Working Part-Time, Operating a Business Under Ontario Disability Support Program Guidelines. Louis Shalako.

Okay, so I have a small publishing business, and I also work for someone else part-time.

I’ve been on the Ontario Disability Support Program for over twenty years.

I called my social worker and asked a few questions.

I asked about the Work-Related Benefit, the Business Start-Up Benefit, and other questions.

But here's an interesting question that I didn't ask. If you can only get the Work-Related Benefit after earning $100 in a month, and if you don't go over the income limit, what effect does it have to have expense deductions...??? If you're below the limit, you don't need the deduction. You need to get up the max level, (which I take to be $200), and only then claim an expense, in order to offset their fifty cents on the dollar claw-back for everything over the limit. Right? And you are allowed deductions, after all.

But. It seems to me, if you don't need the deduction, don't claim it—bearing in mind you might make a lot of money just before the end of the year. This is more of a question than a statement.

I'm being told they go through a year's worth of reports and then adjust the next year's income. And you can only claim an expense during the month you made the purchase. Yet at some point in the process, they must average the total on a monthly basis. If you made more than $2,400 in a year, with no deductions, they want fifty cents on the dollar.

Is it that simple?

If you're on disability, the odds are you aren't sophisticated enough to pick off those sorts of questions. Let alone figure out what's the best thing to do. And sometimes your social worker doesn't know either.

One wonders if they deduct a $100 expense against $50 income in a given month, and then what? Use the negative integer in determining the monthly average of the yearly income...??? In which case you’re a lot less likely to qualify for the $100 Work-Related Benefit.

No one tells you this, they let you flounder around on your own. And it's a lot to remember anyways. We don't even know what questions to ask, sometimes.

Now, a few people over the years have said the ODSP 'helped someone buy a house.'

According to the social worker, they do not. It’s funny how people insist that they are right, to the extent of getting angry if you contradict them—even in the light of facts supplied by ODSP staff.

The only circumstances that they could be talking about would be an inheritance, a big gift, a lottery win, or a big windfall of some sort. Theoretically, you could put a down payment on a house, and they won't hit you with an over-payment by saying that it's income. Theoretically, someone could also give you a house, and it’s not considered, ‘income.’ But that is my interpretation—I didn’t actually ask that question.

As for the Business Start-Up Benefit, that is only if I start up something new—as of now that's not true. I started working for someone else, part-time, last June.

As for the internet, we agree it is vital for the publishing side, and for my labour side one must presume, as I blog and take photos for a customer and all of that. I doubt if the phone will be apportioned, but you never know. Yet some portion of that is definitely used for business. When you consider how few personal calls I get, I would say the majority of it.

You're only going to get so much out of five or six minutes on the phone.

I also think it would be pretty easy to get discouraged, to lose part of your income or other benefits unnecessarily, and ultimately to say, ‘to hell with it—it’s just not worth it.’ And yet the ODSP and the government cheerfully admit that the disabled have the right to work.

In fact, they even encourage it to some extent, judging by the slick radio ads.

***

The ODSP is unlikely to give much more than a one or two percent raise per year, (which is actually below the level of inflation and represents a yearly net loss of income), and nothing if the Conservatives win election, for the duration of their mandate.

In future, it would be beneficial to peg annual increases to the level of inflation, or two or three percent, whichever is more.

Bearing in mind not everyone would be able to benefit from these changes, the best thing the ODSP could do would be to raise the allowable earnings limit, and also raise the mileage rate from $0.18 to something more in line with industry standard. Some of the other guidelines are pretty murky, which must be a pain for staff as much as for the client.

Also, income support decisions can be appealed and must be provided in writing, along with instructions on how to ask for an internal review, and ultimately an appeal. Yet it is unclear whether decisions to withhold some other benefits can be appealed. I couldn't find anything on that on the website, nothing really clear anyways. The thing is, there's not much point in appealing if there's no way to win. Getting in the face of the staff isn't helpful as they're not the ones who wrote the guidelines. They're as hamstrung by guidelines as the client is.

#ODSP

Louis Shalako books and stories are available from Amazon.

Photo Credit.


Thank you for reading.

Back to Work.

Photo by KDS444, (Wiki.)

Louis Shalako





Years ago, I had a house and a mortgage. ODSP was paying $930.00 a month at the time.

What with house payments, taxes, heat, hydro, water and insurance, it was a tough go each and every month. I rode a bicycle and lined up at food banks, which sounds familiar to many Canadians. Going back to work was tough too. My first day was two hours--two hours, at ten bucks an hour, picking up shingles and stuffing them into a bin. I drove up to Port Franks to work with my brother.

