I promised to write about food. So here it is.
When I was part of the employed population my concerns about food were mainly around where to get it efficiently, how to eat it in a socially acceptable way (I have to be fed and it takes me longer to eat than typical, both of which can make for awkward moments at business lunches) and how to dance with my diabetes. The easiest way to address these concerns was to buy a lot of take out food, eat some of it as leftovers and, eat a third of my meal at social functions so I could keep up. I expected to throw away lots of my food but I did my best to minimize waste and to share my abundance. For example, at restaurants, I usually attempted to co-order with someone, sharing my appetizer and dessert, so that we could all order less and eat a broader range of selections.
These strategies are not unlike the ones typically used by people who work for money. In other words I ate like most employed people who have no Mom-like person at home to shop, prepare and clean up. For example I have heard it said that as Poland moved into a capitalistic economy in the 80’s and 90’s (?) there was a huge rise of the use of restaurants and take out establishments.
As an ODSP recipient the situation is quite different. First and foremost I have less than $300/month to spend on food. How can this be? Well, the after rent amount of money has to cover toothpaste, toilet paper, laundry, cleaning supplies, over-the-counter medication, the phone, transportation etc, etc. Under certain circumstances you can get an allowance for transportation. But to get this benefit a person must prove a need and be willing to show up in Doctor’s offices several times a month. I don’t know about you but I’ve certainly noticed a direct connection between heavy use of the medical system and being sick, and it’s not a one way relationship. Too much doctoring can ruin your health. I’m not about to put myself in that type of jeopardy!
The obvious answer to not having enough money is to get free food. As a person who claimed less then $12,000 income last year, I am eligible for the use of the Food Bank. I signed up for one and was qualified to go once per week.
The food bank I have been assigned to is also the provincial distribution warehouse for the Daily Bread Food Bank. (By the way you nearly never can get bread at the Daily Bread Food Bank – Roberts, NOW Magazine, April 22, 2010.) The access for wheelchair users to our local food distribution area is through the shipping and receiving area. I have been warned to be careful of the forklifts. I’ve had the opportunity to see the workings of the system behind the scenes because of this access difference. Regular “clients” never go through the shipping area.
One of my observations is that what I get to choose from when I ultimately get to the distribution room has a much smaller selection range then what is in storage in the warehouse. I can’t say at this point why that would be but it certainly is worth exploring. There is another story in there!
One other comment about the food bank warehouse is that it is in a building next door to the Toronto Police College and otherwise surrounded by industrial activities. A person who walks or uses public transportation has to carry several loaded shopping bags at least 7 blocks to get to any residential area and 1 long block to get to a bus line. Clearly many of us who use the food bank are there because we are not “fit” in the usual sense. This means that “clients” spent at least $6 on 2 bus tickets to use this service. That’s $24 a month out of a meagre income.
Once past the shipping area there are 3 sign-in steps. Typically the food bank is open 4 days a week for approximately 4 hours. If it opens at 2pm the first sign-in time is 1pm. So people come into a large room, put their name in a book and sit on a bench to wait. Sometime during this waiting period each person goes to a small office where a volunteer records their use of the food bank, ensuring that they are using the service only once that week.
This step is set up as a job training site. The person updating the record at the computer clearly is unfamiliar with data systems. The data enterer issues the “client” a white, dry erase card that lets the other volunteers know how much food the “client” is permitted to have. My card will say “1” in black marker ink At this point I may proceed to the 2nd waiting area – and wait.
When the door opens between the 2nd waiting room and the actual distribution room I sign my name into another registry and hand my ticket to another volunteer who has to refer to a dry erase bulletin board on the wall. This board has an updatable chart that lets the distribution volunteer know what categories a person with a “1” may select from and how many items from each category they may have. People with different numbers and/or a sign on their card that indicates there is a baby in their household have allowances that can vary by both category and quantity. This moment of entry is rife with confusion as distribution volunteers and “clients” assess what their real choices are.
My sense of it is that confusion arises from numerous factors. One is that the volunteers who distribute the food are not clear about what food belongs to which categories. Secondly, every volunteer I have met genuinely wants to give me something that I would like you eat and that I know how to use. This can lead to an interesting dance because some volunteers have very different food preferences and experiences from my own. All have been visibly frustrated by the limitations of what is available to them to give out to me.
I don’t claim that my experience is the same as every other “client”. For one thing I have a “worker” with me. My PCA who has driven me to the food bank comes in with me to assist me. The officials of the food bank (of which as far as I can tell there is only 1 or possibly 2) have deemed that this means that I should always go to the front of the line. It also means that all the volunteers instantly talk to my “worker” instead of to me, and my “worker” is trained to get them to talk to me instead of to them. And so we go through a very friendly and fascination dance of pointing and waving and negotiating what food I will actually get to take home.
