- Ontario Works (Welfare in a new dress). The stated aim of this program is to help people without assets or income survive and ultimately find legal income-producing activity. The driving principle is laudatory but the program itself often is of miniscule help to many folks participating in it. Apart from providing a woefully inadequate monthly stipend, it is bound by suspicion driven rules that claw back portions of the laughably inadequate benefit and often penalize people who are making great efforts to get back into the workforce. It provides a pittance to many participants who cannot obtain work no matter how many seminars on resumes, interviewing and networking they are required to attend and no matter how many hours of counseling and encouragement the O.W. front line workers provide. As an example, a 55 year old Tamil woman immigrant, recently widowed, possessing zilch work experience, speaking only rudimentary English and a frightened, lonely stranger in a strange land is flat out not employable. On the tiny stipend she gets from O.W., her only productive activity is that of surviving day to day. The O.W. counsellors are required to keep trying to help her despite the futility and so they often neglect other clients who might actually succeed in finding a living wage. They yearn for a government program that would simply support this beleaguered soul at a decent subsistence level but there isn't one except Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP).
- ODSP, like OW is an excellent plan in principle. It actually provides enough money to support a prudent person at a subsistence level. To qualify for this program, you must have a physical or mental health disability severe enough that a physician or psychiatrist would assert that you are unemployable and will remain so for as long as the disability persists. Guess what? OW counsellors and administrators are motivated to search for disabilities among their unemployables and encourage them to apply for ODSP if they find anything that might pass medical muster. Many unemployables (and a few lazy employable people) find out about the program and limp, wheeze or babble to physicians in hope of being declared unfit to work. Many do not qualify. Being older and creaky in the joints is not considered a physical disability. Being ill-educated, inarticulate, hungry, lonely and scared is not a mental health disability. And so, many seek to appeal.
- Eligible and ineligible applicants alike get turned (again) down in wholesale lots. The review tribunals have of late become cost driven and bloody-minded such that applicants who turn to assistance from their Community Legal Aid Clinics and obtain representation before the tribunals end up no further ahead. This only serves to increase their distress and fuel their cynicism about a faceless "System" that apparently doesn't give a shit about them. The Clinics - another excellent example of principled government response to the problems of people living in poverty - are themselves hamstrung by inadequate funding and wrong-headed micro management by their funding organization. Not surprisingly given the problems with OW and ODSP the staff are overloaded with ODSP cases and spending gobs of unproductive time in hallways on uncomfortable chairs waiting to present to the review tribunals. Meanwhile, new cases pile up on their desks to the extent that they feel like they are using sieves to bail out sinking boats. The fact that they keep trying is a wonder of the modern age. As if the situation was not bad enough, the income level at which people qualify for legal aid was established over ten years ago. It was too low then and is now so out of line with economic realities that it should be an embarrassment to the government of the day. But politicians do not embarrass easily. Their priorities lie elsewhere. Meanwhile, the legal aid clinics have to turn away many people who are losing their homes, being jerked around by bureaucrats, abused in their minimum wage non union workplaces, fired without cause or compensation, denied Employment Insurance benefits - the list could go on - because the rules say that they are just too well off. Is someone earning $30,000. per year and caring for two or three kids in our current urban economy too well off? Someone in that situation does not have a hope in hell off affording the services of a private practice lawyer and so is left to suck it up. Screwed again.
The meta problem here is not just ignorant or uncaring politicians who do not grasp the nettle for all that they have considerable culpability. It is not simply a matter of the government coughing up more money, for all that a few more bucks would really help. Nor is it lack of effective cooperation/communication among social agencies although that lack is real and apparent. It is certainly not deficiency in the skill and dedication of front line workers who work with a will to ameliorate the corrosive effects of poverty but are not equipped to bring money, resources and collective wisdom to the pressing problem of actually eliminating poverty.
The problem is our collective failure to understand the causes of poverty and concurrently realize that poverty does not just grind the hope and humanity out of the poor and their children, it damages all of us as it tears at the fabric of our society. Ultimately, it makes us less free, less safe, more frightened, callous and withdrawn. It causes us to retreat to indifference and denial or treat those in poverty with contempt and abuse. We tell the panhandler to get a job or simply yell "Piss off!" We call the police when some homeless guy pees on a wall. Slowly but surely we come to see the poor as "lesser than", undeserving, lacking in character and gumption and authors of their own sorry situations. Our politicians hear this and respond. Alas, their responses too often demean them and demean all of us.
