Louis Shalako
Dear Kathleen Wynne, Doug Ford and Andrea Horvath.
Clients of the Ontario Disability Support Program are
living on pensions that are thirty-five to forty percent below the poverty
line. Clients of Ontario Works have a special kind of hell reserved for them as
well.
I ask you for bread, and I ask you for lower rents. I
ask you for a raise in the allowable earnings levels, I ask you for a reduced
rate of clawback for those who do get some work. I ask you for honest social
workers, workers who are on our side instead of yours, social workers who don’t
lie, and cheat, and steal, and try to rip us off. I ask you for social workers
who can answer a simple God-damned question once in a while, and social workers
that can give the same answer twice in a row.
No, somehow, you just can’t do it.
And what do you have to offer? Now that you’re all
running for election.
Money for mental health outreach programs. Money for
pharmacare. Money for the opiate crisis. Money to legalize pot, but then you
expect to make a bundle off of it, don’t you.
Money for front-page
nutritionists. Money for child care. Money to reduce wait times in hospitals.
Money for roads, and bridges, and sewers. Money for just about anything the
electorate desires, only as long as it’s anything, anything, for the love of God, but this—but this.
Hell, there might even be more money for advertising—certainly
we can look forward to more touchy-feely, good-news stories about the eight
hundred to a thousand fucking food banks in this province.
I realize that a million people, living in poverty,
has never been an election issue in this province.
But I would sure like to know, just what the hell your
problem is. It’s quite instructive, watching you reaching down your own throats
and pulling yourselves inside out. It’s quite interesting, to see how wilfully
blind you are, each of you in your own way, to a problem that has gone on long
enough. It’s interesting to see you squirm, and wriggle, and twist and turn any
which way you can, all in an effort, a very strong effort, to ignore the
realities for too many Ontario families.
It is intolerable, it is a disgrace, and may it come
back to haunt each and every one of you in your own way, at your own time, and
in your own place.
That last item is something none of us will ever know.
Give us a place—a place to stand. A place to grow. A
place we call Ontari-ari-fucking-oh.
Oh, one more thing—every God-damned one of you.
Fuck
off.
END
Thank you for reading.
