov 4, 2009
If you want people to vote for your request, you might want to explain your terms and avoid alphabet soup acronyms. What is OW? What is an ERC?
Paul Kishimoto
posted Nov 4, 2009
From the tag, it seems to refer to Ontario Works, a social assistance program: http://www.mcss.gov.on.ca/mcss/english/pillars/social/ow/

In Toronto, it seems Employment & Social Services administers the program: http://www.toronto.ca/socialservices/index.htm

I'm not sure that the money flows in the way the original request implies; viz., the Province pays the City some sum, of which the City spends some on administrative costs and dispenses the bulk to recipients. To me it is more likely that the province cuts cheques to recipients directly, but I've got zero experience with this program, so that's just conjecture.

I guess the expectation is to find waste. In that case, maybe the subset of the budget data (http://www.datato.org/app/need/show/45) for E&SS would be enough here.
Christopher Wulff
posted Dec 9, 2009
This won't work as a data set with the way the question is structured now as the province transfers some money to the city, but not nearly the full cost of Ontario Works (welfare to some), which comes out of other city money (somewhere in the neighbourhood of 30% of OW comes from city money). I think Ontario Works payments are supposed to be entirely uploaded back to the province (where they belong) in 2016 or so.

Also, Employment Resource Centres (or ERCs) are primarily funded either directly by the province or by HRSDC/Service Canada and don't go through city coffers at all. You'd need to be vrey specific about which programs and services you were looking for.

I don't think there's anything better than Paul's suggestion to look at the budget data allocated to Ontario Works and the data around payments out to individuals. That difference would give you some sense of the cost. I would note though that your 5% estimate is exclusively for payment transfer systems and so you'd have to factor out whatever counseling/services were also using that pool of resources.
Christopher Wulff
posted Dec 9, 2009
Oops, should've checked the date. That's a late response!