Louis Shalako: Go Deep: The Systematic Failure of Ontario Social Policy. Louis Shalako.

In a kind of social horror, Louis goes deep on social policy, or so it is called...

Louis Shalako

The systematic failure of social policy in the Province of Ontario is no accident.

That's because things are caused to happen.

It’s more than systemic, a pretty good word all on its own. It’s a little more deliberate than that. Systemic refers to those funny little provisions, built into the system, which sometimes makes some things difficult, and other things impossible. The so-called Catch-22, a wonderful story by Joseph Heller.

Systematic, means it is a bit of a lesson in applied cruelty, and this by a democratically-elected government, of whatever ideological stripe. It isn’t exactly enlightened, but it does stem from a kind of self-interest of the taxpayer kind. To claim it is a big conspiracy is to mistake its organization, for it has none. It is smugness, writ large; and its inevitable results, where the rich complain about the cost of housing, and bitch and whine about the costs of homelessness, all in one and the same breath. This situation did not come about overnight.

Our system of food banks and homeless shelters goes back at least forty years, by some accounts, although such things have always existed, in one form or another, probably since the dawn of time itself. There was a big recession, and remember when interest rates went just plain ludicrous—this would be the early to mid-eighties. When the old man went to re-mortgage the family home, the rate was over eighteen percent—and my father, a divorced parent, was scared shitless, too.

That was all so long ago.

More recently, it was Conservative Premier Mike Harris of Ontario and his ‘common sense revolution’, that struck the first and the worst blow, insofar as the present crisis of homelessness and affordability is concerned. We will talk about the impacts of ‘mental health and addictions’ some other time, although I am sure I will get to it someday.

It was in 1995, when the Province of Ontario, with the conservatives elected by a strong majority, gutted social assistance payments by twenty percent. Where the rate for a single adult had been $663.00 per month, it was reduced to $520.00 per month. Using an online ‘inflation calculator’, inflation has taken what would have cost $100.00 in 1995, up to $183.26 in mid-May of 2024. If we multiply that by 5.2, the figure would be $916.30 per month, and yet the current rate is only $733.00 per month. Welfare payments have not kept up with the rate of inflation, and in fact our current, Progressive Conservative government here in Ontario, did not give any raises to folks on disability, for the first five years of their mandate. They have not given one single raise to folks who are unfortunate enough to find themselves on ‘welfare’, social assistance.

Ah, but if we take a figure of $183.00 and multiply that by 6.63, the figure now becomes $1,215.01 per month. It’s still not a lot of money, what with the average cost of a one-bedroom apartment all across the province being much higher than that, but it would, under some circumstances, have given people a fighting chance, of at least keeping a roof over their heads. It is also true that if more people had simply been able to keep the roof they already had, over their heads, the average price of rent in this province would actually be lower—that is because, while the province does have rent controls, on buildings of a certain age, there is no rent control when a unit becomes vacant. The landlord now has the right to charge what could be called ‘market rate’, which is a fine term, useful enough, but only if we accept that things might have been different—if only the Province of Ontario had any kind of effective, or even just rational, social policy.

You're welcome to check the math.

If they had raised the rates, more people would have kept their homes—and if you, had moved within the last five or six years, into any apartment in this province, your rent would have been lower—

Ah, but you prefer to cut off your noses to spite your faces, because the ideology trumps truth, and logic, and utility, every fucking time with some of you people.

Some years later, in an interview, Mike Harris was asked about the common-sense revolution. He considered it his ‘legacy’, that within a fairly short time, unemployment went down, and had stayed down. Yet he made no mention, that it was the economy, (stupid), and not regressive social policy that had made that happen. I ought to know.

I have lived through every recession of the last fifty or sixty-plus years, although as an infant, I could hardly have been aware of such things. As an adult, it is much more up close and personal. When I was on welfare, however briefly, I was paying $450.00 per month in rent. Knock that welfare check down to $520.00 per month, and I had seventy dollars per month, for food, clothing, personal needs including soap, toothpaste, dish-soap, and quite frankly, hobbies, entertainment, were out the door. So was any hope of ‘bettering myself’ with training or education, anything that was not provided by the system. Training a guy with a broken back to become a mason’s helper, slugging 100-lb. concrete blocks, mixing mortar and wheeling that around in a wheelbarrow is simply not appropriate, and is simply not going to work—yet sending him to college or university, in order to train him, (or her), in something more appropriate, something that might actually be a viable career, was never in the cards.

