Applying for last-resort financial assistance is never easy: the law is complex, there are many administrative obstacles, and social judgment is a heavy burden for people living in poverty. When, in addition, the public services are no longer there to welcome, inform and support people in their dealings with the State, it literally becomes an obstacle course.
The quality of services offered at the Ministry of Labour, Employment and Social Solidarity (MTESS) is in decline. The reforms of recent years have resulted in fewer contacts between claimants and their agent. The staff in place to provide local services in the MTESS offices has melted like snow in the sun. As it is generally impossible for citizens to get answers to their questions on site, they have to go through the call centre, which is overloaded.
The ministry, insensitive to the phenomenon of digital exclusion which affects a large number of people living in poverty, is developing online services while reducing access to in-person services. Next step: social assistance recipients will soon no longer have an agent assigned to their file.
Indeed, a major “administrative” transformation is in preparation. Obsessed with reducing staff and reducing costs, the department was seduced by a technological solution that relies, among other things, on the automation of file processing. Eventually, MTESS recipients and staff will be treated as interchangeable numbers in a completely dehumanized system of “shared management” of financial aid files.
Neither the organizations that defend the rights of service providers nor the civil servants of the MTESS were consulted on this important reform, piloted by IT developers. It goes exactly the opposite of the needs and demands expressed on the ground in terms of access to services. In their relationship with the State, social assistance recipients above all want to be able to speak to the officer in charge of their file, describe their situation to him or her and receive clear explanations from him or her. .
For their part, officers know very well that the new mode of operation is likely to lead to a multiplication of errors in the processing of files, as experience elsewhere in the public service has clearly shown. The spiral of the dehumanization of services has been observed for years in social assistance, but it risks reaching an unprecedented peak in the months to come with this reform.
How many people abandon their procedures because of administrative, bureaucratic or technological obstacles? How many find themselves in an even more precarious situation or downright on the street because they have not been welcomed and supported with humanity within the public services? It is time for the MTESS to find its bearings.
With one voice, MTESS aid workers, groups defending the rights of people on social assistance and their allies denounce the dehumanization of public services and call for a change of course.
* Also signed this text:
Regional advocacy groups
LASTUSE du Saguenay
ADDS South Shore
Sherbrooke Action Plus
CSR of Victoriaville
Welfare rights Committee (WRC)
Popular Action of the Mills
Pointe-St-Charles Social Assistance Committee (CPAS)
Genesis Project
Access Living conditions Lac St-Jean-Est
Unemployed Committee (CSE)
Action Dignity Lanaudière
Clinic Rights Ahead
Regrouping Social Assistance and Social Assistance of Témiscouata (RASST)
Plateau Mont-Royal Resource Group (GRPMR)
BRAS Villeray Common Front of People on Social Assistance in Quebec (FCPASQ)
Popular Action Rimouski-Neigette
Allies
Céline Bellot, Director of the Profiling Observatory, University of Montreal
Véronique Fortin, Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Sherbrooke
Nadia Giguère, researcher at the Montreal Research Center on Social Inequalities, Discrimination and Alternative Citizenship Practices (CREMIS)
Janie Houle, holder of the Research Chair in the Reduction of Social Inequalities in Health, UQÀM
Manuel Johnson, lawyer
Christopher McAll, professor of sociology, University of Montreal
Yanick Noiseux, principal researcher of the Interuniversity and interdisciplinary research group on employment, poverty and social protection (GIREPS)
Julie Paquette, Professor, School of Ethics, Social Justice and Public Service, Saint Paul University
Andréane Sabourin Laflamme, professor of philosophy at Cégep André-Laurendeau and doctoral student in the department of legal sciences at UQAM.