Louis Shalako
Okay. I just sent this email to incomesecurity@ontario.ca
Hey, guys.
May I respectfully suggest.
This government would do a very great service to Ontario’s 750,000 clients of the ODSP if they were to raise the allowable earnings from business and employment.
This might be to raise the rate for a single person from $200.00 up to $500.00 per month, and something on the order of $1,000.00 to $1,500.00 per month for single adults with a family of four, i.e., three dependents. A second spouse might qualify for another $350.00 in this scheme.
This government might also consider reducing the rate of clawback, say going from fifty cents on the dollar to something more like twenty-five percent.
The mileage rate for business, employment or medical travel should be raised one cent per year for the next fifteen years, reflecting relatively high fuel and transportation costs and the aging of the population, with a view to preventative medicine and quality of life.
This government should consider a Special Housing Benefit for clients of the Ontario Disability Support Program. This would be over and above proposed and pending provincial and federal housing benefits. This is because clients on the base pension are still at thirty-five or forty percent below the poverty line, this at a time when rents are easily running at 70 % of the pension, in this writer’s experience. Clients are still lining up at food banks, scrambling for odd jobs, and trying to avoid making the smallest mistake, which is stressful to say the least.
Certain disincentives to employment should be addressed, not the least of which is certain bogus mathematical processes of the ODSP and Ontario Works.
Consider the following problem, (and I know you will laugh when you read it. Yet you also know it is true.)
A client makes exactly $200.00 over the allowable limit in any given year. Let’s call it 2017.
This entitles the ODSP to a fifty percent clawback, of $100.00, off of the total yearly pension and an overpayment is assessed.
The next year, the client works exactly the same hours at the same rate of pay. They’re $200.00 over the allowable earnings limit. Again, the ODSP has the right to assess an overpayment of fifty percent. And so, therefore, ergo, they take another $100.00 off of the yearly pension benefit. As we can easily see, a pension, (using nice, simple, round figures), that once stood at $13,500.00 per year is being eroded, at a rate of $100.00 per year, and yet the client is no better off—in fact, in this scenario, the fact that they are working, no more and no less hours, at the same rate of pay, chips away at their eligible benefit.
They’re losing a hundred bucks a year, for the privilege of saying that they’re working.
Of course, most of us aren’t really capable of doing the math, are we?
And we never think to ask the question.
Louis
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