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.

There Is No Such Thing As An Accident.

Chemical Valley, photo by P199, (Wiki.)

Louis Shalako

There is no such thing as an accident.

Things are caused to happen.

I did three hours of hard physical labour, out in the hot sun today. My left thumb hurts, and on the way home I was sort of wondering what I did to it. Basically, I had just managed to irritate an old injury.

Then I remembered the original injury.

A guy called Jim and I were taking down an old sliding barn door, I forget what plant we were working in. They were going to take the door down and put in a rolling steel, which is much easier to weatherproof. It was just some old warehouse in the back end of a chemical plant somewhere.

Jim, making a buck an hour more than me and with more experience with welding and cutting, had gone all along the top, cutting the welds on a Z-shaped strip of sheet metal that goes over the tracks. It keeps out ice, rain, weather, leaves, anything that could interfere with the smooth operation of the door.

And he had somehow missed one weld, right on the end. Somehow poor old Jim ended up on the left end of a forty foot strip of metal, on a ladder, and I was on the right side when we figured all this out. He’s supporting the weight because every other weld had been cut. He can only hold it up for so long before something has to go. Somehow I ended back up on the top of the ladder, with the welding goggles on, supporting the metal with my left hand, otherwise it’s just going to fall when I cut that last weld, right on the very end.

I had the goggles on, and I managed to find the right spot, and hit it with the torch.

Because I was blinded in the goggles, which have minimal peripheral vision anyways, I had no idea that poor old Jim was pulling, yanking and twisting down on the other end.

I suppose it was a hot day and he was not the brightest light in the firmament, that’s for sure.

As soon as the weld let go, the hundred-pound piece of metal rolled back over my thumb.

Yeah, I was like a monkey on the ladder back then. Young guys are as stupid as shit and you don’t always get to choose your work partner either. What I’m trying to say is that I didn’t fall. I managed to get the goggles up, shut off the torch and somehow not drop the metal strip, which was supported by the inside of my elbow, leaving the four fingers on my left hand free to do all of that...at least until I got the torch shut off.

***

People are funny. They like nothing better than to walk through an opening where people are working—like the time I was trying to adjust an automatic door-closer on the Post Office door down in Corunna. There were actually four doors, but mine was partially open, I was on a small stepladder and it’s actually quite funny to watch people contort themselves like yogic-limbo specialists, rather than go to all the trouble and inconvenience of lifting a hand and opening one of them other fucking doors.

Anyhow, I didn’t drop anything on anybody’s head, in either incident, and that is a good thing.

Because it probably would have killed them.

Guys get killed on the job all the time in this town and every other town.

A lot of the time it’s because they’re in a hurry, or the guy that worked on something before them was a total fucking idiot and they just didn’t see the danger.

Be very careful who you work with and who you work for.

It's not worth getting killed for ten, fifteen or twenty bucks an hour.

It's not even worth it for forty or fifty bucks an hour. It ain't worth it at any price and you need to remember that.

You need to live long enough to cash your paycheque. Trust me on that one. Dead guys can't get served at the typical bank.

If you’re in the passenger side, and your work partner is driving a hundred and forty kilometres an hour in an eighty zone, the truck overloaded with tools, materials and hardware, he’s an idiot. I don’t care if you’ve only got two days experience and he’s been there ten years. He’s still an idiot and at least now you know.

I worked for at least five different industrial door companies when I was younger, and quite frankly some of them were okay and some of them were run by manipulative jerks.

I saw a few things.

Twenty year-old guys aren’t that smart. They don’t know the boss is a shyster or a jerk or just a cheapskate, too dumb to rent a forklift for half a day to complete a $100,000 job.

Know when to walk away from the assholes.

End

What Do I Do Next?

Photo by Louis, a work in progress.

Louis Shalako

I'm coming to the end of my current little landscaping job. It's a lot like coming to the end of a good book, whether reading it or writing it.

What will I do next?

There is that strange attachment to a work in progress, which challenged me physically and psychologically, as well as paying a little money. The money keeps me going day-by-day, and at least while working we don't have to confront larger issues...I worked no more than two or three hours a day, two or three days at a stretch except for the most recent, where I went back five days in a row.

That's my big question. Who else in this town would hire me on such a basis, paying a decent rate and supplying tools and materials...???

That is one very good question. The other question is how much the ODSP will dock next month's pension cheque, and what kind of a position does that leave me in regarding rent, insurance, internet/phone bills, and other fixed costs of subsistence.

 So. What in the hell do I do next?

Hopefully it will be something.

Here are some previous stories.

http://bringerofrain.blogspot.ca/2016/06/back-to-work.html 

 http://bringerofrain.blogspot.ca/2016/06/lets-hope-this-dont-kill-me.html

Let's Hope This Don't Kill Me.

