Covert budget-cutting

Quebec's AGIR program steamrolls welfare recipients

by JACQUIE CHARLTON

In a cramped storeroom-cum-office in the rear of a building in Pointe St. Charles, Denis Langevin, director of the Comité des personnes assistées sociales, files the stories of people who Quebec welfare's AGIR program has left as economic roadkill.

He's got some good ones. Like the one about the man who turned down a job cleaning trays in a shopping mall food court, then changed his mind the next day and went back to say he'd take it. The job was gone, but the man found that $150 had been taken off each of his next year's welfare cheques as punishment for refusing. So he moved to a cheaper place, a room costing $275 a month, but then welfare cut an additional $104 off his monthly cheque because he shared a bathroom and a main door with the other roomers. Finally, with his cheque at $246 a month, he found himself unable to afford the new place, let alone the bus tickets, telephone and daily nourishment needed for a job search.

All this for participating in a program whose name, ironically enough, stands for Activité de groupe pour l'intégration par la recherche de l'emploi.

The man in this particular story still hasn't found a job, but after a year on $246 a month, his penalty is over: his monthly cheque now stands at $396. Stories like this convince Langevin that AGIR is more of a covert budget-cutting measure than a genuine path to a job.

According to figures released last month, for example, the Ministère de la sécurité du revenu saved $10 million from March 1995 to March 1996, thanks to individualized $100 cuts imposed on 8,638 AGIR participants' cheques. From March 1996 to January 1997, it saved an additional $19 million from a series of $150 cuts (the penalty became $50 steeper in April 1996) meted out to a further 10,453 AGIR participants.

The figures show that 25 per cent of all AGIR participants were penalized in this way between March 1995 and March 1996, and 20 per cent in the period that followed. In both cases, the number of AGIR participants who had their cheques cut surpassed the number who found paying work and got off welfare.

According to Langevin, participants are not only penalized for refusing jobs but also for missing, showing up late for or even leaving too early from AGIR meetings.

Agents are increasingly seeing people coming in and erupting into violence after finding their welfare cheque has been cut by $150 a month for an entire year, Langevin says. Already, he says, he's seeing more security barriers, emergency buttons and even security guards in welfare offices in Montreal.

"They see a real deterioration in people's lives," Langevin said. "They're hearing stories about debt and hunger. A lot of agents are sick of it."