As I mentioned before I am diabetic. I PRIDE myself on the fact that I am very good at managing my blood sugar so well that my bi-annual test typically indicates that I am not diabetic. This of course is not true and if I ceased for even two weeks to do what I have taught myself over 15 years to do to manage my blood sugar I would be in a serious situation. I also have chewing and swallowing difficulties. The food I eat has to be low in sugar, high in protein and moisture, and easily turned into a pasty but tasty mix.
Ideal foods for this process are canned tuna and salmon, breakfast cereals with no added sugar, juices with no added sugar, canned chilli, and the like. The only protein that I’ve seen in the food bank with one exception is hot dogs and sandwich meats. Milk is frequently available but typically so old that it won’t last a week. The only cheese, if any, is the processed, sliced kind. There are endless cans of pre-sugared anything you can imagine, lots of crackers, lots of sweet snacks and a few old and tired vegetables. Out of this I must design a diabetic-friendly menu. (By the way in a span of 5 weeks I received one roll of toilet paper.)
Obviously I can’t depend on the food bank to stay healthy. I, like other people who use the food bank, quickly invented a number of strategies for coping. I went to the support group meeting to talk to people about their strategies, but I had little chance. As I mentioned in my previous blog entry (Exploration) advocacy tends always to be the main topic on the table. But one woman did tell me some interesting ideas.
For example, she volunteers at a place that is a distribution point for retail organic food. Volunteers receive a free box of food that is individualized to their needs and preferences. The volunteers have to be able to lift heavy boxes. (I guess they don’t have any forklifts.) I’m willing to see if there is anything that I could do for that group that would help them out and give me status!
Last Friday the ODSP support group did spend considerable time talking about the ongoing tussle between the Government and the recipients over who is eligible for the “special” allowance for “special” diets. Many service providers have had their hands slapped for signing up ODSP recipients as “special” in their food needs. Because of this practice the government is trying to restrict the use of this allowance. I have not yet asked for the special allowance because I do not want to get stuck in the fight if I can avoid it.
So here are some of my strategies. Some of my personal assistants bring me food that they or their colleagues have left over from other functions. In turn I sometimes give them some of the food I’ve accumulate at the food bank that I can’t use - foods like sweet snacks, certain kinds of canned beans, or overwhelming amounts of pasta…you can always get pasta at the food bank. Secondly I allow my father and others to buy me lunch on a very frequent basis. Thirdly I have been adapting recipes to mix various purchased food with food bank offerings. A Polish deli in my neighbourhood sells bottles of pickled herring at a very reasonable price. It’s a good breakfast protein served with the Swiss Chalet sour cream mini-containers sometimes available at the food bank. The jellied dessert mix is too sweet but mixed with the cranberry sauce that one volunteer gave me three large cans of it gelled into a less sweet dessert that goes down well with the pain pills I have to chew. (ODSP doesn’t cover the liquid version of Advil and I can’t swallow well!) One week we made a large soup out of the tired vegetables and some of the food bank cans of chicken noodle soup. We put a lot of it in the freezer.
My chief point is that very little of this has to do with eating. So much of it has to do with negotiating a path through other people’s vision of what poor people need. Most “clients” try to be nice about it, but the fact is that we go to enormous physical, emotional and mental effort to manage the help that is provided because we are “needy”. But imagine the life of someone who spends much time and energy, and scarce bus fare, to use a food bank, then at home spends more time and energy to prepare and store lower quality food in such a way that it will last at least a week. Where will this person also find important time, energy and mental capacity to learn new skills and find a job?
Imagine a different picture. Imagine the same person taking real money or a widely accepted debit card to the stores and restaurants of their choice, socializing with neighbours and people with real jobs and sharing time at typical coffee break establishments while attending a local college or retraining program. Leading the same life style of a valued citizen can make available a very different future.
My conclusion continues to be that the poor are intended to be poor!! The system ensures that it is so. Poverty IS the future intended for the poor.
I believe that all the volunteers I have met so far are people who are on ODSP or some other kind of stipend. It is my intention when it is feasible to interview them about how they negotiate being poor and contribute to the poverty system. Theirs are definitely other stories!
Judith
Monday, May 31, 2010
Saturday, May 29, 2010
Exploration
I’m not sure which other story I intended to talk about this time. One of these days I will go back and pick up some threads. Yesterday I went to my first ODSP Support Group, and I want to say something about that right now.
When I originally heard about the ODSP Support Group, it was my intention to go for my own benefit. I wanted to (and still do!) share strategies and get the value of other people’s experience living this way. I also wanted and want to sustain my personal identity as a non-ablebodied individual (ie. a crip). (There is another story – my personal struggle to be seen and to know myself as both competent and non-ablebodied.)
Now I have also committed myself to keeping up this blog on a regular basis. It is my intention in doing this blog to highlight other people’s stories as well as my own. Going to the support group has taken on a research flavour. I am expecting that I will run into people who will be willing to share their perspective in this blog. At the same time, I must be cautious as quite naturally, people who are negotiating poverty as a way of life don’t necessarily want other people to know very much about their story.