I went back a few days later, and stripped shingles off of a roof for about four hours including clean-up. Forty bucks and maybe five bucks worth of gas if I was lucky. I can’t really recall now, but Steve might have bought me a coffee and a doughnut.

Sometimes it’s good just to get out of the house.

The thing is to keep going back, I guess. No matter how fucking painful it is. I’m fifty-seven years old this time around, too.

Going back to work, with back problems, and totally out of shape from a fairly sedentary lifestyle, is always going to be hard.

So. I’ve been shoveling a bit of mulch and it’s the same thing: two or three hours a day, max. 

That shoveling and wheeling things around in wheelbarrows is very hard on the back. When you’re all out of shape, it’s pretty exhausting, working in the hot sun. That’s why I go out there early in the morning…I always did prefer to get things done. I don’t mind coming home a bit early and at least I have something to show for it.

Yeah, and I need the money, too. Quite frankly, I seem to be falling behind, with not a hope in hell of paying off my credit card, for example. I would very much like to find another place to live before I strangle somebody…

As far as the book sales go, they’re nothing to write home about.

I had my own company back then, and I reported my income and all of that. You need to stay out of trouble with the ODSP, and don’t forget, there’s a rat born every minute anyways.

That was back in 2002, 2003, and 2004, when I finally wound it up. In addition to roofing with my brother, I also did the commercial interior renovations for four Curves for Women. 

Those were in Petrolia, Glencoe, Blenheim and Tilbury. At some point I had bought an old GMC S-15 from my brother, and when I finally scrapped her, she had 362,000 kilometres on the odometer. Considering that I was going back and forth to London and all these other little towns; that must have been one pretty good little truck.

After a while, I had saved up something like $12,000 and the ODSP was all over me like a dirty shirt because I wasn’t allowed to have that much in my business bank account.

That’s when I bought a Ford Windstar minivan, which was good because the tools were all indoors. You don't want to leave them in the truck overnight, not in this or any other neighbourhood. It had nice captain’s seats and a good view down the road, being a couple of feet higher off the ground as compared to the pickup.

The way things are right now, I need to find some sort of part-time work, and the truth is that the two or three-hour a day thing is only going to take a person so far. The only employers willing to put up with that are essentially relatives, maybe one hell of a good friend somewhere if I had one.

Otherwise I’m not making it, and the rent here goes up each and every year. That’s sort of what happened to my house, essentially. There it was the taxes, which went up from twelve hundred a year to over eighteen hundred in about four years. I was only going to be able to keep the place for so long and I would have had to sell anyways.

The funny thing was, after cleaning the place up, when I sold it, I made around $23,000.00.

That was the equity, the reward supposedly for my risk and my efforts, and in the end I was unable (maybe even afraid) to buy another house. The ODSP was all over it, of course, and so I had to ‘spend it down’, which is their polite way of saying piss the money away as quickly as possible and go back to abject poverty again. That’s just the way things are, sometimes.

The thing with the ODSP, is that I can earn a couple of hundred bucks a month, after that it’s fifty cents on the dollar in what they call overpayments. Basically, they do their best to keep you in abject poverty, otherwise someone a lot better off than you would be bitching and whining about cheaters.

Let's just say I'm doing okay and we'll leave it at that.


End

The Right to Die.

Louis Shalako

On behalf of Ontario’s 740,000 + disabled persons, I hereby serve notice that I will be lobbying for the right to death.

After twenty years on an Ontario Disability Support Program pension, which as we all know is really only two-thirds of a pension, I no longer have any confidence in this government, this province or country, this people, to do the right thing for the disabled.

We have seen billions of dollars thrown at the richest and most fortunate Canadians, individuals, corporations, and industries of the most anti-social nature.

To go on like this is to compound cruelty with torment, to temper ignorance with abuse.

We have no one to turn to, no one who listens, no one who cares. Simply incarcerating us really doesn’t provide a solution, (i.e. death.)

The billions of dollars this government pissed away on Ehealth and paying for gas-fired electrical generating plants not to be built might have been better spent on gas chambers and factories producing the finest in gourmet Soylent Green for the gustatory delectation of bourgeois gourmands, who are already eating their young anyways.

http://www.dyingwithdignity.ca/?gclid=CJ2l5ZbIyMQCFQqoaQodDEYAPw

https://www.dreamessays.com/customessays/Euthanasia/3674.htm