On Wartime Housing. Louis Shalako.

730 square feet.

Louis Shalako

The new federal government of Canada is promoting home-building, and one aspect of the plan is pre-approved home designs.

There have been references to ‘war-time’ housing, which was built in large numbers and all across this country after WW II. Large numbers of service men and women were coming home from Europe and other theatres, and they needed two things. They needed housing, and they needed employment.

A large housing program served both needs, bearing in mind circumstances are different in the modern context. We have both a housing shortage, and a labour shortage. Funny thing is, there's no real shortage of money. Just look at the homes people are buying now, more importantly, look at the mega-homes that are being built.

By eliminating the basement, and putting the furnace, hot water tank, laundry tubs on the ground floor, you simply bump out the side of the kitchen and add a few more squares. You also save a big chunk of up-front money.

Young people could, in fact, afford a small starter home. The design, #50-13, seen above, stands at 730 sq. feet. My two-bedroom apartment is roughly equivalent. With pre-fabrication, the components relatively small, (for highway trucking), the longest elevation at 30', you could pump these out like so many hot rolls. You could sell these at $299,000.00, with the feds splitting the 10 % down payment, and a mortgage amortized over 25 years, at some rational rate. I’ll go three and a half percent compounded monthly.

All the interest has to do is to cover the costs of the program. Developers make their money by actually building the homes in a speedy and efficient manner. The faster you can build them, the better, and if you build it, they will come.

We have to start the conversation somewhere, after all.

All prospective owners would be subject to means testing. Essentially, are you poor enough to both need the program, but also, can you pay your own way insofar as you must—a very specific demographic group, largely consisting of what we might call ‘mature renters’, a group who might like to get out from under the stern eye of the landlord and maybe build a little wealth of their own, for, essentially, the exact same money.

The basic idea is that people could buy a house, on their own land, for $1,000.00 a month, of course on top of that would be municipal taxes, electricity, heat, water, and insurance and maintenance costs. The entire kit fits on a flatbed or inside a standard semi-trailer.

The kit might include all structural elements, and basic amenities like the furnace, hot water tank, bathtub, shower, fridge and stove, pipe for plumbing and rolls of wire and boxes of electrical components, bundles of shingles, stacks of drywall board, all of it packed into one or two long trailers. You can use the stock colours or upgrade at your own expense, however these are in no way ‘custom builds’. These buildings do not require marble floors and bronze countertops, and zirconium-encrusted platinum toilets a la the bourgeoisie.

We're building homes, not status symbols, or stroking the egos of the unrepentant hedonist.

Those people already have money, they already have their McMansions, if they have over-leveraged their credit portfolio, that is their problem and they can suffer the consequences of their own greed and ignorance, their lack of foresight. For all I care, let them rot or let them sell the his and hers Harleys to make next month's payment...but I digress.

Assuming services are on site to hook up to, the basic assembly is rather quick, finishing takes longer, and in some narratives, in the old 1 ½ story housing, the upstairs bedrooms might not have been finished, the basement, almost certainly not. Garages, privacy fences, decks and hot tubs can come later.

Actual plan from the era.

At any time, after the first five years, you could buy out the balance and own it free and clear. This allows for people to resell at a profit and pay off their debt to the Crown and the taxpayers. The initial covenant does not extend to the second buyer. They will pay something a little closer to a going rate.

After five years, the first owner has built up some minimal equity, been ‘forgiven’ the federal contribution to the down payment, and with a relatively stable housing market, the ‘going rate’ for a property of this nature probably has increased a nominal ten percent in value. Simply put, your new home value is at least, (and probably more than) $330,000.00. With payments, offset by interest, over five years, you probably have thirty grand, perhaps a little more of your own equity. If you sold right now, you have paid all monthly costs, but at least you get some if not all of your money back in terms of that $60,000.00 difference in home value.

(Thirty grand of your own and the increase in value combined. - ed.)

You ain’t going to get that in the rental market, are you—and now, perhaps, with a little in savings, with your personal circumstances now different, you might even go looking for something a little more up-market.

Okay, so the government and the taxpayers are not too interested in funding large-scale, tract housing with a bunch of ‘tiny homes’, eight by ten and with a hot-plate beside the door and a tiny chemical toilet in a box under the bed.

