I also sit on the income security reform working group for the province. Some of the materials I've come across suggest that very low assistance pre-employment and punitive ideas, such as you must force a job search, aren't working, and they haven't worked for 20 years. What we are finding more and more is that people who are longer term on assistance have multiple barriers that no one's addressing.
When you start dealing with learning disabilities, and when you start dealing with chronic mental health issues that may not be acute, but do impact people's lives and they can't afford the medication for it, or they can't.... There are so many pre-employment barriers that people seem to slip through the net, so to speak.
There are some programs available for newcomers, mainly English as a second language, but beyond that the social inclusion aspect that gets people involved in communities and feeling settled is also important, so that they start to network just like all of us do when we go out to look for employment.