In 2008, we encountered a massive global recession. This recession was tipped off by the financial industry, as well as a few people that allowed certain scams like the subprime mortgages, financial collapse of major banks and related public companies. The recession moved worldwide, as thousands upon thousands of jobs were shifted to low cost countries (e.g. where labour can be bought for a dollar a day), or simply lost altogether. Manufacturing used to rule Ontario and upheld the so-called middle class. Supposedly in the "best interests" of the country, American and Canadian governments threw trillions of dollars at the failing banks, failing manufacturing firms and the subprime mortgage sector in some sort of twisted rescue mission. Most of us never received a penny from this spending episode and probably never will.
While governments and big companies pat each other on the back for helping one another "miss that bullet", little did anybody know that people were still losing their jobs, losing their homes and losing their position in society. Average incomes dropped dramatically, despite rising costs in food, housing and transportation. Our respective governments declared some kind of victory against the recession beast in late 2009 or early 2010, pretending that everybody was all doing well again. We hear news reports that as of June 2011, we now have more jobs than we did before this recession hit, so now that we are doing so "well", governments are telling US we better start tightening OUR belts because there's this huge deficit here and we lived high off the hog for too long. That's funny. I can't recall ever having so much.
These reports piss me off more than anything else, because I, like most readers, know things are not good again. Newspapers are celebrating the advent of 100 new call centre jobs in Fort Erie. Wow! One hundred more minimum wage workers to prop up the wealthy corporations that retain the centre as their client ... at the same time, I am watching us continue to bleed manufacturing jobs, so men and women in their fifties and early sixties are now thrown on the street with no options, other than a minimum wage call centre job. At the same time, every second person I talk to is receiving some kind of social assistance, whether this be EI, Ontario Works, Ontario Disability Support, CPP or other long term benefit that doesn't pay all that much.
Yet we undergone both a federal and now a provincial election where our politicians and candidates for political office continue to lie to us by pretending everything is as good as it was before the 2008 crash. They promise us tax cuts, from ....? I almost drilled a new one into the rear end of one of the local candidates when they tried to sell me on this whole "tax cuts lead to jobs" mantra, which I explained in earlier posts why that is a lie. It irritates me to no end how politicians will go to the lowest common denominator to try to convince people of lies they heard over and over and over again, yet in reality, when these policies are put into place, NOBODY is better off other than the very rich! We have to stop voting for politicians that lie to us, and do not tell us the truth of where their policies will be taking us.
If you want health care cuts, or to pay more out of pocket for various services, including health care, community services, education, and so forth, then go ahead and vote for your tax cuts. Chances are you are not making $93,700 a year as a family, which these same politicians wildly claim as the "average" as they sweep the province this time around. The less taxes people pay, the less money there will be to pay for health care, education, social services, roads, bridges, and so forth. However, politicians were a bit reluctant to cut these services, so they went even further into a deficit. Deficits are caused when the government is not taking in as much as it spends, and when taxes are cut and cut and cut, there is less and less and less money in place for governments to use for health care, schools, social services, etc.
Tell me the truth: Did YOU feel any impact from any of these tax cuts? Maybe a bit extra, so you can buy one more double double each month? That is about all the average person will feel from these tax cuts. The very poor do not benefit at all, and with the onset of the HST, the very poor are likely paying as a proportion to their total income, MORE taxes than the top 10% of earners. The McGuinty government of course is being ratted out all over for promising not to hike taxes, but then later on, adding new taxes. So what, Hudak, I don't give a rabbit's behind over taxes. I read your platform. Which one of these taxes are YOU going to eliminate? None. However, you want to cut taxes for the wealthy and big business more and more as each year passes, just like McGuinty did. I know Hudak understands that tax cuts to corporations and wealthy persons does not create new employment. After all, he has studied economics, before he turned to politics. But unfortunately, we have a mediocre community that includes many high school drop outs and people that believe anything that is told to them, and all that matters is votes. They might as well try to convince us that moon is made of blue cheese!
Hudak did make a statement in his platform that his government would allow people receiving ODSP to earn more money and keep it, but there are no details as to how he will go about this. There is no promise to make real changes to this system so that people receiving ODSP can get married without getting their incomes cannibalized, especially if they are NOT able to work but their spouse can. What in the living Hell does a spouse's income and business affairs have to do with their other half's disability? Maybe if somebody told me where this comes from, I might believe them, but I have yet to hear any plausible excuse for a policy like this, which only entraps and subjects the disabled partner to abuse and diminishes their independence at best.
The second one is even more interesting. Hudak is painting himself as pro business, pro jobs, and pro entrepreneurship. Well, will Hudak get rid of the entangled rules that any ODSP recipient or their spouses have to deal with if they choose self-employment as their way of making money? Self-employment income is not counted in the same way Canada Revenue Agency counts for other businesses, yet we wonder if Hudak will allow ANY business to be treated the same. Either tell all businesses they are not allowed to hire staff, not allowed to deduct costs for conventions, not allowed to deduct costs for professional clothing and appearances (especially if this is part of the job), etc. and see where that gets you. So Hudak, either you are for small business and for increasing the number of jobs or you are not. Which is it? Dalton McGuinty has given these same people the same wimpy excuse year after year about how they do not want to "subsidize" businesses with ODSP, yet on the other hand, the McGuinty government will throw Samsung $7 billion, Silicon Knights $2.8 million, GM almost $3 billion dollars .... yeah, now I get it.
