When Social Assistance Confronts Addiction: A Canadian Case of Competing Discourses of Social Justice and Social Control

Across ‘liberal’ welfare states, income support restructuring in the late 1990s and early 2000s has been understood to produce punitive, coercive and regulatory welfare-to-work policy and programming. Critique has been levelled against how discourses laden with power such as ‘less eligibility’ and ‘the deserving poor’ have fueled this neo-liberal reform and the nullification of individuals’ social rights of citizenship and the deepening of their poverty as a result.

In this paper, I assume this material and discursive historical context but focus on a Canadian case, the social assistance policy of Ontario Works (OW). My specific objective is to ask whether the social control mechanisms oft associated with welfare-to-work are relevant at this contemporary moment for OW recipients living with addiction to drugs or alcohol. Through a critical discourse analysis of policy restructuring from 2009 to 2017 and in-depth interviews with OW caseworkers and recipients, I explore the ideas and discourses that inform how persons living with addiction are conceptualized as eligible and then experience income support.

Based on my analysis, I arrive at the troubling conclusion that discourses of social justice and social control inform the relationship between social assistance and addiction in Ontario. For example, persons living with addiction seem to be bracketed from the primary mandate of OW, to activate persons’ labour market potential; a “work first” discourse seems to have little utility for this caseload, at least since the province’s passing of the Poverty Reduction Act in 2009. And yet, shaping caseworker and recipient experiences are other discourses productive of domination, evident in the form of recipients’ self-discipline and surveillance. Recipients overwhelming construct a subject position of “the recovering addict” in order to maintain income support. The implications of this conclusion are further discussed, especially in view of any future change in provincial government.