We are talking real homes, on perhaps a fairly narrow frontage, in order to maximize the impact of municipal services, including water, sewer, utilities like gas and power. I would suggest forty-five feet with no more than eighty or one hundred feet of depth. This allows for a one-car garage to be built at a later date, and a substantial yard with garden, play areas, etc. It’s a green space.

(The secondary or pass-on covenant, which is passed on to the next buyer, deals with issues like second dwellings, over-sized garages and other obnoxious uses. Human nature being what it is, this will have to be backed up by municipal zoning and ‘covenant’ enforcement bylaws. The financials are free market terms at this point. We would also like to see pure speculators kept out or penalized on subsequent sales. Call it 'capital gains' or something like that. Under the terms of this covenant, the owner must live in the dwelling. Buying one and then renting or leasing it out would be strictly prohibited.)

It is private property after five years. It is yours, free and clear, admittedly with a mortgage on it. In that sense, the right to private property and capitalistic concerns are acknowledged.

I don’t like concrete pads sitting right at grade level. I prefer a two-foot crawl space, this would be well insulated, but it also gives heating ducts and plumbing somewhere to go. It is not a living space and should not be treated as such.

What you want is a proper foundation below the frost line, a wooden deck with floor joists and the like. Construction is ‘stick-built’, but major components are done in a factory. With a floor plan of 30’ x 24’, that floor/deck is essentially three ‘panels’ of rectangular shape, each of which can fit on a semi-trailer. They’re all framed up, all you have to do is to drop them on the foundations and fasten them together. A note here. Some of the original designs were literally sitting on concrete blocks; which may, or may not have been set on footings below the frost line. However, in terms of the front wall or elevation, in terms of the factory-built model, the wall is all framed up, sheathed, insulated, electrical roughed in with coils of sufficient length sort of taped securely. Once the four walls are standing, trusses in place, plywood on the roof, windows and doors in, the wire can be pulled out, routed through the ceiling space to an electrical box in the utility area of the kitchen. Essentially, heat and plumbing are down and under, electrical goes up and over and back down, in my concept. A few bags of insulation for the ceilings, and voila! And it is time to move onto trimming and finishing out, perhaps carpet on plywood for the first few years, but it is a snug and viable home for those who qualify.

There is a new apartment building in town, and there are laundry facilities in each apartment. It’s a compact installation—each unit also has a separate meter for water and electricity, very much a trend in new apartment construction in this country. The rent is one thing, the monthly costs are another. In that sense, it is similar, and yet you own the end result.

To try and improve this design is to make it bigger, which seems fair enough. There would have to be a series of designs, all of them under $500,000.00, including a building lot and all service hookups. When you see the new builds in town here in Sarnia, Ontario, semi-detached and starting at $569,000.00, with a garage, a basement, a second floor, it shows what is possible using some imagination.

Another quick note, virtually none of these buildings are wheelchair or mobility accessible, which would require a single-floor design, with large doorways, ramps for access and much larger bathrooms, specially-designed kitchens for example.

Try putting one of these on its own lot and see what happens.

END

 

A Rational Plan forAffordable Housing.

Wartime Housing Report.

Approved Housing Designs for Ontario Region.

The Floor Plan of an Accessory Dwelling Unit.

What is an Accessible Home.

Here's one on a fair sized lot, $389,000.00

Louis Shalako has books and stories available from Amazon.

See his works onArtPal.

Thank you for reading.

 

 

 

A Basic Income for All. Louis Shalako.

The freedom to do what you want.

Louis Shalako

I’m just putting together my final income, mileage and expense report for the Ontario Disability Support Program. I’m retiring after 30 years on ODSP.

I will drop that off downtown tomorrow morning with the greatest of pleasure.

And then, I will be free—

Maybe even rich.

I will actually get a raise of five hundred a month, just for going off of disability.

I earned $1.470.00, working part-time, for 21 days in August of 2024. Now, you wouldn’t want to live on the pension, and you probably couldn’t live on the earnings either. I also drove 1,558 k on business last month. Taken together, they seem to add up to something a poverty-stricken person could actually live on, assuming one has lived in a rent-controlled building for thirteen years, and assuming Landlordie McLandlordface doesn’t suddenly get some sort of a fucking brainstorm.

Even now, I’m still paying just under $10,000.00 a year in rent, and assuming I got renovicted, it’s pretty clear I couldn’t get anything under $20,000.00 or more per year.

