Social Policy Matters. Louis Shalako.

MPP Bob Bailey, Sarnia-Lambton.

Louis Shalako

Social policy matters.

Social policy at federal and provincial levels has a direct effect on the cost of housing and therefore, homelessness and precarious housing. We need to look no farther than the homeless encampment at Rainbow Park here in Sarnia, Ontario, to see this.

The provincial government, faced with the Covid-19 crisis and the fact that a major segment of the working population had been sent home, put a moratorium on evictions.

The federal government, in order to keep Canadians safe, sent workers home and provided those affected with $2,000.00 in monthly CERB benefits.

The CERB benefit was little enough money to begin with. Many workers were living on much more than $2,000.00 per month. Some people are single, some people have families. All of a sudden, things are really tight. They’re still carrying record levels of personal debt. Something has to give. People feed the kids first. They skip the expensive medications.

They cut and snip and pare down as best they can, making whatever sacrifices they must, and sometimes, are just barely holding on.

Housing costs were already climbing. Some people, through no fault of their own, got behind on the rent. Some people just plain abused both CERB and the eviction moratorium.

This resulted in pent-up demand, once the moratorium was lifted, from frustrated landlords anxious to get out from under paying the costs of units which were not returning sufficient cash flow. Did the provincial government not foresee the effect this would have on the rental market? One would think so, with all of the information available to them.

Did the federal government not understand that immigration levels, up to a million new Canadians a year, would affect the housing and rental market? They have all the facts at their disposal. Did they not think it through? It is a fact that this country has not been building affordable, geared-to-income housing for the vast number of Canadians who do not enjoy comfortable, middle-class incomes. This goes back thirty or forty years.

Ontario social policy at work.

Foreign students are short-term renters. In a time of housing inflation, every unit that comes vacant is another chance to jack the rent. Landlords take advantage of such opportunities. The provinces are responsible for rent control, and would kick up a fuss if the federal government overstepped their boundaries.

In terms of immigration, perhaps too much focus was put on professionals—doctors, nurses, medical technicians, software engineers, rather than construction tradespeople.

Do we need more lawyers in this country. The perception is that they are high earners, who should, fairly quickly, at least be able to pay their own way. There are the true refugees, although those numbers are fairly small.

Many foreign students stay in Canada and make a new life. They were going to need housing, relatively affordable, until they really got going and could afford to purchase their own home. First generation immigrants stick to the larger cities, where opportunities abound. This puts more pressure on those housing markets.

Did either level of government, faced with rising housing costs and rising inflation of a general kind, expect that a free market economy, would, all on its own initiative, and out of the goodness of its heart, build low-end rental units, smaller houses even, when they could wring more profit out of the same footprint, and essentially similar units, perhaps with nicer fittings and appointments?

The difference in investment is not that great.

It seems a bit far-fetched. No government is ever perfect. No responsible government is ever right all the time, or wrong all the time, although the true ideologues would have us believe otherwise.

Sarnia-Lambton MPP Bob Bailey admitted in an interview with a local journal that the provincial government has ‘no plan’ to raise welfare rates. This is a short-sighted policy, it has had its effects over the course of their mandate, not guided by any real and practical considerations. It’s ideologically-driven. The government probably knows better, it mostly panders to their base, who are subject to all the usual prejudices. It is ideology, rather than good common sense. It prevents the provincial government from putting some rational form of rent control on units which become vacant. This policy really hasn’t been of any great stimulus in terms of increasing the number of rental units in the lower price ranges. The opposite would appear to be true.

Welfare for a single adult in this province is still $733.00 per month. This is clearly inadequate. The average one-bedroom apartment here in Sarnia-Lambton is at least double that and more. It doesn’t take into account, food, transportation, clothing, and personal needs.

There are systemic issues, such as the low level of allowable earnings under social services guidelines. It all tends to keep people in poverty. The attitude is, if you are not suffering on social assistance, then we must be paying you too much—

Let us know when our suffering is good enough.

Housing restrictions mean that if two people on social assistance share an apartment, one must lose all or a portion of their ‘housing portion’. At which point, they can’t afford the rent. We must also ask why any form of social assistance must be divided into ‘housing’ and ‘personal needs’ portions to begin with. It’s not progressive, to write every line of social legislation with a view to cutting down on the costs, with provisions that are baked into the guidelines, leaving little to the discretion of front-line social workers.

Chronically underfunding all social programs is hardly progressive.

Former Ontario Finance Minister, the late Jim Flaherty, had an adult disabled child. It was a cognitive disability as this writer recalls.

A fairly prosperous family, in order to simply provide as best he could for his own child, Mr. Flaherty was instrumental in bringing in the Henson Trust provisions to social welfare and disability guidelines in this province.

Whether or not this was due to his own interest in the future of his child, or just a moment of enlightenment, this policy has been of great benefit to the disabled, the mentally-ill, or otherwise permanently unemployable citizens of this province.

Perhaps love trumps ideology after all.

There are lessons to be learned here.

 

#Louis

 

END

 

Louis Shalako has books and stories in ebook and audio format available from Google Play. A Stranger In Paris is the latest in the Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery Series.