When I arrived at the meeting there were three people present and another person arrived some time after me. One man clearly had the “chair” role and dominated the majority of the conversation. As the hour and a half unfolded it became clear that he has a WEALTH of resources and skills in a number of areas, from how to pull down TV signals that are being blocked from non-paying viewers to how to analyze the hidden agenda motivations of city and provincial politicians.
At first it was difficult to get a clear view of what the others’ contributions to the group were, mostly because they sat quietly while the Chair talked. But I am a patient person in some contexts and pretty good at asking questions that throw people into different social dynamics. Eventually other people began to speak up and share their experiences as well.
Oh my God, I’m hearing another story coming along. About ten minutes into the meeting I began to feel that old familiar feeling of excitement over the possibility of getting really involved in this group and steering its dynamics to a more democratic conversation. But, (damn it) I am plenty busy enough already and I am not going to take on yet another project!!!
So I took another persons phone number – he does not have enough income or social capacity to have a reliable internet source and his own email. I am hopeful that he and I will be able to create a page for this blog. His contributions about negotiating poverty were intriguing.
I got what I went for in a number of ways and I certainly intend to go back. Firstly I got some good ideas about how to get access to free food that is worth eating. Secondly I got a really good look at what the social and political landscape looks like to the people who use the ODSP benefit.
I want to write about food as a topic in my next blog entry. Right now what I want to say is how disabling I think it is that vulnerable and marginalized people so quickly adopt the agenda of fighting the system. Basically, for an hour and a half, I heard stories and commentary about a long and largely fruitless battle that people in Toronto have engaged with the city and with the province around the impact of their poverty.
Of course people need to fight back, or so it would seem. Somehow we imagine that those who created and run a system that leaves us busily scrambling for basics and daily managing the agenda of the system – we imagine that these people are simply ignorant of our situation and that if we tell them often enough and loudly enough and in as many ways as possible what we’re struggling with then they’ll fix it.
In my view it is clear that having us scramble IS the agenda of the system. The more we scramble the more the system is operating as it should. There is no end to the amount of begging and scrambling that the system desires. The more we do it the bigger it gets.
In my lifetime the poverty-inducing social service system has grown humungously, far outstripping the growth in population. It is a huge part of the Ontario and Canadian economy. Generating and managing poverty is what keeps hundreds and thousands of politicians, social service people and managers employed.
Another essential question for our society to answer if there is ever going to be a real reduction of poverty, or - God forbid – an END to poverty, we have to figure out what else these people, the bureaucrats, politicians and system managers, can do with their lives.
What is largely hidden from our own eyes is how gifted and skilled we are at living the way we do. It is my intention in this blog to highlight the many and valuable contributions that people who are labelled as “needy” are making to society. Some of the stories will be my own. Some will be from the people I meet along the way.
So far I have largely been setting the context. It’s a tricky part of this work because most readers will hear me as complaining. It is automatic to assume that people who need something are complaining. It is very difficult for us to hear ourselves or be heard as saying something that is a contribution. Largely, we have had no practice in speaking as valued citizens. Certainly no one has ever taught us or encouraged us to speak as valued citizens. If we were actually seen as valued citizens it would be impossible to sustain such a massive effort to help us.
Before I go any further I must make it clear that I am not advocating for abandonment. There is no such thing as a citizen who is not supported to participate. In other words, a fundamental purpose of what we call society is to provide the infrastructure that supports people to participate in the society. The citizen and his or her society are constantly in a dynamic relationship.
A valued citizen enjoys support which is transparent. This means that a citizen is continuously using support while virtually never noticing that she or he is using support. The person who jumps in a car, hops onto the freeway, arrives at work, turns the keys over to a valet, gets on an elevator to the fifteenth floor, turns on the internet and checks messages on a blackberry and asks her executive assistant to organize a meeting with lunch provided rarely thinks while doing all this that she is accessing the resources of at least eight or nine integrated support systems and the combined efforts of hundreds of thousands of people who sustain the roads, the car industry, the internet, the phone system, the employment system, the food distribution system, the elevators, the hydro-electric system, etc. She probably imagines herself to be a competent, independent-minded, creative multi-tasker.
A chief characteristic of support systems that service valued citizens is that the citizen can forget that the system is there. Participation is hindered when the participant has to manage the system. Remember what happens when your favourite freeway is blocked by construction and you have to start renegotiating your trajectory, your timing and your temper.
The “support system” built around the “needy” is designed to be constantly in the face of the user with no transparency or invisibility. The user of the poverty system is encouraged in every possible way from the carrot to the stick, to participate in managing the system. The obvious result is the person’s participation in creating society is eliminated or nearly so. The invention of “neediness” eliminates democracy.
Support systems for valued citizens can be highly individualized. The issue is not that so called needy people have odd characteristics that don’t easily fit into regular life. It is not really an issue that somebody who has seizures or who uses a wheelchair or sees and hears things that other people don’t is “odd” and may require very personalized support in order to participate. Executives of multi-national corporations have lots of minute by minute personalized support on top of the background of society-wide support. The issue is that our society is not set up for full participation.