The point is, that the disability pension represents a kind of basic income, providing an income floor, below which, a citizen is theoretically, not supposed to fall.

The ODSP pension was always a good thirty to forty percent below the poverty line. The guidelines for business and employment were always restrictive. The mileage rate, an allowable deduction, was for many years a ridiculous $0.17 per kilometre. You were only allowed to earn up to $200.00 per month, before they would apply a claw-back of $0.50 on the dollar. Yet you could receive a gift of up to $7,000.00 per year, with no penalty at all—no, the heinous crime was that you had earned it. The disabled, showing signs of independence, earning a little money, and clawing their way up out of poverty.

It was more than they could bear, what with all that stigma going around.

Staff worked their no-good, sorry asses off trying to prevent such a thing, and for the most part, they were very successful…so successful, that quite a number of us are currently residing in tents down at Rainbow Park.

You will forgive me if I choose not to be among them.

I have better things to do.

***

Nowadays, you can earn up to $1,000.00 per month without penalty and the deductible mileage rate is up to $0.40/k.

My point here, is simply the one word, ‘restrictive’. A no-questions-asked, basic income, for citizens who fall below a certain cut-off threshold, (one that tapers off with rising income), regardless of ability or disability, (and no bourgeois moral judgements), would be very desirable in terms of lifting hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of our fellow Canadians, not just out of poverty, but into the middle class.

It might even keep a few of us out of homeless encampments.

If having a strong middle class is a be-all and end-all for social policy, and it is one of the pillars of a strong democracy, no argument there, then surely a basic income (for those who qualify), would be a very good thing.

When I went to work for #superdough I was maxing out my credit card every winter and it would take half the year to pay it off again. Groceries and gasoline, right. I was fortunate, in that the job is out in the country, and I could deduct $0.40 per kilometre in mileage. So I earn maybe $60.00, then write off twenty. This means I could earn more, and the actual fuel costs are less than twenty dollars. You’re not making a profit. $0.40/k in no way reflects the true costs of vehicle ownership.

You’re just trying to stay ahead of some kind of a curve. It is about cash flow, and living on the margin—a very slim margin at times.

When I first began, I wasn’t getting too many hours. Ah, but we needed clean totes for our deliveries—and if no one else wanted to wash totes, then all the minutes or hours a week spent washing totes were mine for the taking. When no one else had the confidence to call the distributor, and order fifteen or twenty sacks of flour, well, I had the guts where maybe they didn’t. I took responsibility, ladies and gentlemen, and predictably enough, I ended up running the place. Where others saw it as a crappy job, or a chore, or an unwelcome obligation to the family business, I saw the opportunity, to make the most of what was there. And it can be a crummy job at times.

The Boss was getting older, and no one else wanted it…the Boss offered me a chance to buy in, all sweat equity, and now I own a little piece of the business. It’s what we call ‘free enterprise’, or maybe just freedom. The fucking freedom to do what we needed to do.

I have no illusions there, like when the mixing machine, all $12,000.00 of it, makes loud noises and isn’t working properly, and guess whose job it is to fix it? Mine. That’s why I downloaded all the drawings and parts sheets for the machine. I’ve studied them, and I could take that thing apart and put it back together if I really needed to. And when I take things apart and put them back together again, not only do they run, they run better than before…

(Hell, I might even run for city council next time around.)

Quite frankly, the service techs we’ve called in the past seem remarkably unwilling to take on that job, and I don’t blame them. It really would be one big, greasy mess and you never quite know what you might find in there…the machine, I mean. Not city council.

When it comes to city council, it's pretty obvious what we're dealing with. One big, greasy, fucking mess, ladies and gentlemen.

The point is, I took the base income, and built upon that income, to the extent, that I could invest not just time but money—my bank was only too happy to loan me $10,000.000 in order to purchase a good, used minivan. A minivan which I use to deliver our orders to our customer, which pays an hourly rate, it takes me back and forth to work, and it has more than earned its keep. I paid off a four-year loan in 31 months. And if I could do that, I might even be able to save up a little bit of cash…right?

Right.

The base ODSP disability pension does not cover such luxuries as good vehicles, or significant cash reserves. It barely pays the rent, food, and not much else these days. That’s especially true for singles, although for families, when the children ‘age out’ of the system, the expenses remain basically the same, and the income can take a real big hit—it’s a shocker for those experiencing it.

