The Difference Between the Elderly and the Disabled.

Louis Shalako

My journey began May 4, 1989, when a plank in a scaffolding broke beneath me and I fell to my death.

Unfortunately, in some opinions, I survived. I have three compression fractures, at the T-6, L-3 and L-4 vertebrae. I saw a doctor the next day and he didn’t even bother to order an X-ray, although he did write a scrip for Tylenol-3s, 30-milligrams of codeine per tablet.

I’ve learned a lot, since then.

***

“You can earn up to a certain amount without telling us and without losing your benefits. For 2018, this amount is $5,500.00 (before taxes). This amount may increase in future years.”

At one time, a person on the Canada Pension Plan (Disability) benefit could earn as little as ten dollars and, because they were capable of doing some work, they would lose the benefits. 

That has since changed. Looking at the website, you can now earn up to $5,500.00 annually. 

What is really interesting is that you don’t even have to report it.

On the Ontario Disability Support Program, clients can only earn $200.00 per month, $2,400.00 a year.

In terms of operating a business, the paperwork takes me a couple of hours a month, including income, mileage and expense reports. People who are working for scab employers fill out a different form and for the most part, are too fucking dumb to claim expenses. It would be good if the Province of Ontario were to bring its policies more in line with the federal disability pension system. Note that the rates might be different in the two cases, my impression from years ago was that the federal system actually paid less than ODSP.

“For 2016, the average monthly CPP disability benefit is $933.82 and the maximum monthly amount is $1,290.81. You will receive the basic monthly amount fixed for all recipients ($471.43), plus an amount based on how much you contributed to the CPP during your entire working career. If you are receiving a CPP disability benefit, your dependent children may also be eligible for a children's benefit. In 2016, the flat monthly rate your child can receive is $237.69. Read more about the CPP benefits amounts.”

So, that part's not very good. 

I did apply for CPP(D) but did not qualify, this was in 1994 or 1995. A recent news story indicates that fewer Canadians are qualifying for benefits. According to this story, there are serious problems at or with CPP(D) and that’s certainly credible based on my experiences with this whole industry—and an industry it is, one that employs thousands in relatively good-paying government jobs. At the provincial level, it takes up a good chunk of the budget.

As we can see, the elderly, (who can be equally vulnerable) are sort of favoured over the disabled, who may, admittedly, be younger. That is the only distinction that I can see—other than the fact that old age pensions are paid into by those who are employed. The disabled may never have been employed, and therefore, there is no public fund for their maintenance. I was employed for about twelve years—all my other work experience has been an entrepreneurial, hand-to-mouth sort of subsistence. I didn’t make contributions, and I didn’t qualify for unemployment insurance. Let’s just say I didn’t starve to death and leave it at that—

Anyways, the statute of limitations has run out and perhaps that is a good thing.

Disabled persons on CPP(D) have to have recently paid into the system. How much, and for how long, would appear to be closely-guarded secrets.

Such programs are notoriously underfunded. It is a hallmark of all such systems.

Retirees of sixty-five or seventy years of age can work while receiving regular Canada Pension Plan benefits with no penalty. There is no limit—you can earn a million bucks and still get this pension benefit. This is why scab employers such as Walmart, Tim Horton’s, McDonalds, Burger King, and a thousand grocery stores across the province and the nation love to hire retirees. Walmart greeters are famous for their average and collective age. But they don’t have to live on the money, whether it is full, or more likely part-time employment. 

They are using the additional earnings for luxuries, Christmas presents, travel, spoiling the grand-kids, (and rightly so), or simply attaining some quality of life not offered by a base government pension and no savings, no private pension in many cases.

Retail isn’t the only industry that relies on subsidized labour. When I worked as a security guard, it was surprising, just how many people were retired from the military, ex-cops, and ex-firemen. But they had their pension already, they were bondable, they had some relevant experience, and they didn’t have to live on the money. It is also true some had been bankrupted by divorce (sometimes multiple divorces), and genuinely needed the money. 