Our society designed to limit full participation to approximately fifteen percent of the population. This means that there must be a justification for minimizing the participation of eighty-five percent of the population.
The invention of neediness has taken hundreds of years to unfold. Who knows how long it will take to invent something else – something we can call genuine democracy!
My commitment is to continuously put forward that all people contribute to society and would do so much better if we were properly supported as valued citizens. Currently poor people are contributing as poor people, spending hours and hours everyday supporting the jobs of the people in the service industry. Most of the time we add to that contribution by creating advocacy groups and “fighting the system.” I believe that it is important for us to minimize the fighting and take that time and energy to discover our own giftedness and to imagine ourselves as the valued citizens that we actually are.
Only then, I believe, will we actually be able to shift the society into the democratic future we all so richly deserve.
Judith
When I originally heard about the ODSP Support Group, it was my intention to go for my own benefit. I wanted to (and still do!) share strategies and get the value of other people’s experience living this way. I also wanted and want to sustain my personal identity as a non-ablebodied individual (ie. a crip). (There is another story – my personal struggle to be seen and to know myself as both competent and non-ablebodied.)
Now I have also committed myself to keeping up this blog on a regular basis. It is my intention in doing this blog to highlight other people’s stories as well as my own. Going to the support group has taken on a research flavour. I am expecting that I will run into people who will be willing to share their perspective in this blog. At the same time, I must be cautious as quite naturally, people who are negotiating poverty as a way of life don’t necessarily want other people to know very much about their story.
When I arrived at the meeting there were three people present and another person arrived some time after me. One man clearly had the “chair” role and dominated the majority of the conversation. As the hour and a half unfolded it became clear that he has a WEALTH of resources and skills in a number of areas, from how to pull down TV signals that are being blocked from non-paying viewers to how to analyze the hidden agenda motivations of city and provincial politicians.
At first it was difficult to get a clear view of what the others’ contributions to the group were, mostly because they sat quietly while the Chair talked. But I am a patient person in some contexts and pretty good at asking questions that throw people into different social dynamics. Eventually other people began to speak up and share their experiences as well.
Oh my God, I’m hearing another story coming along. About ten minutes into the meeting I began to feel that old familiar feeling of excitement over the possibility of getting really involved in this group and steering its dynamics to a more democratic conversation. But, (damn it) I am plenty busy enough already and I am not going to take on yet another project!!!
So I took another persons phone number – he does not have enough income or social capacity to have a reliable internet source and his own email. I am hopeful that he and I will be able to create a page for this blog. His contributions about negotiating poverty were intriguing.
I got what I went for in a number of ways and I certainly intend to go back. Firstly I got some good ideas about how to get access to free food that is worth eating. Secondly I got a really good look at what the social and political landscape looks like to the people who use the ODSP benefit.
I want to write about food as a topic in my next blog entry. Right now what I want to say is how disabling I think it is that vulnerable and marginalized people so quickly adopt the agenda of fighting the system. Basically, for an hour and a half, I heard stories and commentary about a long and largely fruitless battle that people in Toronto have engaged with the city and with the province around the impact of their poverty.
Of course people need to fight back, or so it would seem. Somehow we imagine that those who created and run a system that leaves us busily scrambling for basics and daily managing the agenda of the system – we imagine that these people are simply ignorant of our situation and that if we tell them often enough and loudly enough and in as many ways as possible what we’re struggling with then they’ll fix it.
In my view it is clear that having us scramble IS the agenda of the system. The more we scramble the more the system is operating as it should. There is no end to the amount of begging and scrambling that the system desires. The more we do it the bigger it gets.
In my lifetime the poverty-inducing social service system has grown humungously, far outstripping the growth in population. It is a huge part of the Ontario and Canadian economy. Generating and managing poverty is what keeps hundreds and thousands of politicians, social service people and managers employed.
Another essential question for our society to answer if there is ever going to be a real reduction of poverty, or - God forbid – an END to poverty, we have to figure out what else these people, the bureaucrats, politicians and system managers, can do with their lives.
What is largely hidden from our own eyes is how gifted and skilled we are at living the way we do. It is my intention in this blog to highlight the many and valuable contributions that people who are labelled as “needy” are making to society. Some of the stories will be my own. Some will be from the people I meet along the way.
So far I have largely been setting the context. It’s a tricky part of this work because most readers will hear me as complaining. It is automatic to assume that people who need something are complaining. It is very difficult for us to hear ourselves or be heard as saying something that is a contribution. Largely, we have had no practice in speaking as valued citizens. Certainly no one has ever taught us or encouraged us to speak as valued citizens. If we were actually seen as valued citizens it would be impossible to sustain such a massive effort to help us.
Before I go any further I must make it clear that I am not advocating for abandonment. There is no such thing as a citizen who is not supported to participate. In other words, a fundamental purpose of what we call society is to provide the infrastructure that supports people to participate in the society. The citizen and his or her society are constantly in a dynamic relationship.
