DRUG TESTING PLAN UNDER FIRE

Welfare recipients will turn to streets critics charge

Critics are giving the needle to the Ontario government for its plan to
compel those on welfare to undergo drug testing or lose their benefits.

"It's an outrage and a victimization of peoples' rights," said Brian
O'Keefe, secretary-treasurer of CUPE Ontario, which represents municipal
workers who deal with social assistance recipients.

"It's an atrocious plan," said Ernie Lightman, an economist and professor
of social work at the University of Toronto. "It is mean and punitive."

Anyone who tests positive for illegal drugs and refuses treatment will be
ineligible for social assistance, the government announced Tuesday.

I'm quite repulsed by it," said street nurse Cathy Crowe. "It's going to
increase homelessness. You can't force treatment" on people.

"The government should be testing water, not urine."

Social Services Minister John Baird said Tuesday that he didn't know how
many welfare recipients have a drug problem, but that only 200 people are
in a provincial support program because of an addiction.

Yesterday, he defended the plan in the Legislature.

"Some would say we should simply do nothing, that we should sit back year
after year and watch people use their welfare cheque to feed their drug
habit instead of feeding their children."

He said the government was tremendously concerned about the plight of those
"in our community who are down on their luck, out of work and who, in a
state of desperation and despair have turned to illegal drugs."

He said it would be easy to sit back and do nothing. (But) I don't know
what I would say to the caseworker who told me that she has seen one of the
people she serves month after month, year after year, come into her office
with track marks up and down her arm, and she is powerless to intervene and
to force some help and support."

'Harris is asking us to do his dirty work,' union says

Baird said he spoke this week to Ontario Human Rights Commissioner Keith
Norton, who is concerned that the plan violates civil liberties.

"We are . . . willing and eager to get his advice and the advice of his
staff," Baird said.

But Lightman said all the plan will do is drive "some very vulnerable
independent people off welfare, and that is the only agenda this government
has with respect to the welfare case load."

Baird said the government is far from the finish of its welfare reforms
even though the case load across the province is down by 50 per cent.

Lightman said the government doesn't care what has happened to those who
have dropped off the welfare rolls but we know "impressionistically where
they have gone," he said.

The use of food banks "is at record highs, there are more people living on
the streets, women have gone back to abusive relationships and children go
into the care of Children's Aid," Lightman said.

If the government wanted to help people with addictions, they wouldn't have
cut funds to treatment programs around the province, he said.

Union official O'Keefe said, "(Premier Mike) Harris is asking us to do his
dirty work."