Maybe they should look up once in a while, rather than keeping their faces to the floor all of the time…you might have seen that one coming.

I won’t bore you with statistics, but if you’re into that sort of thing, there are a couple of story links below.

A basic income for low-income Canadians means they would have, and would generate, additional opportunities for education, starting a small business, save up for a car, maybe even a small house if they’re lucky enough to be able to see that far ahead, or maybe they just have a little more lifetime ahead of them as compared to an old crock like me.

I suppose that’s why the bougies are against it. It’s a threat to the established order, that much is true.

And when someone tells you a basic income means we have to give Bill Gates $1,000.00 a month, that person is not your friend.

They’re just lying to you.

Truth is, they’re full of shit and they know it.

The question is, do you know it?

END

Louis Shalako has books and stories available from Google Play in ebook and audio format.

Sam Altman's Study on Basic Income.

Tax the Rich.

Thank you for reading.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Three-Dollar Calculator Cuts Through Endless Bullshit. Louis Shalako.

The world's safest, most effective #penis_enlarger

Louis Shalako

A three-dollar calculator will cut through endless amounts of bullshit.

How much is the ‘carbon tax’ per litre of gas in 2024?

As of April 2024, the federal minimum price is set at CA$80.00 per tonne of CO 2 equivalent. This roughly translates to 14.3 cents per litre of gasoline. Provinces and territories with their own carbon pricing systems can use the proceeds as they see fit.

(This is the result of a quick Google search on the internet.)

So, if I spent approximately $2,151.00 on fuel in 2023, and if the average price of a litre of fuel is roughly $1.50/per litre, then I bought 1,434 litres of fuel. Multiply that by 14.3 cents...that's a little over $205.00 in increased fuel costs. I get $134.00 four times a year in carbon tax rebate, (that's going up to $140.00 this April.) Four times $134.00 is $536.00 per year in carbon tax rebates, for a net gain of $536 - $205 = $331.00 in cash, in my pocket, that I did not have to work for.

Any money that I do not have to work for is good money, ladies and gentlemen.

The carbon tax rate was 23 % less in 2023, so the savings are actually 23 % greater. Much has been made of a ‘23 % raise in the carbon tax’, this roughly equates to the raise from $65.00 per tonne to $80.00 per tonne.

Yet it’s only an increase of three-point-three cents per litre at the pump. You could save 10 % in fuel costs simply by slowing down, or you could get similar savings by planning your trips and cutting out unnecessary cruising for entertainment. Interestingly, I haven’t heard the term ‘energy conservation’ in over thirty years. Not in this country. Not while we’re sixth overall in terms of global energy production…not while there’s piss-pots of money still to be made from it, and that is for sure.

No one wants to talk about that ‘conservation’ sort of thing anymore. Oh, and when the federal carbon tax goes up three-point-three cents, and the cost of fuel goes up by ten or fifteen cents, that tells you more about the refiners than it does the federal government.

Admittedly, fuel conservation will not be a popular option for younger people, who may be experiencing that first taste of freedom, (for the most part, without the onerous burden of additional responsibility), or possibly just out having fun with their first vehicle. It’s not like I haven’t done the same thing myself. In fact, my first vehicle was an Austin Mini, which had exactly 38 horsepower. They don’t make cars like that anymore, do they. On a paved side-road, cruising in fourth gear at 60 or 65 kph, you could easily get thirty or forty miles per gallon. 

Funny thing is, it is their future that we are talking about…the kids, I mean.

When I pull up to the gas pumps and the readout shows that the person before me has put in $150.00 worth of fuel, that is not my problem. That is your problem. Not mine—

I’m just here to put twenty bucks in the tank, and maybe, hopefully, make it through one more fucking day.

All pissed-off at the carbon tax. It's like they have a God-given right, somehow.

***

We could divide $80.00/tonne and find out just exactly how many litres of fuel it takes to generate one tonne of carbon dioxide and spew that out into the atmosphere. What is most disturbing about the carbon tax debate is the sheer sense of entitlement that some folks seem to feel about their right to poison an atmosphere, which is, after all a common good.

