Fifteen years of long-term social assistance entries and exits in Quebec and the impact of the Supplement to the Work Premium (SWP)


Charles Plante, Université Laval

During the past two decades, Quebec has taken concerted steps to reduce its number of long-term social assistance recipients. This includes the introduction of its Supplement to the Work Premium (SWP), which subsidizes re-entrants wages to the labour market by as much as $200 a month for twelve months since 2008. Initially, recipients had to have been on social assistance for 36 out of the previous 42 months to qualify for this supplement. In 2018, this threshold was lowered to 24 out of the previous 30 months. We have partnered with the Ministère de lEmploi de la Solidarité sociale (MTESS) to evaluate this intervention. They have provided us with access to fifteen years of longitudinal administrative social assistance records for over 200,000 recipients who received assistance in 12 out of the previous 30 months for the first time and who were not suffering from a disability between January 1st, 2006 and December 31st, 2020. We observe that the number of annual entrants to this group has declined over time, and its composition has changed substantially. The share of young adults (between 18 and 34) has declined by as much as 20 percentage points at the expense of older age groups. The share of people who communicate primarily in French has decreased considerably over time, and so too has the share of people who are Canadian-born. The share of recipients with a university education has decreased. After declining at first, the share of dual-parent and lone-parent families has increased in recent more recent periods. Men have continually been overrepresented, but this share has declined. Together, these findings imply a group of long-term social assistance recipients that was becoming older and more diverse, leading into the COVID-19 pandemic. Overall, exit rates in Quebec are low for long-term social assistance recipients but have increased over time. This is an ongoing study, and by the time of our presentation, we will provide provisional estimates of duration dependence and the impact, if any, of the introduction of the SWP program among these groups.

Non-presenting author: Pierre-Marc Daigneault, Université Laval

This paper will be presented at the following session: