The City has closed all but 3 welfare offices that are open for "emergencies only" during the CUPE strike.

The offices that are open are:

• Etobicoke North – 220 Attwell Dr – 416 392-6400
• Downtown – 111 Wellesley St E – 416 392-5300
• Scarborough West – 1225 Kennedy Rd – 416 392-2800

The City says that they are for emergencies only. To them, this means that cheques are frozen and people cannot get any new benefits, the basic things that people need.

FACING THE CRISIS: We Didn't Create It - We Won't Pay for It!
FREE MEAL AND RALLY: Defend the Special Diet! Raise the Rates Now!

DATE: Tuesday, March 24, 2009
TIME: 11am
LOCATION: City Hall (Bay and Queen)

Food banks, shelters, EI offices and welfare offices are bursting at their seams. There isn't enough food or shelter for poor people. People are going hungry every day in this city. As layoffs rise hunger will only increase. The number of people on social assistance in the city jumped 13% -- or 10,000 more people -- last month. Only 3 in 10 workers in Toronto get EI if they lose their jobs. The other 70% of unemployed workers will almost all end up on welfare but welfare payments are too low to pay for both food and rent. These alarming figures mean that every month in Toronto more and more people are going hungry, and becoming homeless.

Over 10,000 people in Toronto depend on a monthly social assistance benefit called the Special Diet payment. Up to $250 a month, this money makes it easier for poor families and individuals to put food on the table. This payment is crucial to survival and health, but it isn’t enough.

In 1995, just before the Harris Government cut social assistance rates by 21.6%, the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty marched from the low-income community of Regent Park into affluent Rosedale.

How Ontario's Poverty Reduction Strategy Will Fail

As more plants close and the markets continue to fall, there is consensus on the economic future for the province of Ontario: more job losses and recession. Ontario’s last recession took place in the early 1990s - thousands of people from across the province migrated to Toronto in search of work and services that smaller communities offer little of, such as shelters, drop-in centres, meal programs, and outreach workers. Most people who came to Toronto found shelters well beyond capacity, social services over-taxed, and a stingy, overloaded welfare bureaucracy staggering under a caseload of 100,000.