Colby Cosh: Ontario’s welfare-for-illegal-migrants scheme could be dropped overnight

Valid observation:

…There’s a point in the Social Benefits Tribunal ruling that is easy to overlook. When the appellant originally applied for welfare in 2023, there was a check of immigration records to see if he was subject to deportation or a removal order, which would have disqualified him under the current law. There was no second check at the time of the administrator’s decision in 2025. A second search, we’re told, was not conducted by a caseworker “in order to avoid possibly jeopardizing the appellant’s situation in Canada.”

It is hard to understand this as anything other than a sign that the Ontario welfare apparatus — full of social workers no doubt pledged to the sacred principle that “no one is illegal” — is already unwilling to recognize technical citizenship requirements. In this case, the technical requirements turned out not to exist at all. But what do you suppose will happen if Premier Ford gets on the phone this afternoon and orders that the welfare loophole be closed?

It seems welfare caseworkers have a lot of discretion to avoid “jeopardizing situations,” and perhaps it is not their job at all to enforce the (federal) law of citizenship. But even assuming they are willing to safeguard the public treasury against unscrupulous and potentially infinite exploitation, which is definitely part of their job, there’s still another problem. Any new Fordist regulation written to limit public welfare to persons lawfully present in Canada is bound to face near-immediate Charter scrutiny in front of a real court — and how do we imagine that might go these days?

Source: Colby Cosh: Ontario’s welfare-for-illegal-migrants scheme could be dropped overnight