It’s not like it’s the end of the world or anything. The atmosphere was put here so that poor people wouldn’t starve to death, and that seems to bother some people more than it should. It is the tragedy of the commons. What once belonged to all is exploited, enclosed, and engrossed, and ultimately spoiled, all for the profit of the few. And to hell with the rest of us—

Somehow their rights come ahead of yours and mine—and your children, and your grandchildren. It’s like they haven’t spared a thought for all of those cute little unborn fetuses…that the very same folks profess to care so deeply about, and that goes for all them little black babies in Africa as well.

The math: 80 divided by 0.143 = 559.44. So, if I burn 559 litres of fuel, in six months or a year, I have generated one tonne of carbon dioxide and put it up into the atmosphere.

Please, feel free to check my math, as I dropped out of high school in Grade 10, and if the truth be told, journalism school is sort of lacking in math-related subjects. Why, I have often wondered. It’s like they don’t want you to know, sometimes. Maybe they’re just fooling themselves.

***

In a more perfect world, we would all have the right to propose one rule, only problem, is that we would also have to live by it; with no power of compulsion over the rest of the human race.

In a more perfect world, every student of journalism, on the first day of journalism school, would have to demonstrate, to the satisfaction of their future readers, (or maybe just the instructor), that they owned a three-dollar calculator and actually knew how to use it.

Poolever bought a doughnut or something...

At the time of this writing, Monsieur Pierre Poilievre, leader of the federal Conservative Party and head of the Official Opposition in Parliament is leading in the polls by twenty points. His first priority, day one, if he should become Prime Minister, would be to scrap the carbon tax. I don’t think he will do it—I think he will keep the tax, by any other name. All he has to do is to rename it, and simply stop paying out the rebates to low-income Canadians, and that, somehow, magically, will suddenly make everything all right again.

The bourgeoisie is all too predictable, sometimes. Hatred is blind and unreasoning, and it poisons every mind that it touches. Funny thing is, they’d be the first to tell you they hate the carbon tax, they hate Justin Trudeau and they hate Liberals. While claiming to love Canada, (and freedom), they don’t seem to have too much regard for their fellow Canadians, no matter who they are or where they came from. They have a long list of hates and a very short list of things they love.

Anyhow, that’s my opinion, and I see no reason to change it.

 

END

Images: Likely stolen from the internet. 

Here is Louis Shalako’s free audiobook, A Stranger In Paris, available from Google Play.

Check out this free, online calculator.

Thank you for reading, ladies and gentlemen.

 

The Great Canadian Delusion. Louis Shalako.

Louis Shalako

To do the same thing over and over again, and to expect to get different results, is a form of madness.

Welcome to the Great Canadian Delusion.

Food drives and food banks are not a solution to poverty. They’re not even a solution to food insecurity. This totally obvious fact has been so studiously overlooked. Locally, the St. Vincent de Paul food bank allows ‘clients’ to come back every six weeks. The same for the Salvation Army. The Inn of the Good Shepherd allows you to come back every three weeks. 

You can go to all three, and answer a few basic questions, ‘needs-based’ questions, and they will give you some food. Sounds like a solution to me, you say. Bear in mind that locally, you cannot access a food bank more than once every ten days. And the truth is, you never get ten days of food. That would be thirty, full and wholesome meals. The truth is, you don’t even get ten. You get maybe five or six meals, none of which are particularly good, and some incidentals. And the landlord is taking seventy percent or more of your disability pension in rent. The same is true for minimum-wage or part-time workers, precarious workers, pensioners and senior citizens.

What is sort of missed here, is that food bank administrators are perfectly aware that their clients will be coming back, again and again and again, on some sort of routine basis…they have been doomed to do that, every ten days or so, for the rest of their natural lives. That doesn’t sound like much of a solution to me.

The implications of that are profound. The people who promote or participate in food drives and volunteer at food banks are deluding themselves. Anyone who donates is deluding themselves, if they honestly believe that this is a solution.

It is a collective delusion if we think that this is ever going to work. For surely, if it was going to work, it would have worked by now. And food banks have been around forever, although the real period of growth stems from 1995, and former Premier Mike Harris’ ‘Common Sense Revolution’. Needless to say, the gentleman was a Progressive Conservative.

His gutting of social services, the 22 % reduction in welfare rates, a freeze on any sort of increase to provincial disability pensions, was purely ideological.

