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...

***

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.

 

 

 

 

 

Tiny Houses for the Homeless: The Big Myth. Louis Shalako.

 

The challenge of 'narrowness'.

Louis Shalako

The Myth of the Tiny Home.

 

The tiny home, certainly as a solution for homelessness, is a sorry myth, just one more lie from the sort of people who really should know better.

Their plan calls for dozens of the things in the middle of a muddy bean field out by the airport…

Yet city council seems to think it’s a good idea. The only question, is where to put them—the fact the new homelessness encampment protocol calls for one hundred metres of setback, yes, you heard that right—one hundred metres of setback, tells you just how seriously they take themselves.

...essentially, they have made any new encampment both illegal and impossible, which is the result of their own rules. So, where you gonna put that...??? If I may inquire, what does that do for the homeless encampment you already have...???

So, I downloaded a PDF of ruled graph paper, and I can print out as many sheets as I need.

Let’s take a look at the structure itself.

Drawing.

Calculated at 410 sq. ft. although interior space would be a little smaller. Based upon an 8.5'W x 20'L x 8.5'T shipping container for the base. The floor of the upper space is framed with 2" x 6" spruce studs, the floor with 3/4" ply. This doesn’t stand up to the building codes you say. Fine, but then neither do tents pitched in a public park. With framing, insulation, vapour barrier and probably 3/8" drywall in the upper floor, and a bay window, lower left, a proper 3' x 7' door, windows with screens, a skylight upper left, and provision for a stove, what's missing is a floor plan and proper hookups for sewer, water, electricity and possibly gas. It is, of course,  uninsurable. (This is where all that very useful stigma comes in.) Where you put the steps in an 8.5' wide space is very important, I reckon they'd be at least 2.5' wide, hopefully with a straight run, although there is a case to be made for a turn part way up. Simple geometry dictates that a stair that climbs 8.5' at forty-five degrees requires the same length, right.

I really ought to check the geometry. With a 12’ rise from the second floor to the peak, the upper story is a bit of a sail in a really big wind, and you need to bolt that down, rather than just throwing a few spikes in there. The presumed occupant needs to be able to climb stairs, so it’s not for the disabled or the truly elderly.

In my view, it’s better to set the shipping container on a pad of reinforced concrete, rather than just letting it sink into a mud-hole. Services like water and sewage, whether it’s a septic tank or otherwise, must be in place. The shipping container would have to be carefully placed, as the holes for services have to line up.

The challenge of the shipping container house is that the width is limited to 8.5' or you're joining two together. Once you start cutting out large sections in order to do that, the question of loading comes into play, and why didn’t you just frame it properly in the first place. Going to the 40' length merely accentuates the problem. This 410 sq. ft. concept has a kitchen, bath and living room on the ground floor, and a loft style bedroom up above. So you walk in, and the landing for the stairs has two angled steps, turn right and up you go. The upper deck is wider in order to get headroom at the top of the stairs, and to make a livable space. Looking at the end view, you see the limitation of 'narrowness'. Also, the land, the services, those are fixed costs, relatively speaking, no matter how small or efficient the structure. A local guy built a tiny home on wheels, with fridge, stove, heat, toilet, shower, electricity, wifi, big-screen TV, water tanks, and what must be very small washer and dryer. He was asking $45,000.00 and didn't seem to get too many offers. The bathroom, under the sleeping platform, can't be five feet tall. It just can't. As for offers, or lack of them, that’s because the stairs go up to within a foot of the ceiling, and once you get a mattress onto the sleeping platform, you have eleven inches of clearance and you have to get out of bed in order to turn over.

Towing that overloaded, top heavy thing down the road must have been a real nightmare.

How in the hell he got that 25 k out to Reese’s Corners is a very good question. I reckon he’ll never do it again—

...terribly narrow, right.

Services like water and sewage, city or septic, must be in place and the shipping container would have to be carefully placed on a reinforced concrete pad. The holes have to line up.

Construction trailers.

The typical construction trailer is more like 12’ wide. You can get them down a road. They are insulated, some have heat and a/c, some have a washroom and holding tanks, presumably, for water and effluents. You can plug them in and run power from a portable generator.