A valued citizen enjoys support which is transparent. This means that a citizen is continuously using support while virtually never noticing that she or he is using support. The person who jumps in a car, hops onto the freeway, arrives at work, turns the keys over to a valet, gets on an elevator to the fifteenth floor, turns on the internet and checks messages on a blackberry and asks her executive assistant to organize a meeting with lunch provided rarely thinks while doing all this that she is accessing the resources of at least eight or nine integrated support systems and the combined efforts of hundreds of thousands of people who sustain the roads, the car industry, the internet, the phone system, the employment system, the food distribution system, the elevators, the hydro-electric system, etc. She probably imagines herself to be a competent, independent-minded, creative multi-tasker.
A chief characteristic of support systems that service valued citizens is that the citizen can forget that the system is there. Participation is hindered when the participant has to manage the system. Remember what happens when your favourite freeway is blocked by construction and you have to start renegotiating your trajectory, your timing and your temper.
The “support system” built around the “needy” is designed to be constantly in the face of the user with no transparency or invisibility. The user of the poverty system is encouraged in every possible way from the carrot to the stick, to participate in managing the system. The obvious result is the person’s participation in creating society is eliminated or nearly so. The invention of “neediness” eliminates democracy.
Support systems for valued citizens can be highly individualized. The issue is not that so called needy people have odd characteristics that don’t easily fit into regular life. It is not really an issue that somebody who has seizures or who uses a wheelchair or sees and hears things that other people don’t is “odd” and may require very personalized support in order to participate. Executives of multi-national corporations have lots of minute by minute personalized support on top of the background of society-wide support. The issue is that our society is not set up for full participation.
Our society designed to limit full participation to approximately fifteen percent of the population. This means that there must be a justification for minimizing the participation of eighty-five percent of the population.
The invention of neediness has taken hundreds of years to unfold. Who knows how long it will take to invent something else – something we can call genuine democracy!
My commitment is to continuously put forward that all people contribute to society and would do so much better if we were properly supported as valued citizens. Currently poor people are contributing as poor people, spending hours and hours everyday supporting the jobs of the people in the service industry. Most of the time we add to that contribution by creating advocacy groups and “fighting the system.” I believe that it is important for us to minimize the fighting and take that time and energy to discover our own giftedness and to imagine ourselves as the valued citizens that we actually are.
Only then, I believe, will we actually be able to shift the society into the democratic future we all so richly deserve.
Judith
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Assets
This story may not make much sense unless you have read “Reinstatement”, the previous blog posting, so if you get lost try reading that one.
Although you might think that the reason the ODSP benefit was invented was to support people with disabilities in meeting costs that are prohibitive so they get a “level playing field” that isn’t the main reason behind it. ODSP is a part of the Ministry of Community and Social Services – bluntly, this is Ontario’s welfare ministry.
The ancient root of welfare is the “poor laws”. In the early days of capitalism, industrialization and understanding of genetics and evolution the belief was held that it was a personal lack of will to be poor. Laws were made to make being poor a criminal offence. Prisons and workhouses were built.
Obviously, many people with disabilities often cannot work at regular jobs so many were poor. Since having a disability is clearly not a matter of lack of willpower even the most individualistic, self-made folks had to figure out a different approach to creating sustainability for people with disabilities or face them starving to death in the streets.
So tacked on to the poor laws was a definition of a loop hole which says that “being disabled” is equal to being “unemployable” and in such a case a person is entitled to welfare. Of course there also had to be a way to close the loop hole, so programs were also developed to “rehabilitate”, “train” and “educate” so a person could become employable. Then, of course, if one actually becomes employable, suddenly one is legally not disabled, the welfare disappears, the extra costs swamp the budget, poverty ensues and one is a criminal.
This definitional trap has been dressed up in many different forms over the decades but never has the fundamental idea of welfare been successfully challenged. The attitudes towards poverty and disability are still that if you look hard enough at the circumstances of a person with a disability you will find either a lazy bum or a criminal or possibly both!
To successfully be disabled in the view of the system – ODSP – you must be poor, unemployed and be literate enough to inform your “Case Worker” each and every month of exactly how much money did or did not flow into your possession. The on-the-ground definition of “poor” is that you must have no more than $4000 in all your bank accounts. The on-the-ground definition of “unemployed” is that you may not get paid for work, and if you do it must be reported and your cheque will be reduced at approximately 50% of amount earned until you don’t get a cheque, and get cut off from the medical, dental and equipment benefits as well. (For me this figure is approximately $1700/month.) The on-the-ground definition of “literate” means you can successfully check off boxes on a form that requests information that usually has absolutely no relevance to the person’s actual circumstances, and that you can fax this form on time to your “Income Support Worker”, even when the ODSP fax is jammed up with the other hundreds of faxes people are trying to send.
