Re: Consultations for Ontario’s 2025–2030 Poverty Reduction Strategy
November 28, 2025
Dear Premier Ford,
As Ontario prepares its next Poverty Reduction Strategy, it is crucial that the plan reflects and responds to the realities facing low-income households today. Our organizations—social planning bodies from across Ontario—are community-based non-profits that bring people together to understand and respond to local social issues, with anti-poverty advocacy underlying all of our work. Every day we hear stories from residents and from our partners in the non-profit sector about how the high cost-of-living coupled with limited economic opportunities and social supports, has placed enormous strain on people and on systems. In this letter, we offer advice and specific recommendations to help strengthen the Province’s efforts to reduce poverty and have a meaningful impact on the lives of countless Ontarians.
The Strategy must recognize the systemic causes of, and key contributors to, poverty, along with concrete plans to address each of them. Poverty is not the result of individual failings—it is a policy choice and requires deliberate government action to address. This includes strengthening income support programs, ensuring fair wages and decent employment opportunities, expanding access to child care, investing in affordable and supportive housing, creating real pathways from homelessness to shelters and into more permanent housing, and building up the public education system. These systems need to be accessible, reliable, and publicly funded. Focusing solely on employment will not be enough to reduce poverty; the next Strategy must take a rights-based approach to basic needs and affordability.
Specifically, we are calling on the Province of Ontario to take the following actions:
- Increase the minimum wage to $20 per hour or more and aim for a living wage. The difference between $20 and the current wage would lift many families out of poverty.
- Immediately double Ontario Works (OW) rates and index the benefit to inflation, recognizing that the majority of recipients rent in the private market. The current maximum benefit for a single adult is $733, yet the average asking rent for a one-bedroom in Ontario is $2092. This payment is also expected to cover the cost of food, electricity, heat, clothing, and other necessary items.
- Double Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) rates, taking into consideration the higher cost of living faced by people with disabilities. Despite now being indexed to inflation, ODSP rates still keep recipients living in poverty. For example, the income of an unattached single person receiving ODSP falls approximately $11,500 below the official poverty line.
- Cap child care fees at no more than $10-per-day per family and implement a sliding fee scale starting at $0 for lower-income families. Affordable child care is essential to women’s economic livelihood, yet the average cost in Ontario sits at $19/day—still above what many families can afford.
- Implement a child care workforce strategy that ensures decent work and pay for educators and solves the child care workforce shortage so more families can access reliable child care.
- Address the needs of victim-survivors of gender-based violence (GBV) by immediately adopting Bill 55, Intimate Partner Violence Epidemic Act, 2025. Recognizing intimate partner violence as an epidemic in Ontario is an important step in strengthening survivors’ access to justice, preventing secondary victimization through the legal system, and improving housing stability, thereby providing the support needed to escape/avoid poverty.
- Expand the supply of affordable housing by both constructing new units and acquiring existing stock to be designated as non-market housing in partnership with non-profit (i.e. social and supportive housing) and co-op providers. Non-market housing is critical to addressing the affordability crisis because it is shielded from speculation, financialization, and unsustainable rent increases.
- Eliminate vacancy decontrol, the 2018 rent control exemption, and Above Guideline Rent Increases (AGIs). These policies allow rents to rise dramatically between tenancies and through approved increases, pushing units beyond what many tenants can afford. Removing them would help stabilize rents and keep existing affordable units within reach.
- Increase tenant protections including stronger eviction safeguards and improved tenant rights and security. From 2020 to 2023 ‘own-use’ eviction filings rose by 85%, putting thousands of tenants at risk of displacement each year. However, when tenants remain securely housed, they are better able to maintain employment, support their families, and avoid the financial and social costs associated with displacement.
- Improve the effectiveness of inclusionary zoning policies by removing the provincially legislated caps that limit municipalities to a maximum 5% set-aside (by units or floor area) and a maximum 25-year affordability period for IZ units. The Province of Ontario imposed these limits through regulation, which has constrained local planning authority and significantly reduced the potential of inclusionary zoning to produce meaningful amounts of long-term affordable housing. Municipalities should be empowered to make their own decisions, informed by meaningful community engagement and local housing needs.
These actions must be grounded in transparent, measurable goals for reducing poverty and deep poverty in the next Poverty Reduction Strategy. This should be coupled with supporting indicators for housing, food insecurity, access to services, equity of outcomes, and more. Drawing inspiration from Canada’s commitment to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and in keeping with the government’s responsibilities under the Poverty Reduction Strategy Act and the Ontario Human Rights Code, we recommend that Ontario’s next Poverty Reduction Strategy commit to reducing the poverty rate to no more than 7.5 per cent by 2030, representing a 50 per cent reduction over 2015 levels. We strongly believe that using this concrete goal will keep the Province bound to the principles described above and focused on making meaningful progress.
Seeking feedback from non-profits and community partners is an important component to developing the next Ontario Poverty Reduction Strategy. However, collaboration should not end there. In the next Strategy, we urge the Province to work more closely with, and increase investments in non-profit, community organizations that provide vital programs, services and supports to directly support people living in poverty. The Poverty Reduction Strategy must leverage the non-profit sector’s expertise and community connections to create programs that better reflect the concerns and needs of those they are meant to serve, while at the same time, working to reduce poverty and its impacts.
We further urge the Province to take a different approach to poverty reduction than it did with past strategies by adapting inclusive governance structures that enable those with lived/living experience to have a meaningful role in the design and implementation of anti-poverty initiatives. The provincial government should resource the nonprofit sector to lead this engagement as they have closer, ongoing relationships with community members and are less hindered by power dynamics. Community-based organizations have experience and expertise in working with people with lived/living experiences of poverty, including those who face multiple and intersecting challenges. The non-profit sector also has the capacity and connections to engage specific populations, such as im/migrants and refugees, people with disabilities, lone-parent families, and more, who have unique needs and require tailored solutions when it comes to poverty reduction.
Local governments also provide many of the free and low-cost programs and services that low-income residents rely on, like shelters, recreation programs, and transit. Yet, they have the fewest tools to generate revenue. The Federation of Canadian Municipalities estimates that only 8-10 cents of every tax dollar collected goes to municipalities. Because cities are at the front lines of responding to poverty, strengthening municipal finances and expanding their ability to shape local poverty-reduction solutions is essential. Supporting municipalities with direct transfers and granting new revenue generation powers, such as a municipal sales tax, a portion of HST revenue or a municipal income tax, is a critical step toward ensuring they can adequately support low-income residents.
Ontario has the tools, expertise, and resources to significantly reduce poverty. It makes economic sense, it’s the right thing to do, and there is data that shows poverty is a solvable issue. As you prepare the next five-year Poverty Reduction Strategy, we urge you to respond with urgency to the overlapping crises that continue to undermine the well-being of people living in poverty. With the recommendations outlined in this letter—and by anchoring the plan in an evidence- and rights-based approach—you can support the 1.9 million Ontarians who struggle every day to make ends meet.
Thank you for your consideration of our submission. For additional information, please contact Jin Huh, Executive Director, Social Planning Toronto at [email protected].
Sincerely,