UPDATED: You're A Mean One, Mr. Ford

In a move that will surely swell the tiny hearts beating within the breast of Ford Nation, the Ontario government is eliminating a benefit that helps children of the poor, especially those claiming refugee status:

The cut, buried in April’s provincial budget, will end the Transition Child Benefit which provides up to $230 per month, per child in families on welfare who are not receiving the Ontario and Canada child benefits, such as refugee claimants.

The move, scheduled to take effect Nov. 1, will affect an average of 16,000 children a month province-wide, according to the government.

Those who favour tighter refugee and welfare rules will likely be exuberant over the deprivations they cuts will wreak. Others, with their humanitarian instincts intact, are horrified:

“To me, this is the nastiest cut,” said Toronto Councillor Shelley Carroll, a member of the city’s economic and community development committee, responsible for the local welfare system.

It is part of an estimated $177 million in provincial budget cuts to the city that threaten child care subsidies, school nutrition programs and free dental care for low-income children, among others services.

In Toronto, the loss of the Transition Child Benefit will mostly hurt kids in families making refugee claims, said City Manager Chris Murray in a memo to councillors earlier this month.

One such victim will be Eritrean refugee claimant Samu Abdel, 37,

who has three young sons, including one with spina bifida, the benefit has been critical to her ability to support her children.

“I don’t know what I would do without it,” says the single mother who fled her war-torn homeland in 2017. “I have a disabled son. I can’t work. I need this money to buy food and diapers.”

But such concerns seem to matter not to those wielding ever-sharper hatchets as they seek to cut the deficit, insisting that they are actually improving the system:

“We are replacing parts of the social assistance system that provide complicated and unequal support to those in need, with simpler rate structures for everyone,” said Derek Rowland [spokesperson for the provincial ministry of children].

“The government believes that all Ontarians should have equal access to children’s benefits, regardless of whether they are or are not receiving social assistance.”

Increasingly, Ontarians are seeing through the facade that the Ford regime has tried to erect. The question that remains, however, is whether, this early in their mandate, anyone in the Ford government is paying attention.

UPDATE: Hmm, it appears someone in the Ford administration has been listening.