There was some poverty there, as anyone drinking home percolator coffee from a Thermos and eating stale, single-slice bologna sandwiches with a thin scrape of butter and mustard on a long midnight shift can attest. I saw many of those along the way, guys without much education but also no criminal record. If nothing else, they were bondable, although they might have rolled up their own smokes on the kitchen table in a kind of quiet, genteel, Canadian desperation.

A bunch of people must have had their applications in. A bunch of us were called in one day…there was a strike on, and the money was good.

I went from $14.00 per hour on strike duty (where we crossed the picket lines twice a day), to $5.35 per hour when the strike ended and we were lucky enough for the company to take at least some of us on. That company is still in existence today, and I have no doubt that their basic practices haven’t changed. One of the company principals was also involved with a temporary placement company—an employment company.

They’d get you a minimum-wage job somewhere and then take a percentage of your cheque for the first six months. Since it was a temporary job, one has to wonder how many folks ever got out from under that. These guys will exploit the vulnerable, the desperate, or even just the stupid. They’re not all that picky.

What’s interesting is that on polling day, election day, the place is crawling with senior citizens. While 12.6 % of Canadians suffer from some form of disability, it’s like they just don’t vote or something.

Or maybe it’s just that no one cares—unless they’re running a food bank for forty-five thousand a year and bucking for sainthood on the front page of some crummy little Canadian newspaper somewhere with all kinds of feel-good, bullshit glorification of Canadian food banks.

END

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ODSP Guidelines Are Bloody Murder. Louis Shalako.

Louis Shalako

One of the interesting things about the Ontario Disability Support Program, is how the guidelines for income support tend to actually keep people in poverty.

Bear in mind, it was never meant to provide anything more than basic subsistence. When it was instituted, it was ground-breaking stuff and very welcome. That was because there was simply nothing there before.

In previous stories, I have talked about the guidelines for business and employment, where there is limit to how much a person can earn before being hit with a fifty percent claw-back on each and every dollar earned over that limit. The government has never denied that the disabled have the right to work, in fact Dalton McGuinty, former premier, even put it in writing for me: “You have to right to fully participate in the life of this province,” this letter from about 2006.

I really ought to have that framed.

In the case of someone getting into geared-to-income housing, a previous story noted how the rent is pegged at one-third of income, rather than one-third of the shelter portion, based on a client’s monthly benefit.

But ignoring whether someone is in subsidized housing or simply renting, or in the odd case, still owns their own home, there are other ways in which this subtle discrimination works. 

The guidelines were written by some of the best lawyers, incidentally—which is why you have to read it carefully.

If an adult on the ODSP pension enters into a relationship, and if a couple moves in together, then the one on ODSP will have their shelter portion reduced, possibly even eliminated, assuming the partner is making enough money—and it doesn’t have to be much. They might be barely making the poverty line, for a single adult, already. Now their spouse loses the $489.00/month shelter portion of their disability pension. This leaves them $662.00 per month (their personal needs allowance) to contribute to the family’s home accounts. We can see the financial part of this relationship is already off to a bit of a rocky start. People are barely getting by on minimum wage, and now a person is in a relationship with a disabled person, who has just lost a good chunk of their pension.

The same thing is true if two people on ODSP, or Ontario Works, fall in love, decide to start a family together, and to cohabitate. Either one must lose the shelter portion, or both partners lose half of the shelter portion. Boy; that sure sounds nice and logical. Yet there is no way anyone can get even a one-bedroom apartment in the Province of Ontario for $489.00 per month. You can maybe get a room, one room, with shared kitchen and bath facilities, in the typical downtown rooming house. Here in Sarnia, there’s one advertised at $95.00/week. 

How this is going to work for our honeymoon couple is open to some debate…but at least they’d be together, assuming there isn’t a sign on the door saying, ‘limit one occupant per room’, but then, if they were in different rooms, it’s back to the status quo. Both are now entitled to the shelter portion again.

Hey—they can still share a kitchen and a bathroom.

All of this tends to prevent clients of the ODSP from bettering their situation, assuming one believes that two can live as cheaply as one. My old man would have said, “Yeah. As long as one is a horse and the other one is a sparrow.”

