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
Thank you for reading.
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