Municipal politicians enact by laws that turn the marginally housed into the homeless. They support or ignore the caustic whining of community groups who oppose shelters and hospices in their neighborhoods despite the transparent stupidity of their complaints. These people of the narrow view seem to think that it is better to leave impoverished, addicted often disabled "losers" on the streets unsupervised and creating mischief than to have them safely housed, respectfully supervised, receiving medical attention and being helped to reclaim their tattered lives.
At the provincial and federal levels our elected leaders cleave to costly and demonstrably ineffective responses. For them, it gets votes to be "tough on crime", build more prisons, attack mythical welfare cheats and "save" money by reducing support programs. The reality is that this punitive chest thumping approach costs unconscionable gobs of money and worsens the problem. It drives people into petty crime, addictions and worse. Incarceration is hugely expensive and has little rehabilitative effect. The incarcerated eventually return to their communities embittered, more unemployable than before, more prone to addiction and more likely to engage in crime. As the problem worsens as a result of the political non-solution, our senior levels of government respond with more punitive action and the cycle continues. I think it was Albert Einstein who declared, "... the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over in hope of a different result." Some call this the triumph of hope over reason. Others use stronger language.
Better minds than mine have engaged the problem of poverty reduction. Wiser men and women have spent uncounted years yelling into the political void through learned dissertations, finely written task force reports, "hair on fire" popular articles, letters to editors and passionate challenges to politicians. The effect has been one of sending prayers to the gods for intercession and having them all go to voice mail.
"Your call is important to us...". Apparently, it isn't.
I cannot propose a grand solution - I do not have one. Fortunately, others have. What I can do is remind everyone I can reach that Ontario goes to the polls on October 6th. Please vote, and as you make your decisions give some thought as to which contending party and which individual candidates have the best grasp of the destructive problem of poverty and therefore which ones might champion some approaches that would work.
Votes do not go to voice mail.
The problem is our collective failure to understand the causes of poverty and concurrently realize that poverty does not just grind the hope and humanity out of the poor and their children, it damages all of us as it tears at the fabric of our society. Ultimately, it makes us less free, less safe, more frightened, callous and withdrawn. It causes us to retreat to indifference and denial or treat those in poverty with contempt and abuse. We tell the panhandler to get a job or simply yell "Piss off!" We call the police when some homeless guy pees on a wall. Slowly but surely we come to see the poor as "lesser than", undeserving, lacking in character and gumption and authors of their own sorry situations. Our politicians hear this and respond. Alas, their responses too often demean them and demean all of us.
Municipal politicians enact by laws that turn the marginally housed into the homeless. They support or ignore the caustic whining of community groups who oppose shelters and hospices in their neighborhoods despite the transparent stupidity of their complaints. These people of the narrow view seem to think that it is better to leave impoverished, addicted often disabled "losers" on the streets unsupervised and creating mischief than to have them safely housed, respectfully supervised, receiving medical attention and being helped to reclaim their tattered lives.
At the provincial and federal levels our elected leaders cleave to costly and demonstrably ineffective responses. For them, it gets votes to be "tough on crime", build more prisons, attack mythical welfare cheats and "save" money by reducing support programs. The reality is that this punitive chest thumping approach costs unconscionable gobs of money and worsens the problem. It drives people into petty crime, addictions and worse. Incarceration is hugely expensive and has little rehabilitative effect. The incarcerated eventually return to their communities embittered, more unemployable than before, more prone to addiction and more likely to engage in crime. As the problem worsens as a result of the political non-solution, our senior levels of government respond with more punitive action and the cycle continues. I think it was Albert Einstein who declared, "... the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over in hope of a different result." Some call this the triumph of hope over reason. Others use stronger language.
Better minds than mine have engaged the problem of poverty reduction. Wiser men and women have spent uncounted years yelling into the political void through learned dissertations, finely written task force reports, "hair on fire" popular articles, letters to editors and passionate challenges to politicians. The effect has been one of sending prayers to the gods for intercession and having them all go to voice mail.
"Your call is important to us...". Apparently, it isn't.
I cannot propose a grand solution - I do not have one. Fortunately, others have. What I can do is remind everyone I can reach that Ontario goes to the polls on October 6th. Please vote, and as you make your decisions give some thought as to which contending party and which individual candidates have the best grasp of the destructive problem of poverty and therefore which ones might champion some approaches that would work.
Votes do not go to voice mail.
