It's easy to see why welfare reform should be a hot issue. That Ontario now has the highest proportion of its population on social assistance (12 per cent) of any province might be put down to the severity of the late recession, or the differing availability of unemployment insurance; that this proportion rose steadily all through the 1980s, while unemployment was falling through the floor, cannot.

But workfare, whether of the mild version propagated by the Liberals, or the starker variety on offer from the Tories, hardly qualifies as serious reform. It's not that there's any great moral injustice in it: Recipients are already required to be actively seeking work as a condition of benefits, and can be cut off if they are not. But neither is there much that is new or improved in it. In fact, when you get into the details - Mr. Harris suggests planting trees, guarding school crossings and "environmental things" as possible areas of employment - it looks a lot like old- fashioned outdoor relief: make-work, the kind conservatives used to scorn.

The Liberals would maintain present benefits for all able-bodied recipients who took community-service jobs or enrolled in training programs. Those who refused would still receive a smaller "basic" allowance equal to the national average (it's now about 35 per cent above) . The Tories, on the other hand, would reduce benefits even for those who agreed to participate to 10 per cent above the national average. Those who refused would be cut off completely.

The Tories insist this makes theirs the only "mandatory" program; Mr. Harris calls this "the vital element needed to move people off social assistance and into productive lives." But workfare, by itself, wouldn't move people off social assistance. It would just give them something to do while they were on it - presumably, as long as they wanted to be.

Now, for some people, make-work programs can actually do some good. Those who have been out of work for a very long time may become so disconnected from the labour market as to have effectively dropped out altogether. Some economists recommend public-works programs to counter this problem of "hysteresis," though with the explicit intent that these workers, as they returned to the job market, should bid down wages, and so stimulate the demand for labour. So there's something in this for both left and right.

But those encouraged by their experience with workfare to leave social assistance and get a paying job, either because the work they were doing was so unpleasant or their self-esteem was so enhanced, would quickly bump up against the financial reality that they might well be worse off if they did - though at least they would no longer have to reckon any loss of leisure time into the equation.

This is the real nub of the welfare problem: the abrupt, sometimes dollar-for- dollar withdrawal of benefits as recipients take jobs and earn more income, which has the same effect as taxing them at very high marginal rates. Ontario's benefits aren't all that generous: A single employable person gets about $8,000 a year, not much more than what Professor Christopher Sarlo calculates as the cost of the bare necessities of life. (Which, in turn, suggests that Prof. Sarlo's "basic needs" standard of poverty is not so harsh as it was made out, if it matches NDP standards of social assistance.)

Genuine welfare reform, then, starts from the understanding that, for the most part, the real deterrent to employment does not lie in giving people money when they don't work but in taking it away from them when they do. Unfortunately, this means spending more money, at least in the short term, if recipients are to keep more of their benefits as their income rises. Unless, of course, you start from a lower base, i.e., the benefit paid to those with no earned income.

Which in fact is what the Tories propose. While the promise to slash benefits has attracted a great deal of attention, the more important part of the plan gets almost no ink: The Tories would let recipients earn back the difference without penalty. Modest as it is, this is potentially a far more significant reform than workfare. It just isn't as easy to explain.