First of all, the good news is that the problem has been identified and governments have tried to not make matters worse over the past few years. The federal government has implemented working income assistance. Quebec did the same thing two years earlier, with its working bonus. And yet, despite those measures, some people were worse off after receiving federal assistance because those measures were not fully harmonized. Governments have to talk with one another.
One of the problems is that two orders of government are taxing the same income at the same time. And then there are the payroll taxes collected by para-public agencies. Assistance programs have been implemented especially for people with low incomes, and these are positive initiatives. But when all these programs bear down on an additional dollar of income at the same time, in some instances, the government ends up clawing back 75¢ on that dollar. People are wrong not to work overtime and claim that they have no money left over, but in fact, they are not entirely wrong. In some cases, the problem is due in part to taxes but also to the effect of three distinct actions.