What Would A Basic Minimum Income For Ontario Look Like?

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Louis Shalako

What would a basic minimum income look like for Ontario?

It’s very hard to say without knowing what the government’s pilot project actually looks like. 

Hopefully we’ll get more information on that very soon.

Let us assume the goal is to get every citizen at least up to the poverty line. While this number varies according to location across the province, living in Toronto and other major cities being more expensive than living in some other places, let us assume this is about $20,000.00 per year for a single adult.

In Switzerland, they’ll be voting on one such proposal on June 5. If you look closely, you’ll see that the program will be funded approximately 75 % by new taxes and the rest is expected to come from savings in other social programs. We are comparing apples to oranges here, but Switzerland, like Canada and the Province of Ontario are capitalistic, socialist states. They’re relatively affluent, not only in natural resources, but agriculture, technology, and their present state of development.

In Kenya, as little as $250.00 to $400.00 a year can make a big difference in health and welfare outcomes.

In Ontario, the only thing really under discussion is a pilot program, much like the one in Dauphin, Manitoba in the 1970s. If you take a small community, the cost of a pilot program is much less than the institution of such a program over an entire province or country.

Under such circumstances, one could have a very successful pilot program, one costing five or ten or twenty million dollars without ever having to justify it politically, without ever even speculating as to where all the funding might actually come from. Back then, the one in Dauphin cost $17 million overall—pocket change by modern, budgetary standards.

While I have no doubt that the government is prepared to make such a social experiment, (heading to the polls a short time later), one has to wonder just how serious they are at pursuing this to a logical end—or whether this is just another cleverly disguised attempt to gut the Ontario Disability Support Program, or Ontario Works, or whatever.

Proponents usually contend that such programs will be funded entirely by savings in other programs—or they sure don’t mind being misinterpreted along such lines, but if so, then such programs must inevitably be underfunded, for surely the government social programs they are intended to replace have always been underfunded. This has been true since day one, and that includes the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board, and a hundred other programs administered by this government.

Here’s an Ontario Works (welfare) rate chart. A single person would receive, per month, $305.00 for their basic needs and $376.00 for shelter costs—which is about half what I pay for rent, although I’m not on welfare. In this province, benefits are divided into ‘basic needs’ and ‘shelter costs.’ If you don’t have a home, (or at least an address), then you don’t qualify for shelter costs. (The government did away with moving benefits some time ago, although start-up benefits may still be available depending on program. For the most part, these programs have been fiscally gutted by this very same government.)

Back to our point.

That’s $681.00 a month to keep body and soul together. Inevitably, most of that will go for rent, and that’s why people on welfare line up at food banks. They end up homeless and on the street, and they end up in a whole host of unenviable social situations such as divorce, court, jail and in other programs largely dedicated to mental health and addictions. How much of this will be alleviated by living in less stressful social conditions, and how will this translate into sufficient savings and efficiencies to justify the basic minimum income social program?

That’s a real good question and one worth asking.

It’s as much about people as it is about saving money or redistributing income in an era of growing inequality and degenerating social justice.

It’s a simple equation.

Where there is no hope there is no incentive. Life is hard at the lowest socio-economic strata. 

People are the same everywhere. They all need the same things. And it’s just what they can’t get. They’re not going anywhere and they know it. And the day is long—very long. I know that from personal experience. Filling that day leads to social problems largely stemming from boredom, desperation and availability.

The $681.00 a month adds up to $8,172.00 a year. This is approximately $12,000.00 below the poverty line, which I make out to be about $20,000.00 a year in anything but a major city. 

I am referring to Ontario, Canada, 2016, just so we are defining our terms accurately.

Assuming the goal of an anti-poverty program is to bring people up to the poverty line, this is $12,000.00 that has to come from somewhere—somewhere else, as the taxpayers are no doubt already saying.

That’s an additional $1,000.00 a month, which would admittedly change people’s lives. The problem is that there are something like 750,000 clients of the ODSP program in the province, and probably another 125,000 families on Ontario Works. This does not address the numbers of unemployed and underemployed family members who fall below the poverty line. 

Neither does it include the millions of Ontarians working full time hours for minimum, sub-poverty wages. Just for the record, I know a lot of these people personally. My own bias has been disclosed.

Ahem.

If their family income went up, it is entirely possible that their taxable income would also go up—a fact often overlooked by commentators who have never experienced the challenges. 

Basically if you want to tax the poor, first you have to give them a raise. But it is entirely possible that middle class taxes could go down or be reduced under such a system.

The real question is, would that new life cause or incur savings in other areas, to the tune of $1,000.00 a month, or greater, from the ‘mean average’ or median individual in question. 

This is the question the taxpayers should be asking.

For parents with children, or for adults with dependent adults in the household, the no-questions-asked aspect of the proposed basic minimum income has to sound pretty good.

For a single person on disability, (ODSP) it has to sound pretty good. In my own case, I can honestly say that an additional eight or nine hundred bucks a month would make a big difference in my diet, my clothing certainly—and communication, transportation and entertainment. It would allow me to invest a small amount each and every month into my business and maybe even into some kind of savings program.