City council is looking into building 80 sq. ft. doghouses for the homeless. With ‘wraparound’ supports, due to all the mental health addictions and stigma. They honestly think they can build them for five grand, and will set them down in a bean field, with one hundred metres of setback from all other roads, trails, parks, schools, retail, industry, ditches, trees, groundhog dens, pretty rocks or any other sidewalk, bus stop, or other amenities such as fire hydrants, ladies and gentlemen.

There are dozens of these in a field south of town...

Shortly after the 2018 municipal elections, county council voted unanimously for a five-year study of housing and homelessness.

It was a cop-out, it bought them five years of idleness, and they did nothing with it except bloviate at various housing summits, all of which were reported on by Canadian journalists, presumably with a straight face and without puking up a little bit into their mouths and having to swallow it all back down again.

The funny thing is, you can get a used camper trailer for five or six grand. Don't worry, that won't happen either.

 

END

 

Louis Shalako has books and stories available from Google Play. A Stranger In Paris is currently free in audio format.

Council Approves Inaction Plan for Microscopic Doghouses for ‘Our Most Vulnerable’ People.

(One year from now, there will not be a single tiny home anywhere in this municipality. - ed.) 

Everybody needs a home.

Added link, (CBC Sept 22/24) Man Designs Tiny Homes. If you read the article and look at the pictures, you may see what might be a bed, very high over the kitchenette area. There appears to be a ladder leading up there. One, that ladder looks extremely dangerous due to structural weakness, and you probably don't want to fall out of bed or have that ladder break while you're climing up there. I am hoping that is a storage area, and the bed is in a more desirable location, but the pictures are limited. This is why I put a proper set of stairs up to a proper bedroom in my own design, and of course there would be a handrail, and the bed is just a bed, not a cubby eight feet off the floor.

So, in order to remove barriers to housing for our most vulnerable citizens, we ask them to climb eight feet up a vertical ladder, 90 degrees, straight up and no fucking slope at all, like Spider Man or something, and somehow clamber into and out of bed via ladder at the foot of a space which cannot be more than about thirty-two inches at its highest. Are we fucking monkey's then. Fuck off.

Nice as the colours are, this thing was clearly drawn by a member of the #bourgeoisie.

Thank you for reading.

 

 

 

 

 

On Immigration and Related Matters. Louis Shalako.

 

The Blind Leading the Blind, Peter Brueghel the Elder.

Louis Shalako

Everything is politics, and all politics is local politics.

Immigration is one of those issues which fall under the aegis of the federal government.

Yet its effects, are seen and felt at the local level—I can only live in one town, one little neighbourhood at a time. What’s happening at the other end of the country doesn’t affect me, mostly because I don’t see it. Canada is a very large country, but it’s a very small town, in the sense that we all know each other. We have wonderful communications in this country, telephone, internet, television. Radio, newspapers and magazines, websites, and all that goes on in our new, electronic, public square. With the Weather Network, I can sit here and watch thunderstorms on radar, rolling on in from wherever.

We have vast resources of information, compared to a few short years ago.

This is one storm no one saw coming, except that they did—they did. We all did. We knew all about the inverted pyramid of demographics back in the early eighties. This is the graph that looks like a pyramid, upside-down, based on statistical analysis of age groups and one would suppose mortality tables of the time. It is the opposite of Malthusian economics, as limited as that is, and as open to question, even at the time it was written.

And people will talk.

***

The housing crisis has come to Sarnia, just has it has come to all Canadian cities and towns.

Past and present federal governments have seen increased levels of immigration as a desirable thing. An aging population and a falling birthrate would seem to make this an inevitable process: when half the population is over 65 years of age, the burden of taxation, including all those state or taxpayer funded pensions falls on fewer and fewer shoulders. People hate taxes of any kind. Older folks hate being rendered homeless and starving to death on the street, a fairly natural inclination. What is interesting, certainly in the case of the Province of Ontario, is that no one seems to have seen this coming. If they did, they sure as hell didn’t think to do anything about it.