Now to my situation. I was employed until October 2007. As a consepquence, when I retired I had earned a small pension fund, a little bit less than $12,000. This pension is “locked-in”. That means that I cannot touch it until I am 65. I had also been saving over the years and although I had not been a very successful saver (for all the reasons mentioned in the previous blog, “reinstatement”,about extraordinary costs) I had another Mutual Fund. Finally, and as a matter of great generosity of my mother who died 3 years ago and my father who is passionate about the economic well being of his 4 children, there are 2 GIC’s with a total value of $35,000 that are set up with me as having Right-of-Survivor.
In other words there is just under $47,000 that will come to me some day, but not until either my father passes away or I turn 65. The other amount of money disappeared last year in the stock market crash and my need to pay for my own personal assistants for five months (that’s another story that is well documented in the blog www.peaceforinclusion.blogspot.com )
There is a stipulation in ODSP that up to $1,000 of assets can be segregated. This provision is part of the circular loop hole situation where the state recognises that disability is not necessarily equal to poverty and criminality. However, my financial adviser continuously runs into difficulties in establishing the segregation of my accounts because on the one hand two of the accounts are actually my fathers until he passes away and the other one is locked-up in some kind of locked-in issue that is frankly beyond my understanding.
The ultimate result is that ODSP, who by law is allowed to observe all of my bank accounts all of the time, questions whether I am poor enough legally to receive it’s benefits. It is of no matter that I have no access to these funds and cannot spend anything from them. I still fall clearly into their criminal classification.
So approximately every month or 2 I get a letter, I get cut off, I go into their interegation room (that’s another story!) and I get a reprieve by explaining the efforts my financial adviser and I are making to please the banks and get permission to segregate the funds.
So far, so good. This criminal is still on the loose.
Judith
Although you might think that the reason the ODSP benefit was invented was to support people with disabilities in meeting costs that are prohibitive so they get a “level playing field” that isn’t the main reason behind it. ODSP is a part of the Ministry of Community and Social Services – bluntly, this is Ontario’s welfare ministry.
The ancient root of welfare is the “poor laws”. In the early days of capitalism, industrialization and understanding of genetics and evolution the belief was held that it was a personal lack of will to be poor. Laws were made to make being poor a criminal offence. Prisons and workhouses were built.
Obviously, many people with disabilities often cannot work at regular jobs so many were poor. Since having a disability is clearly not a matter of lack of willpower even the most individualistic, self-made folks had to figure out a different approach to creating sustainability for people with disabilities or face them starving to death in the streets.
So tacked on to the poor laws was a definition of a loop hole which says that “being disabled” is equal to being “unemployable” and in such a case a person is entitled to welfare. Of course there also had to be a way to close the loop hole, so programs were also developed to “rehabilitate”, “train” and “educate” so a person could become employable. Then, of course, if one actually becomes employable, suddenly one is legally not disabled, the welfare disappears, the extra costs swamp the budget, poverty ensues and one is a criminal.
This definitional trap has been dressed up in many different forms over the decades but never has the fundamental idea of welfare been successfully challenged. The attitudes towards poverty and disability are still that if you look hard enough at the circumstances of a person with a disability you will find either a lazy bum or a criminal or possibly both!
To successfully be disabled in the view of the system – ODSP – you must be poor, unemployed and be literate enough to inform your “Case Worker” each and every month of exactly how much money did or did not flow into your possession. The on-the-ground definition of “poor” is that you must have no more than $4000 in all your bank accounts. The on-the-ground definition of “unemployed” is that you may not get paid for work, and if you do it must be reported and your cheque will be reduced at approximately 50% of amount earned until you don’t get a cheque, and get cut off from the medical, dental and equipment benefits as well. (For me this figure is approximately $1700/month.) The on-the-ground definition of “literate” means you can successfully check off boxes on a form that requests information that usually has absolutely no relevance to the person’s actual circumstances, and that you can fax this form on time to your “Income Support Worker”, even when the ODSP fax is jammed up with the other hundreds of faxes people are trying to send.
Now to my situation. I was employed until October 2007. As a consepquence, when I retired I had earned a small pension fund, a little bit less than $12,000. This pension is “locked-in”. That means that I cannot touch it until I am 65. I had also been saving over the years and although I had not been a very successful saver (for all the reasons mentioned in the previous blog, “reinstatement”,about extraordinary costs) I had another Mutual Fund. Finally, and as a matter of great generosity of my mother who died 3 years ago and my father who is passionate about the economic well being of his 4 children, there are 2 GIC’s with a total value of $35,000 that are set up with me as having Right-of-Survivor.
In other words there is just under $47,000 that will come to me some day, but not until either my father passes away or I turn 65. The other amount of money disappeared last year in the stock market crash and my need to pay for my own personal assistants for five months (that’s another story that is well documented in the blog www.peaceforinclusion.blogspot.com )
There is a stipulation in ODSP that up to $1,000 of assets can be segregated. This provision is part of the circular loop hole situation where the state recognises that disability is not necessarily equal to poverty and criminality. However, my financial adviser continuously runs into difficulties in establishing the segregation of my accounts because on the one hand two of the accounts are actually my fathers until he passes away and the other one is locked-up in some kind of locked-in issue that is frankly beyond my understanding.