Mulch.

Louis Shalako

My landlord was insisting that I get tenant’s insurance. It’s in the lease and to be honest with you, I’m pretty good about insisting on the terms of the contract myself. You know—stuff like peace and quiet between the hours of eleven p.m. and six a.m. No parties, no harassment, don’t take other people’s parking spots. Don’t make a big stink in the hallways…

Shit like that.

So I guess maybe I earned that one.

This is my home, and they’ve got some kind of investment in the place, and would prefer not to suffer any liabilities.

I sympathize with their position, I really do.

My insurance company was happy enough to hear from me. It’s just another twenty bucks a month for them, right? They don’t care where it comes from. Unfortunately, I’m on ODSP and in the company’s infinite wisdom they decided to take the first two month’s payments out of my bank account about the third week of June. The ODSP insists that while they might cover some other client’s insurance, somehow I don’t qualify for the same assistance.

I’m already getting the maximum shelter allowance of $479.00 a month, right?

By the end of the second week of any month, there is never anything in my bank account…not much, anyways. My Google payment of about six bucks and not much else.

Natural, wood-chip mulch.

Well, that ain’t ever gonna work for you, ergo the payments bounced and this is the big chance to nail you from both ends. The bank has a charge and the insurance company has a charge for NSF payments. And I fucked up two payments according to them, the one for June, which I actually specified in the application, (like a fool), and one for May 1 even though I only called them on the 25^th, (the date of initial coverage according to them.)

The nasty-gram arrived, a registered letter and some postie pounding on my door.

Those fuckers can go on strike anytime they like in my humble opinion…maybe you guys should stay out for a while this time around rather than settling in thirty hours or whatever.

Anyways, I’m fortunate to be building a website for a client, and I’m extremely fortunate to get a little work landscaping, which is an area where I have some experience if not expertise.

(I’ve built a few free websites, but Go Daddy is a new learning curve and of course someone’s paying the bill, which puts a bit of pressure on me.)

So I’ve got a certified cheque for the insurance company, and that will go out Monday morning if I have some kind of envelope to put it in. Also, they’re saying in their letter that as soon as that goes through, they’ll be taking the July payment out of my bank account…in other words, about the third week of July.

So it would be incumbent upon me to make bloody damned sure that I have the money in there, eh, boys and girls?

‘Cause I know how much that one hurts.

The other thing is the credit card. A year and a half ago, my computer blew up and I put a really good one on the credit card. That was about seven hundred bucks and my new, larger monitor wasn’t completely paid off at the time.

In the year and couple of months that I’ve had this present vehicle, it has let me down a few times and nothing’s cheap. I’ve replaced the crankshaft sensor, the camshaft sensor, the multi-function switch, (lights, turn signals, high-beams, fog lamps) and a tire, and then there were the front brake rotors, front brake pads, etc. Coil packs and spark plugs last time around. 

Much (or all) of that went on the credit card. I make some kind of payment every month, but some of these items seem to hang on there for a very long time and it is one hell of an interest rate.

When I need a professional cover image for a new book or story, my favourite stock photo site requires a credit card. They don’t do Paypal, and even if they took debit, there’s never a shit-load of money in my account anyways. The images themselves are less than eight bucks CDN. Lately I can’t even afford one, so I’ve been using my imagination and certain research skills and finding free, public domain images.

So it would be nice to do something about that.

Killing weeds.

If I want to do all that and still eat, then I’m going to have to use my head and maybe even work at it a little bit.

This morning I dug out weeds with a hoe. The dirt, hard packed and very dense, fluffs up and then I have to dig or scrape two or three inches of topsoil and put it somewhere else. Then I shovel black woodchip mulch out of the back of a trailer and spread it around, roughly three or four inches deep. We’re leaving a few blank spots for plants to go in later. Also, the stuff settles and packs, and a bit of raking would smooth that out anyways.

I’m grateful for the work, assuming I can remember to keep gas receipts for the tax people and most likely mileage for the ODSP.

And I’m tired. It’s hard on the back, but I’m being extremely careful not to blow the thing up. 

If I need a pop, or water, then I get one. If I need a smoke, I get one. I sit a few minutes and think about what I need to do next.

I think I’m very fortunate to be able to do this.

Today I worked two and three-quarter hours. There’s a bit of driving, roughly forty-five or fifty kilometres round trip.

Hopefully I will get a chance to work on the website, it’s a long holiday weekend after all and they’re calling for thundershowers tomorrow.

I have a few day’s work there and that’s good.

The gardens are starting to show some promise and I’m looking forward to putting some new and interesting plants in there.

The thing to do is just to keep going back.

Life is like that sometimes, or maybe it’s just me.

I will be back.

End