That’s not to say that there weren’t food banks and poverty before, but that one definitely had an impact.

Get a Job.

The idea behind making life tough for those on welfare, was to force them to get out and get a job. The tragedy was that so many of those targeted were vulnerable individuals to begin with, single mothers with infant children, people with mental health issues, disabled or partially-disabled persons who simply failed to qualify for a disability pension, and just when they needed it most. There are also addiction issues. The problem here is one of employability. They may appear to be able-bodied.

I’m always sort of amused when I comment on social issues and someone indignantly tells me to ‘get a job’. One, I have a job, and two, just because I disagree with you doesn’t make me a drooling idiot, a lazy cunt or some guy just out to fuck the system.

That sort of stigma is irritating to say the least. (And you keep spreading it with that big old shit-spatula of yours.) When they say that, I always think of the seventy year-old woman with swollen ankles, the bare feet, wearing Crocs in February, in her sack dress, no coat, no gloves, no hat, and with the rather unprepossessing young man to drive her. I think of my nephew, with Down’s Syndrome, diabetes and on a waiting list somewhere for his third kidney…the guy in the wheelchair with stumps where his feet used to be.

I think of Bill, with his schizophrenia, controlled by medications but he’s still kind of disruptive and totally unemployable because sooner or later he’s going to talk to a customer…Jim Morrison, the name somehow randomly interjected into his sentences, which now make no sense at all.

(I tried that on him once, Jim Morrison, and he looked kind of hurt, ah, I have to admit.)

Getting a job simply isn’t an option for some people, for all kinds of reasons. The thing with the guys who have all the easy answers, is that they have never spent a real minute thinking about the problem. These are the ideologues, and they are completely immune to the facts.

Structural Problems.

In Ontario, if you’re on disability, (ODSP), the maximum monthly benefit would be $1,169.00 per month. That’s about fourteen thousand a year. Only trouble is, the poverty line is more like twenty or even twenty-two thousand a year, and this is a small town.

You would need a lot more than that in Toronto or some other major centres. So, in order to just bring someone up to the poverty line, you need from six to eight thousand a year to do that. At thirty cents a packet, that’s anywhere from eighteen to twenty-four thousand packets of Ramen or Mr. Noodle. And the unfortunate truth is, the people you are trying to help, simply can’t eat that much dried soup. No matter how hard we try, we just can’t eat that shit fast enough…and so, we will always be poor, one must assume.

Here’s another structural problem. The director of the local food bank will never tell you this. 

He can’t. It’s a political statement—and as someone who has the power to write a tax-receipt, he cannot make political statements or risk losing that cherished tax-exempt status.

That fucking charitable status. They give that up, and next thing you know, the church will be paying taxes on income, and we can’t have that now, can we. As for the government and the taxpayers, they’re saving themselves an easy six to eight grand a year, per person, by denying to the most vulnerable of people, that most fundamental of human rights, the right to a home, and the right to a full belly at some regular and sustainable interval. There are a million people in Ontario on ODSP and OW.

Here’s a structural problem, one that few people have considered or understand the implications of: clients of the ODSP and OW, (welfare), receive benefits either by cheque or direct deposit. These are invariably divided into ‘shelter portion’ and ‘personal needs portion’. This is such an effective tactic at perpetuating poverty and homelessness, I wouldn’t be too surprised if this was a sort of universal in terms of state and provincial benefits of this type worldwide. The problem, of course, is that once a person becomes homeless, they are no longer eligible to receive the shelter portion—this is $479.00 per month for ODSP clients. 

The fact that this comes nowhere near the cost of an apartment is not particularly relevant here. But we are asking homeless people, with not even enough money to eat, to somehow save up first and last month’s rent so they can get off the street again. This is especially impossible on welfare, which, in total is a measly seven hundred or so a month—and that’s divided into shelter and personal needs portions as usual. Now, this would always be presented as an act of fairness, to those of us who are still in our homes and still paying the rent faithfully…after all, I don’t get my whole cheque just to blow, just to party with every penny, each and every month. (An example of bourgeois thinking, which is a big contributor to our structural problems.) So, the government is being fair to me, by being totally ignorant to someone else, and of course I should feel just how blessed I am, because after all, that is not me. Although it could be me, easily enough.

