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

Your National Post gets results! Unfortunately, sometimes “results” means “everybody gets angry and little is accomplished.” On Monday, Ontario Premier Doug Ford promised on the bird site that he would change provincial regulations to make illegal immigrants ineligible for welfare. It would be a natural assumption for an Ontarian to make that illegal immigrants were already ineligible for welfare! But, as the Post’s Adrian Humphreys had revealed in a story published Saturday, that is not the case.

The tireless Humphreys was reporting on a May decision of the Ontario Social Benefits Tribunal, which was hearing an appeal of a denial of benefits to an unnamed immigrant already living in a homeless shelter. The gentleman had arrived in Canada on a work visa in 1997, but that visa expired in 2001, and he had hung around surviving on “cash jobs” — details unspecified — until his situation got desperate in 2023. The administrator of the Ontario Works program refused, in October of last year, to enlist him on the provincial welfare roll on the grounds that he was in Canada altogether illegally.

But his lawyer pointed out that the Ontario Works regulations don’t explicitly say that an illegal immigrant can’t receive welfare. The law says that “visitors” and “tourists” aren’t eligible unless they’ve applied for refugee status or permanent residency. The appellant in this case hadn’t taken any such steps: he had just stayed under the radar long enough to become neither visitor nor tourist. The tribunal explicitly acknowledged that the appellant “has no status in Canada and is here illegally.” It then ordered Ontario Works to write him a cheque anyway.

On its face, this would appear to be a matter of a carelessly written regulation, one that could, in principle, be rewritten overnight without the involvement of the Ontario legislature. Ford’s statement suggests he’ll put the wheels in motion. Taking him at his word for the sake of argument, and because his indignation is completely appropriate, there remains only one question: what will actually happen after the regulation is amended to exclude illegal immigrants?

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?

National Post