Note: this story originally appeared somewhere else.

***

This sort of thing is hardly helpful, in the print edition of First Monday, Mr. Cooke goes on and on about pimps, pushers, sex workers, drug addicts and criminals. Since he's not naming names, he is immune to legal recourse in terms of suits for libel, slander and defamation of character.

Ontario Works.

The late Jim Flaherty. (Wiki)

 

Thank you for reading.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I, Dill Bennis, Armed With Strong Mayor Powers.

Dill Bennis, Strong Mayor.

Dill Bennis

Guest Columnist

Heads will roll when I become Mayor of Sarnia, armed with the Province of Ontario’s Strong Mayor Powers, and I would sure like to thank Doug Ford, the Premier for that.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, on my first day of office, the new broom will sweep very, very clean, as the saying goes. Disruption is good, continuity is bad, as are any sort of intellectual considerations at all, as those are mostly theoretical and have no real application in life.

Up first, are all those weak and incompetent City Hall bureaucrats. I’m going to fire every little Baby Jesus-denying one of them in one fell swoop. It will be a veritable Symphony of Destruction, and about time, too. They should have been aborted at birth, and that way, at least their mothers might have learned some responsibility. (A technical point. They have the right to life before they are born, after that fuck them as they’re all probably going to grow up as weak, incompetent socialists, study piercing, or esthetics and sticking bones through their noses and plastering their hair in white mud and wearing saffron robes in some sort of anti-social, and rather gay fashion statement.)

Let them sue the city for wrongful dismissal. No cost is too high to rid the city of these appointed socialists, these sandals and shorts and floral-printed shirt-wearing pinko commie basterds…tax-sucking parasites, every damned one of them.

Let them call the lying press, let them go to the Human Rights Tribunal, which takes forever anyhow. No price is too high—we’ll get the money from the disabled, who have no reason to live because they just can’t afford it anyways.

They stand slightly to the left of Chairman Mao. Well, just so you know, I stand slightly to the left of Adolf Hitler; and I shall show no mercy to these pedophile Liberal child-groomers and polyamorous, effeminate slobs with their tattoos and their Prius hybrids and transvestite dogs and cats that lick themselves in all the wrong places…

While there may be some disruption, it will be short as we will be skipping the usual recruitment and selection process. As Strong Mayor, I will quickly appoint their successors, with minimal professional input by Liberal Elites…obey the right. Conform to the norm. I read that somewhere…

These strong and highly-competent appointees will of course be selected outside of their particular areas of expertise, as I distrust expertise, even though no one knows more than I do, and I gave up a half a million dollar a year job to become Mayor. Which as you know only pays about fifty grand a year.

That’s how much I love my city.

***

An extremely conservative person, I believe ever so strongly in democracy. One of my first bylaws will be the Democratic Freedom in Sexuality Guidelines. Under these guidelines, your neighbours will have the right to determine your gender, your orientation, and therefore, your worth as a human being, bearing in mind you should have been aborted but technically we are against that sort of thing. If they don’t like your name, they will choose a more appropriate one for you. A simple majority will rule, unless the verdict is wrong, in which case I will cast the tie-breaker in all cases, or I will phone that in from my palatial but characterless home in Bright’s Grove, to my designated deputy; who quite frankly could use a transfusion of good, red, Canadian blood and maybe a bit of a chin transplant.

The only exception shall be lesbians. Everybody loves lesbians, who, at the very least, can’t get pregnant and if nothing else, they can pretend they’re just friends and share an apartment and everyone, even their mothers, just sort of accepts it…what saves them is a physical inability to bum-fuck.

Lesbians hate kids, so we don’t have to worry so much about that. And I promise not to create a toxic work environment, not like that last guy anyways.

...lesbians hate kids, ladies and gentlemen...

But the truth is, you cannot be trusted to decide who (or what) you are. That especially holds true for children, who cannot be trusted to choose for themselves, and it is too important to leave discretion to the parents. That sort of thing is best left to guys like me, and it will be. All decisions are final, with no recourse to appeal, and all of you child-grooming sickos will just have to live with our decision, made in the interests of society, which above all requires order, and in order to have order, we must have authority. Trust me, I lie awake all night sometimes, worrying about your children.

Under this bylaw, accusation is proof of guilt and you’re lucky we provide you with a letter to sew on your prison coveralls free of charge…

***

I have always believed, like Ronald Reagan, that the best social program is a job. For that reason, all unemployed persons and other undesirables, will be employed on a rock pile, with big hammers, smashing out gravel, which will be sold at the going rate, about three dollars per ton—their income potential is unlimited, all they have to do is to put in the hours, never mind that conscript labour, harsh conditions and no real reward with which to better themselves, is the most inefficient labour of all. After costs, we will be subsidizing builders and cement workers to the tune of five or sixteen hundred dollars per ton, as the rocks will have to be trucked in, and the workers fed, clothed and housed, however temporarily. These will be accessible workplaces, as I have always believed in physical disabilities, although the cognitive ones not so much—there are too many ODSP scammers out there and we need to crack down on that too. The truth is, when you were renovicted, you made your bed and now you must lie upon it. But it’s okay, I have a plan to create hundreds of sampans, anchored in Sarnia Bay, and you can cook your tiny silver little fish on twigs and moss in an old Volkwagen hub-cap. You’re all pansies anyway.