It’s not like I haven’t lined up at food banks, every ten days or so, for about the last twenty or thirty years myself. Right? It’s not like I didn’t live in my sister’s basement while waiting to get into this building…right.

The solution is so obvious, that I’m the first person who ever thought of it. If someone becomes homeless, why not give them the personal needs portion, and then hold in trust, in a bank account in their name, the shelter portion of their benefits. It might take a few months, with a client couch-surfing, or living at the homeless shelter, but sooner or later they’d have their first and last month’s rent. You could even start off a brand-new ‘intake’, (that’s social services talk), a homeless person, and after some time, they’d be able to start looking for an apartment. One that is hopefully something other than a flophouse in dope-loser alley somewhere.

There are many structural problems, which not only make it difficult to alleviate poverty, but also cause it in the first place. Low wages, part-time and precarious employment, poor skills development, illiteracy even, simple lack of opportunity, high rents, high-crime environments, mental health or physical health issues. I hate to break it to the bourgeoisie, the suddenly-all-one-word-in-local-media mental health/addictions tag is probably one of the lesser causes of poverty. To you guys, it seems to be the only cause of poverty, which reveals the unenlightened self-interest that pervades much of the thinking on this subject. I may be reading between the lines here, but it is the most sophisticated form of reading after all.

Back to low wages for a moment. When the previous, (Liberal) government raised the minimum wage, retail outlets, including the Tim Horton’s chain of franchised coffee shops, protested that this would drive up costs, and therefore prices, and that they would lose customers and therefore sales would suffer. The new (Conservative) government listened to their cries and put a stop to another wage increase set for January 1 of this year, 2019. They did not raise their prices, or by a nickel maybe. And now, less than fourteen months later, after the first increase had taken effect, going from eleven bucks an hour to over fourteen, (a significant increase one would agree), Tim Horton’s introduces a new customer rewards card. 

For every seven cups of coffee, Tim’s will give you one free cup of coffee or a ‘treat’, a doughnut or a muffin, a cookie, whatever. A medium coffee is a $1.80 value—to the customer, although the retailer pays somewhat less, bearing in mind markup on the product and that fucking taxpayer and donor-subsidized labour.

And here’s the interesting thing. If you can afford to give away every seventh cup of coffee, you could afford to pay each and every one of your employees something on the order of sixteen to seventeen dollars an hour, perhaps more, considering that the average employee serves many more cups of coffee—or treats—than seven measly cups per hour.

Arguably, we could reverse-reason this, or ‘invert it’, where we take it upside down and give it a good shake. See what falls out of the pockets, but the fact is, they could also lower prices—all of their pricing on coffee and donuts and products of that ilk, by one-seventh, and still be profitable.

They would still be profitable.

So, structural problems are not just what the laws say, or how a program is administered, or what is in the guidelines, or why some food bank administrator can’t make relevant comments on social programs. Structural problems also exist in our minds, in how we look at things, and in our unconscious assumptions about this or that or any other problem.

One of the biggest structural problem lies in the area of education. Generations of schoolchildren have cheerfully collected ‘food for the hungry’. They have, essentially, been brainwashed into accepting the necessity of food banks and food drives, and worse, into thinking that it actually accomplishes something. The thought of kids going home and telling their parents they’re collecting food for the hungry, and the parent knows damned well that some of those shit canned goods in the back of the cupboard came from a local food bank…my blood boils sometimes.

And it will never really accomplish anything. Not until we change our thinking about poverty, its causes, and its solutions, of which there can never be one, but only several.

Possibly even many, which sounds daunting but actually gives us plenty of levers—tools, ladies and gentlemen, which we can use to affect some positive outcomes.

When the Canadian journalists don’t even know what questions to ask, because they’ve never experienced it, and when the advertisers and the sponsors don’t want them to talk about it anyways, this is a structural problem.

Local Radio and other media.

Local radio in Canada operates under license from the CRTC. Part of the terms of the license involve a ‘promise of performance’. Ignoring issues of Canadian Content guidelines and profanity on the airwaves, part of that license stipulates that they must do news content. They must do free public service announcements. Predictably, promoting food drives, food banks and homeless shelters, falls right into line with that, and it’s just too easy for them to go along with it, without really thinking about the issues. They’re there to play the music, run the promotions and the games, and to enjoy their day and to have fun. It’s a fun job, after all.