I’ll be of retirement age in another eight years. After that, the ODSP has no hold on me. It would be nice if the benefits could remain in force even when a recipient went out of province or even out of the country—perhaps for up to six months at a time.

Here’s a funny thing, and I don’t think it’s a contradiction at all. But I get a pension, and I also work full time as a writer; which is admittedly one of the most marginal professions going.

The problem, is that I don’t make enough money in this new abundance economy. That problem is only compounded for people with a family to feed and a home to make and a shit part-time job in some scab industry which is already being subsidized by scab wages, an abundance of unskilled labour and this crazy mind-set that somehow work brings dignity. The truth is that leisure and the arts bring dignity.

The problem is that this is only a trial balloon, never meant to actually float.

You heard it here first.

There’s not enough good jobs to go around, but there’s nothing we can do about poverty per se. There are only so many skills to go around—and colleges and universities and training programs also cost this province a lot of money and there aren’t always enough jobs for those graduates.

But here’s an interesting thing. The federal government already pays Harmonized Sales Tax rebates. They already pay or contribute to Child Daycare Tax Credits. They already pay pension benefits to the elderly and there are federal disability programs. (And it’s a crock of shit because I didn’t qualify.) The province pays plenty to the almost universally excoriated Workplace Safety and Insurance Board.

They’re already spending hundreds of billions between the two levels of government for bloated and inefficient bureaucracies, and yes, this includes the police, court and prison systems. This already includes the medical, hospital and mental health systems. It also employs a lot of people at a relatively high level of income and status. This is a concern that will have to be addressed, to the tune of much angst no doubt.

It is only by bringing in a much smaller government apparatus, and perhaps some incremental increase in tax assessment rates that this program has a hope of succeeding universally, in the long term.

There are already mechanisms in place to pay the money—the federal and provincial income tax systems come to mind. With modern algorithmic systems and self-reporting, with verification through existing channels, the program could be made to work if the political and social will actually exists to do so.

You sort of have to wonder.

END

Burnout.

 

Sitting at that desk all day long.

Louis Shalako

Lately there’s this sense of boredom, a bit of depression and what sure seems like burnout.

I’ve worked pretty hard over the last six years, since publishing my first two novels. Now I have five pen-names, twenty novels and something like a hundred thirty-five ebook titles, with another slew of titles available in paperback.

At some point I just quit blogging for five pen names in rotation. In order to write a bunch of novels, the short stories and submissions sort of fell by the wayside. Every morning, I get up and check the emails. I check the sales account numbers. Then I go on a bunch of websites and read, sometimes for an hour and a half, sometimes two or more hours. I call it ‘the morning repost,’ and I post those stories as many places as I can in order for other people to get the benefit of them.

In the last six years, I worked pretty hard to educate myself as a writer, to build up a platform and to learn at least the basics of everything a person can learn in order to write and publish their own works.

Since January 2015, I wrote six novels of over 60,000 words each. That alone was a ton of work.

It’s difficult to take a day off once you get bitten by the bug, and yet, inevitably, I seem to be slacking off. Finding ideas is not that easy, and lately I haven’t been working at it. I have couple of blank files on the desktop and I haven’t even really thought about them. Publishing # 99 Easy Street as a serial sort of gives me a little something to do, a nice easy job that doesn’t take up too much time.

I have chores left undone, including taxes, price changes, edit and format Easy St., make a cover, all kinds of things really, and it’s like I just don’t care.

Bear in mind, it’s been a long winter if not a particularly harsh one. I’m lucky to get out of here for an hour or two a day. Three or four hours away from the house would be a real good day for me.

I am at this desk pretty much all day, every day, and this has been going on for some time.

At some point, I need to do something different once in a while. This is just what we can’t afford to do after twenty-three years on a very small pension, and after all this time, book sales are not all that impressive.

As somebody once said, if you can quit, then do it—

The trouble is, that if I just gave up on writing, there wouldn’t be much left, and I’d be even more bored than I am now.

END

On Grief.

Louis Shalako

My dad died about four years ago.

The worst of the grief lasted about six months. The first year was pretty rough.

My father was eighty when he passed away.

He had lived a good life.

I knew he had Parkinson’s disease in about 2002, and he passed away, I’m thinking, about September 2012.

I think about him every day, and yet the pain, the loss, the regret is much diminished.

My grandmother, who was 100 and a half years old, died two months later. I don’t know why, but the effect was a lot different.

Maybe it was the two of them leaving so close together. The passing of my grandmother affected me so much less.

I was already numb.

The funny thing is, that my cat was killed by a car. That would be about 2011. The grieving process was exactly the same—the first six months were sheer hell. The first fucking year was pretty bad—and we’re talking a God-damned cat here, not my grandmother…

I had the cat trained.

He would lay flat on his back, sort of under my armpit, laying in bed, his head on my shoulder, purring away and looking up at me with love in his eyes, until I said hey!

You little bastard.

And I that's when I rolled over and went to sleep.

That’s just love or something, and yet I must have loved my grandmother too.

A hundred years is one hell of a long time, and so is eighty years.

But that fucking cat wasn’t even full grown when some poor bastard hit him going down Kathleen St.

It’s all right, Bud.

It can happen to anyone.

END