In Sarnia, in a recent news story, it was revealed that there are at least 2,000 foreign students at Lambton College. Foreign students pay the going rate, tuition and rent, with no help from federal and provincial student assistance programs.

Foreign students aren’t taking high-end homes and condos. They’re not taking high-end apartments. They are taking the cheapest apartments they can find, what with being here only temporarily.

We can’t blame foreign students for housing inflation in detached homes or high-end condos and apartments. We can’t even really blame immigrants for such inflation, as few immigrants arrive on these shores with big stacks of cash. We all know immigrants can be hard workers, we know their children tend to get good educations, we know that for various reasons related to language and culture, it is often easier for an immigrant to work in low-skilled occupations, right up until the day they quit and start their own business. At which point the rest of us nod thoughtfully and talk about them taking all of our welfare, and all of our jobs…

We sort of know that folks whose French or English language skills are not good will often seek out their fellow countrymen. They will labour in the kitchen rather than at the front counter. One of our local realtors has radio commercials in an Indian language. He’s from India, presumably, there are enough Indians in the local marketplace that this confers some kind of competitive advantage.

Not all foreign students get their education and leave town. Far from it, also, the children of immigrants, Canadian citizens, can go to a college or university as easily as anyone else’s kids.

You see them all over town. Young people, working the gas bar, the beer store, working the vape shop, (as sole proprietor), working the phone sales. Answering the phones at federal and provincial agencies. There are five of those mobile phone shops in our local mall, virtually all of them appear to be ‘foreigners’ or people of colour to be exactly clear.

Some people in the comments section of any major news source just seem to hate immigration, as if it were the cause of all our woes. I won’t lie to you—it probably isn’t the solution to all of our woes either. There may be some valid arguments regarding the level of immigration, but for the most part it is bigotry suffused with ignorance of any economic and social realities. Hatred is blind, and unreasoning, and it poisons every mind that it touches. It also gets to vote—through the ballots of those who hate.

These are the folks that profess to love Canada—only real problem, of course, is that they seem to hate every little thing and every other person in it.

The housing crisis was caused by a perfect storm of events. Immigration, foreign students, these are only factors, but not the whole story.

Even if there was no immigration at all, zero, nil, nada, ladies and gentlemen, we still haven’t been building what is called the ‘missing middle’ in terms of housing, and we sure as hell haven’t been building the lower and bottom tiers of housing. No responsible developer is going to propose a brand-new, state of the art flophouse, ladies and gentlemen. Not when you can go high-end on the same site, rather than listing one-roomers for $700.00 per month when you can put a few of them together as one unit and get $2500.00 per month for the same square footage. It is, after all, new construction, not some clapped-out old church or factory or a sweatshop in an alley somewhere. Simply put, a one-roomer still needs one toilet, one sink. One fridge, one stove. One bathtub, one patio door. An apartment with five rooms still only gets one toilet—capiche?

It is more efficient in terms of cost to the builder.

(Where in the hell would you put it? Sure as hell not Bright’s Grove. – ed.)

The people that are against immigration tend to forget that half the doctors in this town are from Africa, India, Asia. They tend to ignore the fact that here in the Province of Ontario, we simply do not graduate enough doctors to serve the needs of our population of 14 million.

That is just one more failure of Ontario social policy, which I have mentioned before.

When the federal government decided on an increased level of immigration, it was a gamble. The gamble will pay off in the long run, in the shorter term, it has brought increased pressure on available housing stock. What they did not gamble on was Covid-19, supply chain disruptions, and inflation increased by pent-up demand. They did not gamble on a major European war, which has in fact cost this country billions that might have been better spent elsewhere, and driven up the costs of basic food-stuffs like flour and cooking oil. In Japan, with an aging population and virtually zero immigration, they have rural and small-town housing, vacant and falling into disrepair. In China, with a population of over a billion, they can’t fill the housing they have. There are huge developments, full of half-empty and even half-built high-rise apartments. These are mistakes of demography. When the provincial government decided that free market capitalism would be the solution to all problems, it seems to have overlooked the most vulnerable members of the population in terms of available housing. They had to overlook them. Otherwise, they would have had to have given them a raise…was it wrong to put a moratorium on evictions during the pandemic? Ah, but when they took that off again, there was all that pent-up demand, mostly from the landlords, and yes, some folks did abuse the privilege. Most of us did not—

Just sitting here, watching the storms roll in.