They’re out there, madly signalling their community spirit and their moral values, and they have literally no idea of the harm they have been doing in the long term. While it is surely not some vast global conspiracy, surely it is not complete coincidence either.

These guys are contract employees. They’re not going to buck head office on a point of principle.

It’s not that they’re not nice people. It’s just that they don’t know any better, they’ve never really thought about it, and the real corporate types are not the ones who are going to inform them.

This is about keeping people scared and hungry, and therefore, dependent upon their scab employers, virtually all of whom advertise on local radio. This is the sort of stuff that only gets discussed behind closed doors. There’s a certain eye-to-eye going on here.

Raising Awareness.

Raising awareness has never changed a single thing in this world. A case in point is the opoid crisis. Virtually everyone over the age of seven, certainly in North America, has heard of the opoid crisis. It has what the marketers would call ‘a hundred percent penetration’ rate. My question for the ineffectual do-gooders, standing around on the riverbank holding candles, raising awareness of this or any other issue, is always the same. What single, concrete and specific action, assuming the government or anyone with any power to do anything at all, is listening, what would you recommend? And they never have anything.

They have nothing, ladies and gentlemen, and yet, oddly enough, they always somehow manage to end up on the front page of your local media outlet. But then, the journalists, most of whom stem from the middle class, know very well it’s not going to work.

However, it does help to sell newspapers. It sets a certain tone for the community. More than anything, it goes along very well with the needs of the advertisers and their corporate agenda.

Track ODSP/OW suicide statistics.

Speaking of ineffectual do-gooders raising awareness. This is especially true when the issue of suicide is involved. Too many people line up at city council, or county council, or petition the government for funding. They want to ‘educate’, they want to raise awareness, of issues related to suicide, mental health, or addictions. And yet, in the case of clients of ODSP or OW, (welfare), there is presently no tracking of suicide statistics. 

How in the hell would you ever judge the effectiveness of such programs, when you have no statistics. But they, apparently, don't care about how effective it is.

They just want to be seen to be 'doing' it. When really, they ain't. Oh, we can tell you how many cops commit suicide in any given year, how many firefighters, or doctors, or psychologists. All relatively small, demographic groups. And here's this big old demographic group, over a million people here in Ontario--and you simply can't be bothered. Although you would like some money and possibly to get yourself on the front page.

#fuck_off

For one thing, surely this demographic group is at far higher risk, and everyone ‘knows’ it. But to officially know it, is to be holding a very hot political potato, for surely something would have to be done about it—and that can only mean effective programs, actions, specific and concrete actions in order to positively affect the outcomes. And let’s face it: there’s been plenty of awareness raised. Surely no responsible government or politician could ignore such statistics. It is a known fact or correlation that income levels have an impact on mental health outcomes. This would appear to include suicide, and so, why do we not do this?

Money. That’s why. It’s going to cost them some money and they know it.

That’s just the truth, ladies and gentlemen.

And they don’t want to do it.

You, you don’t want to do it.

In order to hide that fact from yourself, you have to work at it.

To do this is to become delusional.

Jim Morrison.

A Concrete and Specific Suggestion.

Okay, here’s a specific, concrete suggestion on the subject of ending homelessness. My proposal would be to put a cot or a set of bunk-beds in the lobby of every Canadian banking institution that has 24-hour ATMs there, ah, so that the homeless wouldn’t have to sleep on the floor.

Does that seem like madness to you? Because it is no more madness than what you are presently doing.

When it comes to poverty and local food banks, it strikes me that anywhere from seventeen hundred to over two thousand people use it in any given month, and this in a city of only 72,000 people. Many of them are elderly, many are women and children.

What is even more striking, and I read this in a fairly recent news story, was that there were something like thirteen or fourteen hundred volunteers going through that place in that year. It is, in fact, an ‘approved’ venue for high school students to do their volunteer component—and you can’t graduate without it. A food bank serves other needs as well—this is where the Kiwanis and the Optimists and the Rotary club oldsters, the church groups, anything up to half a dozen people at a time, go in and make soup for the people.

The fact that community journalists get good copy out of such things is an additional bonus.

The thing has been institutionalized to such an extent, and the bourgeoisie has an awful lot invested in it.

END

Louis has all kinds of books and stories on Google Play. Many of them are free.

Image. Stolen.

Thank you for reading.