What is interesting is that disability and welfare are always divided up into ‘shelter’ and ‘personal needs’ portions. The minute you lose your housing, you no longer ‘need’ that shelter portion, although the Province, so I have been told, does provide a meagre $100.00 per month ‘homelessness benefit’. Yes, you heard me right. Now you’re supposed to live on the street, feed yourself, stay off the dope and somehow, over the course of several years, without getting robbed and beaten for your money, to somehow save first and last month’s rent for an apartment you can’t afford in the first place, also bearing in mind after all of this you are sort of unlikely to do well in any sort of credit check—right???

The so-called homeless benefit mostly goes to the rich, in the form of reduced taxes.

Affordable, geared-to-income housing would appear to be a desirable thing, a ‘social good’ in every sense. Yet the County of Lambton appears to be totally incompetent to build any such thing in any appreciable numbers. When confronted by a looming crisis, the council voted unanimously to fund a five-year study. This was a cop-out by any other name, and of course the ultimate results of that study were a study in pure shamelessness.

The rich are your friends...

They’ve been spewing out this pap smear for years, and yet they haven’t succeeded in doing one damned thing about it.

Neither city council, or county council, have ever said one word about the levels of social assistance, federal and provincial disability pensions, levels of Old Age Security, Canada Pension Plan, or any other federal or provincial benefits for low-income Canadians. It’s almost like they’re afraid someone might do something about it—

If you look at the image, you will see that MillDon, recently split off from Steeves & Rozema, is charging three percent if a tenant shows up at head office to pay their rent by debit or credit card. Considering that a one bedroom unit is going for an easy $1,500.00 per month, this equates with $45.00, per month, for the privilege, of paying your rent. That is $540.00 per year, for someone just to pay the rent.

With a lack of affordable housing for working Canadians, we end up with a captive audience of renters. There is nowhere else to go. What are they going to do, especially as there is still a fair percentage of unbanked individuals, and they have to live somewhere. It’s a lot like the family doctor—so many of us simply don’t have one. Why would someone not have a bank account? There are a hundred reasons: garnished wages, child support or alimony in arrears, overdrafts, accounts frozen or sealed, unpaid fines, overdraft maxed out, service charges built up and no funds to pay—the usual sins of poverty, ladies and gentlemen, this is how folks end up taking their cheques to a payday lender, and end up hooked on that peculiar and rather predatory service.

$45.00/month, just for the privilege of paying the rent.

***

The landlord lies awake at night, wondering if they even have the nerve to try that with automatic bank payments; which don’t cost them a single damned cent. The simplest of software will tell you who has paid, and who hasn’t.

In one local development, affordable, geared-to-income development of over fifty units, a very small number of people wanted garden plots, and their wish was granted. Funny thing is, the landlord, in this case the County of Lambton, squawked about water usage, and therefore, imposed a hundred-dollar per month water surcharge, regardless of whether a household was using the vegetable plots or not. One wonders how many tomatoes one would have to grow to make it worth it to the individual user, or whether they had such plots the next year, or what the County actually did with the estimated $5,400.00 per month they gouged out of our most vulnerable citizens, (half of them dying of cancer), with that little stunt…

What I thought was interesting, was when tenants, all of whom are low income, many on disability or other benefits, had to pay for their own hot water tanks, installation and monthly fees. This is of course, over and above the one-third of income that the so-called rent is supposedly set at. One wonders what happens when a ‘client’ is evicted—where do we go from here, right.

This particular development is sort of high-end for subsidized housing, and yet the county has been unable to build anything like it since. We have, over the last ten years or so, ‘approved’ something like 2,400 housing units, many described as ‘affordable’, in Sarnia-Lambton. Some would even say 3,500, but some of those have been acknowledged to be dead in the water—which is at least honest, and one would hope that some other property developer will take that over and maybe do something—anything, with it.

Let’s not hold our breath waiting.

And I have often wondered. When the Doug Ford government imagines affordable housing, just exactly what do they see in the privacy of their own heads.

I’ll bet it’s nice.

Government: building more castles faster.

***

In the fourteenth century, the Black Plague killed anywhere from one-third to one-half of the population. The cost of labour went up. The profits of the lords of the manors fell, due to vacant lands. They had trouble getting people to work for them. The result, in legal terms, was that efforts were made to bind the serf ever closer to the land—and the master.

Naturally, it didn’t really work, and when someone who had gone to work in London, and yet found themselves disabled, they had to return to their home parish just to get poor relief, which did exist in those days. Back then, the Church provided virtually all social services outside of the military and the courts. To see the state still relying on that in modern times pretty much says it all...