All of those evictions. All of those rent-controlled units, suddenly becoming vacant…that wasn’t very smart now, was it. Don’t forget, half the workforce was sent home for six months to a year or more. How in the hell was the average person supposed to pay the rent?

There are villages in Italy, where they will sell you a house for a dollar. It sure sounds like a real bargain. All you have to do is fix it up and live there, and pray for a bit of luck as it’s Mafia territory—and you look like an easy mark in what is someone else’s country. They like to call it free market capitalism, don’t you know—otherwise, it’s just simple extortion.

Right?

Free market capitalism simply can’t do anything for us—what with being responsible to the shareholders and all. The one thing they ain’t, is responsible to the taxpayers, and I guess that just leaves the poor old government holding the bag.

When the provincial government fails to adequately fund colleges and universities, that was a conscious decision. When the provincial government fails to adequately fund disability pensions, or social assistance payments, to the extent that people can’t pay the rent on the units they already occupy, well, this was more than a conscious decision. It was a moral failure, based on ideology and mistaken notions of how things actually work. At some point, you are asking people living on the street, to save first and last month’s rent, on an apartment they couldn’t afford in the first place and that goes about triple several years later; and by this time, you don’t stand a chance in hell of passing the credit check anyways.

The exact same unit that once cost $700.00 per month now costs $2,100.00. It’s like the blind leading the blind sometimes around here…or maybe they’re just stupid, but I think not, and they would hotly deny it themselves. In that sense, we are in agreement…so, you’re not so stupid after all.

Blind, maybe, but not stupid.

When the provincial government fails to provide rent controls on vacant units, this only makes a bad situation worse. It also fuels inflation in the housing market, what with all that turnover.

The only thing that is going to bring down the cost of housing is to build more housing, as quickly as possible and that is going to require skilled labour—and our construction industry is facing a demographic crunch that cannot be denied.

Where exactly do you plan to get all those people? The Province of Ontario is already receiving the benefit of 50 % of all immigration. They have literally fought over immigrants, ladies and gentlemen, although Quebec insists on French language skills in all new arrivals. They still wanted their fair share.

They are here to be exploited, in other words, at least for the first few years, or until they become real Canadians, or something.

It is also true that immigrants do not move to the wide-open prairies and bust some sod these days. They don’t take a freehold title in northern Ontario and begin, with axe and plow, clearing 140 acres of timber to wrest a subsistence from the land in what turns out to be a very short growing season. The land is all taken. They move to the cities, where the opportunities abound and they can be absorbed in a more cosmopolitan environment.

It takes time, decades, before they filter down to the smaller cities and towns. It will happen. It happened here, after all. At some point the immigrants arrive in Tuktoyaktuk, and one wonders what the Innu will think of that one, ladies and gentlemen…more bloody foreigners, eh.

Malthus was a mathematician studying social effects. His thinking was limited in that his model was of an agrarian society, where nothing ever changed except the level of population. He did not take into account changing technologies, and he seems to have completely missed the industrial revolution, with its explosion of productivity, which was happening all around him.

Malthus recognized goods, but failed to recognize services. Immigration, classic or internal, (province to province, for example), played no role in his calculations.

Canada is the second largest country in the world, geographically, with a relatively tiny population. How in the hell are you going to develop all that potential, without people to build the things, to consume the services, to invent new technologies, to find greater efficiencies and to become a nation greater than the sum of its parts.

That, my dears, is a series of very good questions flying in some kind of a fur-ball of aerial combat.

 

END

 

Louis, under oath before a Congressional Committee...

Government to Cap Student Visas.

Same Story from CBC. A two-year cap, due to ‘housing crunch’.

Government to Decrease Temporary Resident Population.

What Is Canada’s Immigration Policy?

Why Canada Wants to Bring 1.5 Million Immigrants by 2025. (BBC)

Ontario Receives Benefit of 50 % of International Immigration.

Malthusian Principles.

The Systematic Failure of Ontario Social Policy.

