When You've Been Had. Louis Shalako.

Louis Shalako

Do Ontarians know when they've been had? It's awful hard to prove.

But.

But.

I would say no—they don’t know it, but the truth is, they’ve been had.

The previous Liberal provincial government, shortly before losing the last election in 2018, had announced that they were raising allowable earnings for clients of ODSP/OW.

(Why in the hell they didn’t just do it, I will never know. But it was exactly this sort of mucky thinking that lost them the election in the first place.)

As I recall, it was something like going up to $400.00 per month from the present $200.00 per month.

At that time, the rate of claw-back against earnings was fifty percent, and that was to remain unchanged. This would have made some small, incremental progress in addressing the #income_crisis

Having won the election, the Doug Ford Conservative government announced a ‘social services review’ of about three or four months. They actually extended that by another couple of weeks. During this time, the author tweeted the premier virtually every day on this subject.

They finally announced that allowable earnings for ODSP would be going up to $500.00 per month, for clients of Ontario Works (welfare), up to $300.00 per month. Sounds good, but the kicker was that the rate of claw-backs on earnings over and above that amount, would now be seventy-five percent.

There was no date of implementation announced, and perhaps this is a key piece of information. 

It was never meant to happen.

I could never find anything on the date of implementation, ladies and gentlemen. I’m a highly-trained Canadian journalist, and I’ve been all over this story—going back many years.

So, November rolls around and there I was, trying to find out the date of implementation…

And then…and then, I stumbled across a very recent Toronto Star article, where they say the whole thing has been shelved. This is the first I’ve heard of that. Yeah, and I made certain important business decisions too, based on the whole idea that those guidelines would have to take effect at some relatively near date in the future. We’ve been getting our raises in November, for example, and this goes back some years.

So now, everything goes back, or rather, stays the same—nothing changes. While the claw-back stays at fifty percent, the allowable earnings also stay at $200.00 per month, and this when ODSP is about thirty-five to forty percent below the poverty line, and OW, more like seventy. Oh, and the people who wrote that article are quoting some quite different figures. 

They say that welfare, at $733.00 per month for a single adult, is fifty percent of the poverty line. I’d like to know where they got those figures, as the poverty line has been well defined by any number of sources, and it’s easy enough to look up social assistance rates. Considering the journalists live in Toronto, it’s quite ludicrous, it really is.

Ah. But.

But.

The government has done something interesting here—they’ve put up a trial balloon. One that appears to have been shot down. One, that it seems, may never rise again…not until the government is ready, that is to say. Two or three months for a social assistance review was never going to be enough time…not when it affects a million of our most vulnerable citizens. 

They may have simply figured that out. They may have known it all along, but the first year of this administration had its own style, one that may perhaps be gone now that it has outlived its usefulness.

Their plan to make it more difficult for the mentally-ill to qualify for benefits, would appear to have also gone out the window. The funny thing is, I never had any problem proving I was crazy—it was the three compression-fractured vertebra they were disputing.

They were convinced I was crazy all right, or maybe I was just a little bit assertive.

(Which they don’t like.)

And now—

The government can be said to have listened to the people. They can be said to appear to have listened to their own base, who honestly believe all poverty stems from moral failure, (otherwise, taxes might be going up), and they can even appear to have listened to those across the aisle of a more liberal bent.

Everyone wins, except those who are affected most—our most vulnerable citizens.

Oh, and it sure sounds to me like we won't be getting that 1.5 % raise, either. You remember--he slashed the three percent raise by fifty percent.

Yeah, there must be a shit-load of ineffectual do-gooders, simply reeling in their effectuality this morning, eh.

And here is the really tricky part.

Maybe we won after all—because it would appear that Mr. Ford and his government still haven’t slashed rates by twenty-two and a half percent, as former Premier Mike Harris and his Conservative government did upon gaining power in 1995. From which we have never recovered, and from which we will never recover.

That’s not to say that they won’t—

But—

I would say that this is a pretty good opportunity for them not to do so—

It’s not like anyone with half a brain is even looking, after all.

No, it’s just me—or us.

This is up to you and me, Doug.

We’re the only ones that seem to care.

END

Poor old Louis, eh. He’s been fighting this lonely battle all this time, but, uh…he has a few books and stories on Kobo.

Image. Stolen from the internet.

Thank you for reading and stuff. January 1 is the tenth anniversary of our independent publishing venture and we’ve been putting some thought into that…