Social Policy Matters. Louis Shalako.

MPP Bob Bailey, Sarnia-Lambton.

Louis Shalako

Social policy matters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ontario social policy at work.

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

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

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

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

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

The difference in investment is not that great.

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

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

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

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

Let us know when our suffering is good enough.

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

Chronically underfunding all social programs is hardly progressive.

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

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

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

Perhaps love trumps ideology after all.

There are lessons to be learned here.

 

#Louis

 

END

 

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

Note: this story originally appeared somewhere else.

***

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

Ontario Works.

The late Jim Flaherty. (Wiki)

 

Thank you for reading.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Invisible Disability. Louis Shalako.

So, how's your mental health lately...

Louis Shalako

When every report on homelessness and poverty mentions mental health and addictions, one wonders how it is even possible that at least some of these people can’t qualify for federal or provincial disability benefits.

They all qualified for the most minimal welfare, didn’t they. In which case, they must have some rights. They must exist, if we can put it that way.

If nothing else, they are documented citizens.

It’s not like every asshole in town doesn’t somehow know that to be true—

Surely there must be some evidence for all of that, evidence other than the fact that they are homeless, for this is the old ‘coincidence-chasing-the-tail-of-causality’ ploy in all of its logical and rhetorical ugliness.

First, there is the stigma, a stigma that the exact same Canadian journalists are careful to remind us of, with depressing regularity, which as we all know equates with a good poop…it’s pro forma. They can’t help themselves. They must do it. If they were caught in a bear trap, they would gnaw their arm off, in order to continue to slather on the stigma, ladies and gentlemen.

Second, it is an invisible disability.

It’s terribly hard to prove something that is invisible, and yet the Chief of Police is quoted as saying that 88 % of the folks forced to live down at Rainbow Park suffer from a combination of these issues, thereby stigmatizing them and the other twelve percent…that’s because we cannot tell with a quick glance, who is who, and who is what, ladies and gentlemen.

Words have great power. They also have meaning, sometimes very deep meaning which goes beyond that which is in the dictionary.

Words can be used to obscure, as well as to illuminate.

And guilt is one of your weapons.

***

What’s kind of interesting is the sheer number of invisible disabilities. My mother suffers from vertigo. Shirley and Ron were driving the big rig, a brand-new tractor they’d financed themselves. It was a dream for Ron and Shirley was nothing if not game for adventure. She fell getting out of the truck. Hit her head, began experiencing symptoms. Diagnosed by her doctor, and now confirmed by thirty years of experience…the insurance company wouldn’t pay off. It was impossible to prove, and despite her own doctor’s signature, their own doctors were there to dispute it. The government is no better and perhaps no worse than the insurance company.

Ron and Shirley quickly went bankrupt, the costs of trucking being what they are—two drivers can keep that vehicle on the road twice as many hours per day as one single driver.

They did try to get another driver to help Ron, but when diesel went from thirty cents to fifty cents a litre it was time to admit defeat and hang it up.

The financial penalties were tough in such a situation. Bankruptcy is not fun, ladies and gentlemen, and it takes years, many years, to recover from such an event. My mother suffers vertigo to this day.

No one would ever say that my mother was disabled, (Shirley would never say such a thing), and yet, there are people who have been bedridden for years by vertigo. The sheer nausea caused by vertigo, the spinning head, and the loss of balance is purely subjective, in the sense that it cannot be measured by a blood test, an X-ray, or by a urine sample.

No one is going to take your word for it, not when there’s money involved. In that sense, the government and the insurance company are a lot alike…

This one will do.

If you’ve ever been right on the verge of going to sleep, and had that sudden falling sensation, that is very much what vertigo feels like. I’ve suffered from anxiety attacks, way back in the early 2000s. It is different but similar: a kind of rushing feeling, a feeling that the walls are squeezing in, and it is, in fact terrifying. I guess that’s why they politely call it ‘anxiety’.

What it is, is sheer, unremitting terror—all for no apparent reason, it’s all in your head. You’re sitting in a chair, in a room, watching television, and you’re absolutely scared shitless for no reason. By definition, a ‘mental illness’. And thank fucking Darwin that’s over and done with, those particular circumstances, the stress has been gone for a long time now, and I will probably never suffer from that again.

I was afraid to even leave the house for about nine months, funny thing was, I always felt better when I managed to do so.

It was the fear of fear itself, or so I guess.

***

When I was twenty or so, going to Lambton College, I worked part time at the old Woolco Auto Centre, doing oil changes, the old lube, oil and filter Saturday specials, and tires and the like. We had a mechanic. Rolly had to take the three-beer lunch, every single day. His toolbox was a rusted, pathetic wreck. Rolly had the Class A License, the boss hung it up on the wall or we would have hardly been able to stay in business.

Andy was a journeyman mechanic, not Class A, and his toolbox was very professional. I was just young and enthusiastic, in some sense. But poor old Rolly never should have been allowed to repair automobiles after a certain stage of alcoholism. The problem with alcoholism, of course, is that it is self-inflicted. It’s like shooting yourself in the foot—you might get out of work, or even out of a war, but no one is going to give you all that much sympathy. I guess that’s why we call it stigma…Rolly’s hands shook even on a good day, and it was Rolly who stood there and watched as I pulled off brake drums, brake calipers, the rotors, replaced bearings, and put new shoes and pads on the customer vehicle. His hands shook. Was that the booze, or was that Parkinson’s? I suppose I will never know.

Someone had to sign off on that repair…and it better not be an inexperienced twenty year-old kid, or the Ministry of Transportation would have every right to ask a few pointed questions.

And we have absolutely no idea of why any fairly rational person would do that to themselves.

We also have no idea of what the trauma in that man’s life might have been.

Alcohol is pretty insidious, and it takes quite a few people down.