The sumptuary laws literally told people what they could and could not wear. In 1 Corinthians 7:20, it says; Let every man abide in the same calling wherein he was called.

The ruling classes, of course, took it literally—or presented it literally, for they themselves, did not feel bound by it. Basically, do not quit your job and go looking for more money somewhere else. This was the original rentier class, and they meant business—even as they plundered France and held their captives for ransom, even as they built new castles with the money they had ‘earned’ by valor in battle. In their own eyes, the very paragons of virtue. But then, that’s what they always say.

***

With the aging of the population, and a falling birthrate, it is a similar situation. The cost of labour will go up, the number of hands will go down—and the upper crust of society will do all they can to continue to exploit the labouring classes. Not the least of which, is to just plain lie to us, and still expect us to like them for it. But this is why the federal government took a gamble on an increased level of immigration. This gamble will probably pay off in the long run, in the short term, it has indeed exacerbated the housing crisis. Or, as I like to call it, the income crisis. And I am not talking about the rich when I say that.

What would happen if we all just stood here and stared at the camera...

One aspect of all this is surveillance: at some point, the landlord put cameras outdoors, and then, they put cameras indoors, and then, some time later, put in more cameras, looking up and down the hallways. They call it security. It may actually provide some, assuming it’s not the landlord and renoviction we’re worried about. This is an effort to exercise their rights—in the future, tenants may be asked to sign an NDA, a non-disclosure agreement. If you prefer not to sign such an agreement, they might prefer not to offer you a lease. It’s their right. Not so much yours. It’s that simple. Odds are, you will sign it.

Oh, and when you do leave, and if you do open your mouth and speak about some negative experience, you have violated the NDA and you can be sued for ‘damages’ in a court of law.

It’s one more attempt to control.

END

Go deep: a theory of local journalism.

Okay. So, local radio reports on important local news stories. Whether it’s on the air or on the website, the stories are short and shallow. This is a feature of the medium, where the attention span is assumed to be about three minutes or less—accounting for the sort of music they play as well. In the local daily, stories range from very short, up to the average, roughly five or six hundred words, and a long story is maybe a thousand. In our local monthly, the same holds true, in that ‘genuine’ news coverage, biased as it might be, is no more than five or six hundred words, and the columnists, being mostly unpaid, about the same. It is true that the major news sources, the CBC for example, have the budget and the time to do investigative reporting, analysis, the regular panel of experts commenting on one major issue of the day. It struck me that in a media environment where the tendency is to go shallow, and devote the least portion of time and resources to news coverage, (the local market in other words) a person of some journalistic bent, someone with a few gut instincts, might go deep.

A bit of background. The Sarnia Journal won a Community Journalism Award for doing just that, going deep, in their series on homelessness and addictions in this community.

Yeah, but doesn’t that just prove what I am saying?

Go deep. It’s not like I have anything to lose, or anything better to do, while I await renoviction papers and a verdict of ‘mental-health addictions’, on the front page of those very same publications, when I finally am rammed through the cracks with a fine-toothed hatchet and end up living in a tent in Rainbow park, or maybe, if I’m lucky, in a van down by the river. Since I don’t work for them, I don’t have to play by their rules. I am a private citizen, not responsible to any other person or entity besides the law and the constitution, and I will say what I want, I will write what I want, and let the chips fall where they may. I do not have any advertisers. I do not rely on donations, corporate or otherwise. We're not selling Girl Scout Cookies here, ladies and gentlemen...

Maybe that’s why they want to get me out of my house, ladies and gentlemen—or am I just being paranoid.

(His instincts are killing him. – ed.)

The funny thing is, I have been very stable these past thirty fucking years on disability, and one can only wonder just what in the hell is the matter with you people.

Would you like to know the truth? You’ve probably guessed it already.

They—or maybe even we—in a collective sense, just don’t want to spend the money, unless it’s somebody else’s money—the very socialism they profess to despise, ladies and gentlemen.

#Louis

The Bank of Canada’s online inflation calculator.

A Three-Dollar Calculator Cuts Through an Endless Amount of Bullshit.

Catch-22. Joseph Heller.

Catch-22 available from Russian Website. Use at own risk.

Food banks arose to fight hunger:

The Interest Rate Crunch of the ‘80s.

If you can make any sense of this, please let us know.

Lambton’s housing pap smear.

Failure of the County.

Recommended reading.

The Hundred Years War, by Desmond Seward.