You’re just a big bunch of fuzzy sock-lickers, that’s what I always say.

That being said, in the words of Margaret Thatcher, there is no such thing as society, even though there is something, and if nothing else, I will be in charge of bogus aphorisms around here from now on.

***

When the Sarnia Police Services request a 27 % budget increase, I will bring down my gavel, which is real enough as I got it off of Ebay, and rubber-stamp that in a heartbeat.

A Sampan.

The police are always heroes, all of the time, in all circumstances, without exception, always have been, always are, and always will be, selfless and unselfish, for all of time past and present, and no price is too high to pay for men, women, whatever. We’re not too sure about one or two, but we will weed them out, trust me on that one. I will never vote to defund the police, which one has to admit, isn’t much of a bargaining position but I said it in the paper and now we’re sort of screwed, but hey—that is who I am after all.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the time has come for these fairies to learn how to suck the cock of the fire god.

Thank you for listening, and please vote for Dill Bennis, Strong Mayor, in the event you turn up to vote at all. Quite frankly, the fewer the better, in which case I might even stand a chance—be that as it may.

Incidentally, you don’t have to click any other boxes on the ballot, one click in the right place would be enough.

Those other folks are all weak and incompetent. I would give their names, but even I am smart enough, with good legal advice from a free half-hour consultation, which I would advise for any well-to-do person, not so much their victims; ah, not to engage in libel, slander, or defamation of character.

Oh. They’re stupid, too.

 

END

 

This weird-ass Louis Shalako guy has a free audiobook, A Stranger In Paris, available from Google Play.

 

Thank you for reading.

 

 

 

 

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…

A Workable Plan for the Reduction of Poverty In Ontario. Louis Shalako.

Louis Shalako

This is a workable plan for the reduction of poverty in Ontario. Yes, it will cost a little money, which will result in savings elsewhere. Only one example, this would be in hospital admissions for mental health/addictions, which term has had an unfortunate tendency to become all one word in media coverage of issues related to poverty.

It is an unfortunate tendency to lay the problem of poverty on mental illness and addictions, which is an unfair moral judgement as well as a conflation of two separate and distinct issues.

***

The roots of poverty are structural, and therefore the solutions must also be structural.

This program specifically addresses the Ontario Disability Support Program and Ontario Works, (welfare). As a highly-trained Canadian journalist, the author has been embedded in this story for 24 years, and he is very familiar with the ODSP program in particular. He is proficient at interpreting guidelines insofar as that relates to his employment and business interests. When the landlord is taking seventy percent of an ODSP pension in rent alone, working means eating. For whatever reason, this writer has become rather fond of eating over the last 59 years or so—

Raise the rates, annually, at greater than the rate of inflation, which currently stands at roughly two percent.

Raise the allowable earnings limit, which currently stands at $200.00 per month for a single adult.

Lower the rate of clawback on earnings over the limit from its current fifty percent to thirty or even twenty-five percent.

Under CPP (D) guidelines, clients can earn up to $5500.00 annually, and they don’t even have to report it. I would recommend the same level for ODSP/OW clients, in order for the province to be more in line with federal policy. This would save much administrative time for Ministry staff, resulting in higher morale, less staff turnover, and real financial savings. 

Presently, with $100.00 in Work-Related benefit and an ‘automatic’ business deduction of another $100.00, it now stands at $2400.00 per year. (That automatic deduction is a trap. Staff would prefer that clients NOT keep track of each and every receipt, each and every kilometre. It is, after all, a real headache to administer such a client, who is perfectly within their rights to pursue employment and business interests.)

Raise the mileage rate for employment/business/medical travel from $0.40 per kilometre to $0.45 or $0.50 per kilometre. Note that medical travel is a cash disbursement, while the rate for employment/business travel is a deduction from gross income. It is interesting that Ministry staff probably receive (in cash disbursements) more like $0.55 per kilometre when traveling on business when using their own vehicle. The per-kilometre costs of operating a vehicle are well-known and have been studied extensively. This government might ask what the Canada Revenue Agency recognizes as a legitimate rate of mileage/reimbursement, and 

model their own program accordingly.

Raise the work-related benefit from $100.00 per month per single adult to $200.00 month per single client. Adults with families should get an additional hundred a month benefit per child.

Keep rent controls in place, as presently constituted, for three to five years, in order for the province’s most vulnerable citizens to have some reasonable time to catch up.

Raise the provincial minimum wage to $20.00 per hour by 2024.

A special housing benefit to augment the federal housing benefit, slated for 2019, although details are presently sketchy.

A dedicated university fund, initially $25-million per year, in order for ODSP/OW clients to get the skills and education required to break the cycle of poverty and to address the skills shortage presently plaguing the province.

There’s more, which I will address in a future post.

END

Please read this additional coverage.

Nuns Back On the Bus.

Food Banks Urge Government to Address Hunger Crisis.

Image. Louis Shalako.

Thank you for reading.