They can still walk, they can still talk, theoretically, they should be able to look after themselves.

It’s a disease.

We're all getting older.

***

After thirty years on disability, (ODSP), I retire at age 65. This results in a substantial raise of three or four hundred dollars a month. Which tells us just how much the government values the disabled. There are seniors on similar benefits, one story on the CBC tells of a woman paying 100 % of her income in rent. What might be the only thing that saves me, is thirteen years in a rent controlled building.

In a recent story, also on CBC, they state that if you have been in a rent-controlled unit for five years, ‘you have a target on your back’.

It’s not a very nice feeling. They’re not telling me anything I didn’t already know.

So what happened, is that I fell from a scaffolding when a plank broke. That was May 4, 1989. I broke my back in three places, so there were compression fractures at T-6, L-3 and L-4. There was also a hell of a lot of pain, and a lot of depression to go along with that, and yet, I can walk. I can talk, I can look after myself pretty well, once I sort of adapted to the realities. Nowadays, I simply don’t work more than three or four hours a day, in winter, when sales are slow, that’s like maybe 12-15 hours a week, in summer, more like 24-26 hours a week. Oddly enough, the job is fairly physical. I just can’t do it full-time, and probably couldn’t live on that income alone…

That almost doubles the base ODSP benefits, and the fact that the government finally raised allowable earnings from $200.00 per month up to $1,000.00 was a big help and a big forward step—dare I call it a victory, for the disabled no matter how we choose to classify them.

Some people fought long and hard for that change, as well as regular raises from the Conservative provincial government, and in fact I was one of them…trust me, they know my name over there.

This is how I know that victory is bittersweet. I mean, we really shouldn’t have to fight that hard, just to get a little justice around here.

I do not know if I get a full payment for August. I do know that the OAS (Old Age Security), presumably CPP and GIS as well, first payments will be September 30.

Only an idiot wouldn’t take steps to prepare for certain eventualities. You might be surprised that I have been saving money, (rather than spending it all on cocaine, heroin, methamphetamines…etc. – ed).

(What I am saying, – ed., is that I will cover the Sept. 1 rent.)

I haven’t even bothered to call the social workers, neither did I appeal a whopping $4,000.00 in so-called overpayments. It took them five years, partly due to COVID-19, (they also tore down their own building), to rule on income dating back to 2019. Some things in life just aren’t fair, what in the hell are you going to do about it. Truth is, I should have fought them, even if I lost—I do reserve the right to tell them exactly what I think of them, although it might be pointless.

It can also wait.

I also know that a lot of folks simply can’t fight for themselves, and maybe I was cast in a somewhat more heroic mold…I am not without my own vanity. You can always fight for someone else, right.

All that juicy stigma.

You might even win a round once in a blue moon, and I have to admit, it feels like a kind of power, which is exactly what the disabled, visible or otherwise, lack.

***

That’s right, ladies and gentlemen. The price of my freedom, is four grand.

They will cheerfully claw that back one way or another, with little regard to the impact on a senior citizen’s situation, which may be precarious for any number of reasons. What if I can’t work, what if the job goes away, what if I muff the income tax return and don’t get all the proper benefits?

My vehicle is paid off, and yet it is also 14 years old with 308,000 k on the clock. My job depends on a vehicle and having a place to live.

I haven’t had a winter coat in eight or nine years, basically I just dress in layers…and layers and layers.

I’ve cut my own hair for thirty years. I have used dish soap for shampoo, and brushed my teeth with baking soda.

One way or another, I will survive—

Assuming the landlord doesn’t get some kind of a brainstorm.

MillDon Enterprises has a thousand units across southwestern Ontario, and one wonders just how many relatives they have, in order to produce the N-12 eviction form, and to claim that they need the unit for a family member. The problem there, is that there is no follow-up, no verification, and no enforcement, and the onus is on the client to do all of that investigative work. Then take it back to the tribunal, hopefully with competent legal representation. Very few people get back into their old unit, and certainly not in any sort of time-frame.

I live in a three-floor walk-up in the central city. It’s probably the best unit in the building, top floor, (even the Mayor doesn’t have that), on the end away from the driveway, and facing the south so we at least get a bit of sunshine in winter…if you moved into an exact same unit, you will be paying at least double what I am paying. If this seems unfair to the landlord, or the other tenants, well, that’s too bad. I have some rights too, and perhaps the foresight simply to hang onto the place, even when there was a horrible noise problem, one that was never solved until three or four problem children simply moved on, as they almost inevitably will. The rest of us suffered through it, and that’s really all we can say about that.

Here’s the other thing: the company has been systematically renovating units, and raising the rents, as people ended their occupancy and moved out. You could call it a kind of natural attrition, and at this point in time, there are only six or seven units that have been occupied for ten years or longer. Some of us are getting older (we’re all getting older), and all the landlord has to do is to be patient. It’s not hard to estimate the income from this building, which has gone from about $28,000.00 per month to well over $40,000.00 gross income.

(That’s a half a million a year almost, from one fairly small building.)

It would be extremely unlikely that the company would evict the entire building (the N-13 ‘renoviction’), in order to renovate, although that is exactly the case in the building across the street. That building has been vacant since roughly June 1 of 2023, and there is virtually no activity on the part of contractors, although the grass is cut regularly.

The biggest issue with housing right now, even here in Sarnia, is that there is simply no place to go—

No place to go.

In which case, the only thing to do is to stand up and fight.

 

END

 

Landlord has brainstorm...

Woman Pays 100 % of Income in Rent. (CBC)

Apartment Tenants Renovicted. (Sarnia Journal)

Why do we Have to Prove Our Disability Constantly? (The Walrus)

The Invisible Disability. (Wiki)

Louis has books and stories available from Amazon.

See his works on ArtPal.

 

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.