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