Proactive Social Services

Help earlier and it will cost less.

Too much of Canada’s safety net comes too late or falls short of providing substantial enough aid to help people get back on their feet. There is an incredible amount of inefficiency here and wasted cost; at the end of the day, the real expense comes at people’s lives. Much of the aid or support provided needs to be rethought and redesigned.

There is a secondary cost to our social services which is a part of the safety net, as fairly considered. When it fails to help people adequately the onus becomes on social and non-profit organizations which get more taxpayer dollars and cost more. These organizations have become a full-fledged and booming industry now. Their growth also speaks to the failure of government services (and policy in general).

Calgary’s 10-year plan to end homelessness ended up with more social orgs and more homeless. In Vancouver the more being spent on housing and drug addiction places the more drug addicts and homeless we have. It’s the same story in most parts of the country.

The failure can be broken down into four issues and the effect of their combination: Insufficient financial aid is given, aid comes too late, too much of the spending is inefficient with geographical concentration, and a lack of cooperation with the private sector.

At the end of the day, the ultimate goal is for people to become self-sufficient but more importantly remain self-sufficient from needing any aid to begin with. With that in mind, the focus should be on how to get people back on their feet as soon as possible without them spiraling down into a place that is much harder to climb out of. The longer they stay in that spiral the greater the cost is for taxpayers and the lower the productivity is for the economy.

People who are down on their luck and need income support can get from $824 per month if they are single and living in private housing in Alberta. It’s around $1,060 in British Columbia. To qualify you also need to have the most basic amount of savings, car value, and under a threshold in RRSPs.

The monthly amounts you see below are so ridiculously low and when you consider that you need to have under $4k in liquid savings to qualify the results are that many people will essentially become homeless and stay homeless. You couldn’t afford a one-bedroom apartment’s rent or mortgage payments with such support levels. It just makes no sense.

Let’s keep in mind that the Liberal government essentially established a precedent for how much someone needs in aid to survive by giving refugees, asylum seekers, and illegal immigrants $224 per day for shelter and food costs. So why are Canadians getting a fraction of it and getting pushed into the streets? 42.4% of food bank users according to their own study are people who are on provincial social assistance.

When people can’t be kept in their own housing because of poor social services they need housing provided to them and the costs here add up quickly. Let’s take the British Columbia government’s property shopping spree to add more beds to the shelter system.

They have spent 269.5 million dollars on properties that would add a total of 767 beds. That’s an immediate cost of $351,369 per bed. They could have just bought these people apartments in most places across Canada and still saved taxpayers money. They could have also taken the $269.5M at 5% return which yields $13.475M/yr and given an additional $1,464 per month to 767 economically at-risk people to stay in their own housing and would have not needed to touch the principal or needing to spend more taxpayer dollars servicing these properties.

We don’t need to be buying properties in the most expensive real estate jurisdictions in the world and Canada to help the homeless. It’s money that will always yield fewer results because of this inefficiency.

Individuals who require income support usually do so because they can’t find a job and have exhausted other benefits or don’t have any to begin with. Many also lose employment because of short or long-term injury. These people can be simply kept out of the streets with more financial aid in the short term which would save much more in the long term.

Giving people with injuries more in financial aid and general support also allows them to tend to their injuries and recovery plan which saves money in our healthcare system while setting them up for success in getting back to normal or as close as possible to it as fast as possible.

Of course, too many people end up on the streets because of substance abuse. Keeping the former out of the streets by simply just adding more financial aid frees up resources and capital to focus on the needs of the latter. Keeping people and removing them (with opportunities) from drug encampments is the best first option, and not only it is an option but also a choice for us.

The geographical concentration of how services assist is a tunnel vision error mostly because it’s driven by where the social organizations are. People in one part of the province may be best helped and set up for success in other parts of the province. We need to think bigger and holistically.

Rural areas claim to have labour shortages, and Canada is spending billions on temporary foreign workers, and LMIA for businesses. We are doing so without exhausting our labour potential first.

We need to start partnering businesses with our at-risk/in-need population. Farms, fast food restaurants, landscaping, construction, warehouses, and many other businesses are a perfect fit to get people off the streets and keep them out. Partner up social service workers, when needed, on location with businesses that will hire these people. This is a great venue to also further skill development.

We can build cluster units or tiny villages for people in more rural areas to work with these businesses to meet their labour shortage needs and take care of our society. The cost will be much lower than buying bed spaces in the big cities. The secondary benefit here is that it will slowly develop more economically viable regions across Canada which will help overall housing costs.

Most of it comes back to economic and financial stability. We need to build people up to a position and to keep people in the position to return to their normal or into a better position as soon as possible. We can’t do that when their savings must be dwindled down to a point of unaffordability just to give them the most basic aid that will not course correct. Services must be much more proactive and forthcoming than that.

It will help us unleash the potential of our country and strengthen our communities.

However, nothing replaces the government’s most important role in social services: to make sure our cost of living isn’t running out of control and that the country is viable with economic participation and opportunity.