Canada, the Second Largest Country in the World. (Britannica)

The Innu.

Louis Shalako has books and stories available fromAmazon.

Louis has some art on ArtPal.

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.

 

 

 

 

One Single, Concrete and Specific Suggestion to Address the Opioid Crisis. Louis Shalako.

Louis Shalako

So, are you having an opioid crisis?

Well, you’re never going to solve it going on the way you are. That’s because you’re a bunch of dipsticks and you don’t have any fucking ideas.

***

Don’t worry, I’m not here to have a candlelight vigil on the riverbank, in the rather vain hopes of affecting the outcome, (in some miracle from heaven, apparently), not to mention signalling our bourgeois virtue, and values, and, not incidentally, getting ourselves on the front page of our local media outlet like so many other God-damned ineffectual do-gooders.

I have one single, concrete and specific suggestion. (You’ll notice they never have anything. Not one fucking thing, ladies and gentlemen.) Bear in mind, this is just one of many tools, many of which will have to be used in order to actually do anything to combat the opioid crisis. 

It’s very simple. 

Re-list chiropractic care under OHIP and the Ontario Disability Support Program. A few years ago, chiropractic care was in fact partially covered under this universal, provincial, health care program, certainly as it pertained to clients of ODSP. Then, the (Liberal) government of the time, in what was obviously a cost-cutting measure, prodded on in no small part by the lobbying efforts of the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons, de-listed it. So, I went from paying twelve or fifteen dollars for a chiropractic treatment, to paying full price. These days it’s $70.00 for an initial visit, and $40.00 for each treatment after that.

And of course, when you’re on welfare, or ODSP, (the Ontario Disability Support Program), that’s just what you can’t do. Oh, maybe the middle class, working class people with good pay-cheques can do it. It’s a sacrifice, down at the lower end of the income scale, but they can at least do it. But we could no longer do it.

Of course, we’re still in a shit-load of pain, right? It’s not like the fucking assholes didn’t already know that, because they did.

And of course we’re going to continue to seek out some kind of pain relief, wherever we can find it…

Bear in mind, chiropractic care is fundamentally opposed to pain treatment based on heavy drugs. It is in fact completely drug-free treatment, and in my personal experience, it can sometimes be the only thing that works. The experience speaks for itself: one minute you’re popping pain pills, and can barely get out of bed, on and off the toilet, or up and down out of your car seat. Pulling on a pair of pants is sheer agony, and as a male, I’m a bit uncomfortable with the thought of wearing a skirt.

Anyhow.

The doc snaps your back, and the difference is amazing. You walk out of there a new man, or woman, or person, or whatever.

And it didn’t take any pain pills at all. One must wonder, if this wasn’t the basic problem the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons might have had with it—they’re getting all those kickbacks from Big Pharma, and the chiropractors were taking too many of their patients. 

And here’s the thing. Anything that can treat your pain, and maybe you don’t need to get that prescription for narcotic pain pills in the first fucking place, well. Maybe that would be a good thing. There’s nothing there to abuse, there’s nothing there to get addicted to.

There’s nothing there to sell, and this is a population that has been chronically and systematically starved of money, going back for many decades. You would almost think that somebody somewhere somehow benefits from all that petty crime in the community.

But that, I suppose, is just being paranoid—

Ha.

Ha-ha.

Over the course of time, this sort of action—a real, live, actual action—will have some discernable and measurable effect on the opioid crisis. It would take time of course, (because I know you’re going to want to study it for five years first, just like the housing crisis in this here town), and (of course) with everyone looking for the magic bullet that will instantly solve the problem forever and for good, ah, well. They may be a little disappointed, not getting those instantaneous, miraculous results after all, but then they’re the ones wasting their time, and their candles, down on the riverbank.

They’re wasting all of our time too.

Yet the truth is, there are a few tools in the chest that we might try.  

When the ineffectual do-gooders get involved, there’s really nothing to try, is there…??? 

That’s because they don’t have any fucking ideas except thoughts and prayers. 

 

Which are cheap enough, in the end.

END

Thank you for reading.

Louis has all kinds of books and stories on Amazon.