The ultimate result is that ODSP, who by law is allowed to observe all of my bank accounts all of the time, questions whether I am poor enough legally to receive it’s benefits. It is of no matter that I have no access to these funds and cannot spend anything from them. I still fall clearly into their criminal classification.
So approximately every month or 2 I get a letter, I get cut off, I go into their interegation room (that’s another story!) and I get a reprieve by explaining the efforts my financial adviser and I are making to please the banks and get permission to segregate the funds.
So far, so good. This criminal is still on the loose.
Judith
Friday, May 21, 2010
Reinstatement
To try to make this story make sense, let me take you back a few years.
I have been a person with quadriplegia all my life. I have a rare muscle weakening condition and essentially have no more strength than an infant. I am sixty years old.
I could have lived on a pension since I was sixteen when a small allowance was granted to teenagers like me to assist with extra costs of living. Essentially my Mother took that cheque, probably spending it on the gas needed to drive me to and from school every day.
I chose employment, getting my first paying job in the summer between 1st and 2nd year university. The only time I was on a disability related pension was for a few months while recovering from major surgery in my mid-twenties.
When I decided to leave paid employment in 2007 and live on the pension from the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) it was something of an adventure for me. I had met many, many people over the years who live from this income and spend their time quite productively volunteering in some way. I wanted to, and do, build projects and research around the idea that Inclusion makes people more peaceful and therefore is a road to World Peace. (www.peaceforinclusion.blogspot.com) It seemed that an ODSP pension could make focusing on this work more feasible for me.
You see it seemed like choosing between two paths that both involve managing one’s income carefully and creatively. Employment brought the potential for more income, the accumulation of more assets and more credit backing. It also meant that costs like a $22,000 wheelchair would fall 25% to me and fixing that chair as it aged and making a car accessible ($19,000) were 100% my problem. ODSP allows for not more than $1,700/month – and that’s with deliberate and delicate management of every entitlement – and no more assets than $4000 and of course no credit, but it does cover medical, prescription, dental and access equipment.
Employment ties one to the employer’s agenda. After years of working at the top level of the bottom rung, not being encouraged or allowed to take on other positions or projects I was qualified for, being assigned forever to the token “disability” position, and watching as others in similar positions lost their health and self respect, I began to consider that maybe I could make the ODSP option work, i.e. find freedom in poverty.
Making a go on such a small income is tricky, but that’s another story! This one is about getting suspended three times in one year.
There are three things about my life that have led the powers of ODSP to find me indigestible in the recent past. The most recent is that I filed my claim for a Federal income tax refund after April 30.
Now as you most likely know there is nothing technically wrong with filing your taxes after April 30 if you know you don’t owe Revenue Canada anything. Many people go for years without filing – no problem! It’s like giving Canada an interest free loan and the government isn’t going to complain about that.
On the strength that I wasn’t going to owe anything the guy who does my taxes didn’t do them until after the 30th. He prioritized his clients who DO owe Revenue Canada something.
Now, how on May 5th, does ODSP know that Revenue Canada doesn’t have my tax form yet? And why is it of such interest to them that they sent me a letter that day threatening suspension from my benefits by the end of this month? I don’t really know – it’s not in any manual or on their website.
Anyway I filed, I made an appointment, I went in, I am reinstated for a month.
Next time I will tell why it’s only for a month, because that’s another story.
Judith
I have been a person with quadriplegia all my life. I have a rare muscle weakening condition and essentially have no more strength than an infant. I am sixty years old.
I could have lived on a pension since I was sixteen when a small allowance was granted to teenagers like me to assist with extra costs of living. Essentially my Mother took that cheque, probably spending it on the gas needed to drive me to and from school every day.
I chose employment, getting my first paying job in the summer between 1st and 2nd year university. The only time I was on a disability related pension was for a few months while recovering from major surgery in my mid-twenties.
When I decided to leave paid employment in 2007 and live on the pension from the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) it was something of an adventure for me. I had met many, many people over the years who live from this income and spend their time quite productively volunteering in some way. I wanted to, and do, build projects and research around the idea that Inclusion makes people more peaceful and therefore is a road to World Peace. (www.peaceforinclusion.blogspot.com) It seemed that an ODSP pension could make focusing on this work more feasible for me.
You see it seemed like choosing between two paths that both involve managing one’s income carefully and creatively. Employment brought the potential for more income, the accumulation of more assets and more credit backing. It also meant that costs like a $22,000 wheelchair would fall 25% to me and fixing that chair as it aged and making a car accessible ($19,000) were 100% my problem. ODSP allows for not more than $1,700/month – and that’s with deliberate and delicate management of every entitlement – and no more assets than $4000 and of course no credit, but it does cover medical, prescription, dental and access equipment.
