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Louis Shalako
Bogus Social
Policy and the Price of Ignorance.
I hate it when people ask me for spare change in
front of a business, a store, a bank. I hate it even more, when all I want is a
twenty dollar bill so I can go to work—and there are three fucking crackheads,
all lined up in a row, using the little ledges under the ATMs in order to heat
up their little rocks on tinfoil and sniffing that up their little plastic
tubes.
I hate it even more, when one of the twitchier
ones is up and active, and gets in behind me when I’m trying to use the
machine…that one brings out my own natural aggression.
Bear in mind, every fucking one of them has a
knife, a pellet pistol, a spring-loaded baton, brass knuckles…hopefully you get
my point—and not one of theirs, right in the kidneys.
It’s so much better when they’re down on their
blankets, muttering to God and themselves, invisible things that only they can
see, and at least I can keep an eye on them.
Lately, the bank lobby is unlocked at 8:30 a.m.
The bank itself opens at 9:30, (although not Sundays). At one time the lobby
was open all night, and you could get cash 24-7. For a while, they were opening
up at 6:00 a.m., but the homeless would congregate there as soon as the doors
were unlocked. It gave them three and a half hours to warm up, or just get out
of the rain. Now, there's a security guard there, at least in the morning
hours.
The homeless numbers exploded due in large part
to bogus Ontario social policy, which includes an appalling welfare regime, a
lack of rent control, especially on units which become vacant in the older
buildings, and punitive guidelines which means two persons on disability or
welfare who cohabit an apartment must give up a good chunk of the so-called
housing portion of their benefit. And of course, the rent is simply too high
for one person to manage it on their own.
I have in fact been refused tenancy 'because you
don't make enough income', even though I passed the credit check, and even
though I'd been paying rent for years at another location. That rent wasn't too
far off the $800.00/month in the new place. $800.00 per month sounds damned
cheap these days, with housing costs having skyrocketed. My mistake was to tell
them I was on ODSP—a typical case of someone thinking they're just being
honest, and somehow cutting off their own nose. I should have just said I was
self-employed; and semi-retired, uh, from a good factory job down in Chemical Valley. At
the time, I was a little too young to claim to be a senior citizen. Just for
the record, if someone can write a cheque for first and last month’s rent, and
it doesn’t bounce, what in the hell is your problem, anyways? And if it does
bounce, you are within your rights to refuse the application.
Even now, there are no plans in the Ontario
government to raise the rates, even though the results of their policy are all
too clear, neither is there any great rush to build affordable,
geared-to-income units for our most vulnerable.
In the building where I live, the landlord began
locking the outer lobby door at 7 p.m. in the evening, and unlocking again at 7
a.m. in the morning—this again requires more labour, whether one of their own
employees or a private security guard. This was due to a small number of
incidents of homeless people camping in the outer lobby overnight.
They do it for six months of the winter.
The
Contradictions.
Imagine telling a landlord, ‘don’t worry, we’ll
be going down to the Salvation Army once a month and applying for rent
assistance’, or ‘don’t worry, we’ll be applying to the county, the province,
the federal government for all related housing programs’.
Landlord: So, you can’t pay the rent. And you
still expect me to let you in…huh.
The bougies can never see the contradictions,
funny thing is, they’re the ones that wrote them in the first place.
Homeless numbers were growing even before the
pandemic. When something like one-third of the work force was sent home for
months and months, naturally, some of them became homeless. CERB, the emergency
benefit of $2,000.00/month, simply wasn't enough for some households to survive
a long period of unemployment. My point is that at least some of our homeless
must have been employed at some point in the past, to the extent that they
could, effectively, pay the rent. And
when a unit becomes vacant, in the absence of rent controls, the sky is the
limit in terms of raising the rent. Also, with a million new Canadians
coming in the door in a very short time, housing stocks were clearly going to
be under strong pricing pressures. This is where both federal and provincial
governments come in, in fact Quebec and Ontario were fighting over quota, in the sense that immigration
brings investment, skills, even just warm bodies for relatively unskilled labour to a province or
region.
They wanted to have their cake and eat it too.
The price of that ignorance, was our most vulnerable going to the wall, ladies
and gentlemen.
Here in the Sarnia area, a few new buildings have
gone up. There is the Addison, on London Road, there are two new buildings at
the old Sarnia General Hospital site, and two fairly large buildings on
Venetian Blvd. in Point Edward. This is a municipality bounded on three sides by
Sarnia. Then there are public housing projects on Maxwell Street and an
indigenous one on Confederation Street. These are nearing completion and staff
are combing through the (nine-year) waiting list in the case of the Maxwell St. project.
Whether private or publicly-funded projects, these will only take so much steam
out of our local housing bubble.
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| ...what the bougies see in their heads when they talk about 'affordable' housing... |
***
It doesn't exactly help when local realtors insist on continuing to blow hot air into that balloon, neither does it help when one considers what the bougies see in the privacy of their own heads when they talk about housing...
In one Parthian shot, I would ask Canadian
journalists the following question. If, as is so often implied in stories about
homelessness in Canada, the sole and only cause of homelessness and poverty is
#mental_health_addictions, (all one word in their own minds), how is it that
they can never seem to qualify for a disability pension, for example the
Ontario Disability Support Program?
No, they're stuck on the street, where they are told they must save up first and last, on two or three hundred dollars total income per month, for an apartment they couldn't afford in the first place.
Or does that question seem impertinent.
Or maybe it's just one more contradiction.
END
Mark Carney makes Announcement on Housing. (CBC, Mar. 31/25)
Approvals are Nothing. Shovels in the Ground Are Everything.
Tiny Homes for the Homeless. The Big Myth.
Louis Shalako has books and stories available from Amazon.
Thank you for reading.