A very wise man, my old man—

Okay, so a single adult gets about $13,800.00 per year in pension. Mathematically two such pensions in the same household would add up to $27,400.00 per year, and with some (home) economics of scale, it is arguable that there would be some savings. This could not possibly add up to anything like 12 x $489.00 per year. Which is what they lose by moving in together. 

The funny thing is, marriage, is subsidized in so many ways, at almost any other socio-economic level.

As long as you’re not disabled, as long as you’re not on the ODSP pension or Ontario Works.

If a couple, or the one partner on ODSP, could keep their full pension, this would result in income that had been loosened up. They would be unburdened by the need to pay a substantial portion of rent for a one-bedroom apartment, some of which would always come out of a single client’s personal needs portion—the other part of what is actually one payment, with the division into two categories as it is presently shown on ODSP payment stubs basically bullshit and they all know it. The disabled are the ones who can’t figure it out.

Now, in terms of equity, or as some prefer, inequality, a couple, both of whom are working full-time, minimum-wage jobs, would not be hit with the same penalty—yet the penalty is imposed on Ontario’s disabled, who number among our most vulnerable citizens.

No, we only have the nerve to do that to the disabled.

Anyone else, and they’d be screaming bloody murder.

END

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They'd Gut It If They Got the Chance. Louis Shalako.

Louis Shalako

Yesterday my teeth were hurting on the left side. That sort of pain will often spread sympathetically to other teeth, two or three of them in this case. Today, I’ve got a full-blown toothache, which two or three Tylenol 3s barely seem to touch, and that’s with 30-mg of codeine per pill. It’s barely lunch time and that’s a lot of dope. (Washed down with beer. – ed.)

In the past we have noted that the Ontario Disability Support Program pension is really only about $13,800.00 per year for a single adult. In the interest of objectivity, the poverty line is roughly $22,000.00 per year here in Ontario, and this writer is presently paying 69.5 % of that pension in rent.

The landlord just sent a tax receipt and it’s like $9,800.00 per year. It’s nothing fancy, but it was nice and clean when I moved in and lately it’s even been quiet.

This is why we work part-time: so that we can eat something once in a while, something that didn’t come from a food bank, so we can have a car to go to work…an endless cycle, once you get into it, one with not very many good outcomes, or ‘miracles’, as people like to call them.

There’s more. Basically, I just picked up the phone and called my dentist. I’ve got an appointment for next week, and it will be covered by the ODSP Dental Benefit. All I have to do is to show the card. If the doc prescribes, same thing again. Just show the card at the pharmacy.

(All I have to do is to make it through the misery until next week.)

There’s even more to it than that. While a neighbour or a friend might also be getting a base pension of $13,800.00 per year, her medical needs are unique, and much different from my own. I basically didn’t go to the doctor’s for something like seven years before my conscience got on me. She’s in there every month, getting her meds, getting a monthly depot injection, and in her case, the social workers actually show up at her door once a day, to ensure she’s taking the pills. I looked up some of her meds and the cost is substantial. The social workers have to be paid as well as the doctors and the nurses.

Yet in terms of base pension, she’s still living thirty-five to forty percent below the poverty line, just as I am. Since our medical needs are unique, and being adequately covered, this seems fair enough to me. Insofar as that goes...we'll talk about the rates another time.

To put this in perspective, if someone working full time for minimum wage had to pay for this out of their own pocket, it’s an easy six hundred, maybe a thousand a month for all of the medications that she is required to take. This is why the Province of Ontario’s Pharmacare + program is so wonderful. It’s going to help a lot of people.

The fact is, most patients/workers wouldn’t be able to afford anything like it, and therefore, they really couldn’t afford to work. Certainly not at minimum wage. In some odd sense, people on ODSP and even Ontario Works, (welfare), are better off than the lowest-paid workers. The money is not quite so good, but the benefits are a lot better and you don’t have to put in forty hours a week for some scab employer just to survive—in pain, and in some shit-box substandard housing somewhere.

This, I think, is why they raised the minimum wage.

People simply couldn’t afford to work that cheap anymore.

Just for the record, it wasn’t a Progressive Conservative idea to bring this in. It was a Liberal idea—so far the bad guys aren’t saying too much about it.

But I reckon they’d gut it if they had even half a chance.

END

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