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

Back to Work.

Photo by KDS444, (Wiki.)

Louis Shalako





Years ago, I had a house and a mortgage. ODSP was paying $930.00 a month at the time.

What with house payments, taxes, heat, hydro, water and insurance, it was a tough go each and every month. I rode a bicycle and lined up at food banks, which sounds familiar to many Canadians. Going back to work was tough too. My first day was two hours--two hours, at ten bucks an hour, picking up shingles and stuffing them into a bin. I drove up to Port Franks to work with my brother.

I went back a few days later, and stripped shingles off of a roof for about four hours including clean-up. Forty bucks and maybe five bucks worth of gas if I was lucky. I can’t really recall now, but Steve might have bought me a coffee and a doughnut.

Sometimes it’s good just to get out of the house.

The thing is to keep going back, I guess. No matter how fucking painful it is. I’m fifty-seven years old this time around, too.

Going back to work, with back problems, and totally out of shape from a fairly sedentary lifestyle, is always going to be hard.

So. I’ve been shoveling a bit of mulch and it’s the same thing: two or three hours a day, max. 

That shoveling and wheeling things around in wheelbarrows is very hard on the back. When you’re all out of shape, it’s pretty exhausting, working in the hot sun. That’s why I go out there early in the morning…I always did prefer to get things done. I don’t mind coming home a bit early and at least I have something to show for it.

Yeah, and I need the money, too. Quite frankly, I seem to be falling behind, with not a hope in hell of paying off my credit card, for example. I would very much like to find another place to live before I strangle somebody…

As far as the book sales go, they’re nothing to write home about.

I had my own company back then, and I reported my income and all of that. You need to stay out of trouble with the ODSP, and don’t forget, there’s a rat born every minute anyways.

That was back in 2002, 2003, and 2004, when I finally wound it up. In addition to roofing with my brother, I also did the commercial interior renovations for four Curves for Women. 

Those were in Petrolia, Glencoe, Blenheim and Tilbury. At some point I had bought an old GMC S-15 from my brother, and when I finally scrapped her, she had 362,000 kilometres on the odometer. Considering that I was going back and forth to London and all these other little towns; that must have been one pretty good little truck.

After a while, I had saved up something like $12,000 and the ODSP was all over me like a dirty shirt because I wasn’t allowed to have that much in my business bank account.

That’s when I bought a Ford Windstar minivan, which was good because the tools were all indoors. You don't want to leave them in the truck overnight, not in this or any other neighbourhood. It had nice captain’s seats and a good view down the road, being a couple of feet higher off the ground as compared to the pickup.

The way things are right now, I need to find some sort of part-time work, and the truth is that the two or three-hour a day thing is only going to take a person so far. The only employers willing to put up with that are essentially relatives, maybe one hell of a good friend somewhere if I had one.

Otherwise I’m not making it, and the rent here goes up each and every year. That’s sort of what happened to my house, essentially. There it was the taxes, which went up from twelve hundred a year to over eighteen hundred in about four years. I was only going to be able to keep the place for so long and I would have had to sell anyways.

The funny thing was, after cleaning the place up, when I sold it, I made around $23,000.00.

That was the equity, the reward supposedly for my risk and my efforts, and in the end I was unable (maybe even afraid) to buy another house. The ODSP was all over it, of course, and so I had to ‘spend it down’, which is their polite way of saying piss the money away as quickly as possible and go back to abject poverty again. That’s just the way things are, sometimes.

The thing with the ODSP, is that I can earn a couple of hundred bucks a month, after that it’s fifty cents on the dollar in what they call overpayments. Basically, they do their best to keep you in abject poverty, otherwise someone a lot better off than you would be bitching and whining about cheaters.

Let's just say I'm doing okay and we'll leave it at that.


End

What Would A Basic Minimum Income For Ontario Look Like?

http://wallpapercave.com/w/AhN6BZh

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