Employment ties one to the employer’s agenda. After years of working at the top level of the bottom rung, not being encouraged or allowed to take on other positions or projects I was qualified for, being assigned forever to the token “disability” position, and watching as others in similar positions lost their health and self respect, I began to consider that maybe I could make the ODSP option work, i.e. find freedom in poverty.
Making a go on such a small income is tricky, but that’s another story! This one is about getting suspended three times in one year.
There are three things about my life that have led the powers of ODSP to find me indigestible in the recent past. The most recent is that I filed my claim for a Federal income tax refund after April 30.
Now as you most likely know there is nothing technically wrong with filing your taxes after April 30 if you know you don’t owe Revenue Canada anything. Many people go for years without filing – no problem! It’s like giving Canada an interest free loan and the government isn’t going to complain about that.
On the strength that I wasn’t going to owe anything the guy who does my taxes didn’t do them until after the 30th. He prioritized his clients who DO owe Revenue Canada something.
Now, how on May 5th, does ODSP know that Revenue Canada doesn’t have my tax form yet? And why is it of such interest to them that they sent me a letter that day threatening suspension from my benefits by the end of this month? I don’t really know – it’s not in any manual or on their website.
Anyway I filed, I made an appointment, I went in, I am reinstated for a month.
Next time I will tell why it’s only for a month, because that’s another story.
Judith
Monday, May 17, 2010
Cut Off
Now, That’s Another Story…
This blog started about five weeks ago, today being Mother’s Day, 2010.
It started when I got a letter from ODSP saying I was cut off.
ODSP? It’s the Ontario Disability Support Program – a program of the provincial government in Ontario that will pay an adult who has officially been classified as disabled an amount of money for living expenses.
There are all sorts of other things you have to be to get this money. The words “patient” and “persistent” come to mind. “Genius” is another one, because it takes a certain level of mental gymnastics to figure out what the ODSP workers are talking about when they do things like send letters informing you that you have been cut off.
It being the second time in a year that this has happened I was annoyed and I phoned a Toronto Star reporter to see if I could write articles about how poor people manage the system which “helps” them. There was no one at The Star who wanted such articles. But the idea did lead to this blog which lets me tell some stories. This blog also may help add to some research people are doing about government policies and how they affect people who get income supplements because they are poor.
Back to a few weeks ago… My financial advisor who knows a lot about ODSP told me they send out letters like that one every now and then – seemingly because they want to scare people. It worked! Anyway the next Monday I spent about two hours on the phone, mostly waiting while recordings told me that calls would be answered – eventually. I tried every extension that I had ever been given, and the receptionist, and was able to put messages in about four voice mailboxes.
Several days later my Client Representative called to let me know it was not a real letter - just something I had received because some department somewhere hadn’t gotten the information yet that my CPP pension had started soon after New Years. Even though the money has already started being deducted from my ODSP pension, somehow higher up in ODSP someone thought I was trying to hide it.
My Client Representative got me reinstated. My May pension was deposited in my bank account OK.
Ten days later I got another letter. This time I have to explain why I haven’t reported my 2009 Income Tax Assessment immediately, and in the meantime I am cut off – again. Of course the Income Tax year has barely ended, and I don’t have my final assessment yet, but that’s another story….
Judith
This blog started about five weeks ago, today being Mother’s Day, 2010.
It started when I got a letter from ODSP saying I was cut off.
ODSP? It’s the Ontario Disability Support Program – a program of the provincial government in Ontario that will pay an adult who has officially been classified as disabled an amount of money for living expenses.
There are all sorts of other things you have to be to get this money. The words “patient” and “persistent” come to mind. “Genius” is another one, because it takes a certain level of mental gymnastics to figure out what the ODSP workers are talking about when they do things like send letters informing you that you have been cut off.
It being the second time in a year that this has happened I was annoyed and I phoned a Toronto Star reporter to see if I could write articles about how poor people manage the system which “helps” them. There was no one at The Star who wanted such articles. But the idea did lead to this blog which lets me tell some stories. This blog also may help add to some research people are doing about government policies and how they affect people who get income supplements because they are poor.
Back to a few weeks ago… My financial advisor who knows a lot about ODSP told me they send out letters like that one every now and then – seemingly because they want to scare people. It worked! Anyway the next Monday I spent about two hours on the phone, mostly waiting while recordings told me that calls would be answered – eventually. I tried every extension that I had ever been given, and the receptionist, and was able to put messages in about four voice mailboxes.
Several days later my Client Representative called to let me know it was not a real letter - just something I had received because some department somewhere hadn’t gotten the information yet that my CPP pension had started soon after New Years. Even though the money has already started being deducted from my ODSP pension, somehow higher up in ODSP someone thought I was trying to hide it.
My Client Representative got me reinstated. My May pension was deposited in my bank account OK.
Ten days later I got another letter. This time I have to explain why I haven’t reported my 2009 Income Tax Assessment immediately, and in the meantime I am cut off – again. Of course the Income Tax year has barely ended, and I don’t have my final assessment yet, but that’s another story….
Judith
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