Bogus Social Policy and the Price of Ignorance. Louis Shalako.

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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 assistance 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.

These folks weren't immediately grabbing upscale housing. No, they were grabbing affordable housing...

As for the government(s).

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.

...what the bougies see in their heads when they talk about 'affordable' housing...

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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.

In Depth: The New Landlord.

Tiny Homes for the Homeless. The Big Myth.

Louis Shalako has books and stories available from Amazon.

See his works on ArtPal.

Thank you for reading.

 

 

 

 

 

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.

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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.