The poorest of the poor, the entrapped poor and their families and the "working poor" are supposed to continue to pay for these subsidies and benefits given to the rich and to large corporations they will never benefit from, even though these same entities have been busy sucking out of the government trough for years, leading our government into this huge deficit they are saying is there now, and because of that, WE but not THEY have to tighten our belts. I'm sorry. THIS IS NOT MY DEBT. I OWE NOTHING. The more of us that can say this and really mean it, the more impact it will have. If there is a debt that has to be repaid, take it from those that benefited in the first place from all the largess.
Take it from the multi millionaires that pay less tax as a percentage of their incomes than the people that clean their offices. Take it from the corporate executives that paid themselves bonuses after their companies went tits up and got government bucks to "stimulate" the economy. Take it from the $3,000 a day consultants that worked for e-Health under McGuinty's watch, who had the nerve to charge their Tim Horton's on top of it. Take it from your so-called "average" family that makes $93,700 a year and up.
One of my MPPs in my region asked me how I would respond when groups like the Canadian Taxpayers Federation show up at their door crying poor because they do not want to pay any more taxes. I told him to ask each and every one of them present to bring in their last year's tax return and show him line 150. I am willing to bet my first born that their incomes are all in the six figures and they can damn well afford the taxes they are supposedly paying, and probably have more loopholes than the average person anyways if they want more write-offs. Ask them to make a choice: earn the money they are earning or more likely receiving right now, while continuing to pay the taxes that they allegedly do, OR earn only $20,000 a year and pay NO taxes, and still have their current expenses. I am curious which one they would pick. Are you?
To me, it is people in the higher income brackets that benefited from the spending and tax cuts that led to this monstrous deficit and it is THEY and not US that should be tightening their belts and giving up more. This era of the selfish has to end, as it is driving all of us into the ground. These same people do not want to help the poor other than their "charitable donations" to food banks etc. - (no thanks). At the same times, poverty is costing every man, woman and child each year over $2,700 according to a study by the National Council of Welfare, but would cost less than half to eradicate it.
Some of you people reading this probably wonder what I have AGAINST the rich. Actually, I don't have anything against the wealthy. I have many friends among this upper middle echelon and so forth, and I once made good money in the past where I had few financial worries. However, when I made the good bucks, I did not care about the taxes, as I believed if I made more, I should pay a little more than those that earn less than I do. Taxes create a civilized society. This does not mean we do not have the right to criticize HOW our taxes are spent, as there are likely ten thousand different ways governments can save money without cutting services, and to use their resources more efficiently. What I am critical is the growing passive acceptance by the public of the growing gap between the very wealthy and the very poor, as well as the decimation of our middle classes.
Some might argue that companies will leave if they had to pay more taxes. This has never been proven. Companies do leave jurisdictions, usually for a variety of reasons and not necessarily because of taxes. Many times, it is labour costs. There are companies that move to Canada as well because employers are not stuck with a bill for health insurance for their employees. Others choose a location because of the pool of labour available, the number of people with particular skills and expertise. However, as I said before, there are probably a few companies that would be eager to hire chimpanzees in exchange for a clean cage and bananas, if they could do it. The very wealthy often do not seem to want to share their wealth, even though it is their best interests.
First, the work of the lower and middle echelons of their companies effectively keep them in business, and in turn, with a public with an acceptable level of income, there are more consumers for the corporation's product or service than if this inequality is allowed to continue as it has. People on the bottom end of the income scale do not eat at restaurants, do not buy their clothing at department or clothing stores, do not buy their books at bookstores, do not go to the movies, nor do they buy computers, iPads, cell phones or even cars. When companies that supply these things have less consumers, because more and more members of their communities are unable to afford anything beyond their housing, these companies eventually fail. Henry Ford, when he set up his factories, knew that he had to pay his staff enough money so they can afford to buy his product, or he would not sell enough cars to enough people to make any money at all.
I tried over the years to tell politicians how to achieve this aim, how to do true stimulus, and how to deal with objections by the selfish and senseless. I also tried to show politicians how to achieve change without killing people, or putting people into positions where they feel they must take their lives, or they develop health conditions where they slowly die. All of these things seem senseless or illogical, but when you think of it, when more of us are healthy, costs for our cherished health care system go down and become more manageable. When we have not only sufficient funds for bare physical survival, but also for meaningful participation in the community, everybody is richer, from the butcher at the corner, to the farmers at the market, to the chef that runs the downtown eatery, to the man that owns the movie theater.
This is all common sense to me. How come our leaders seem to be losing their way?
Showing posts with label economic stimulus. Show all posts
Showing posts with label economic stimulus. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Sunday, January 25, 2009
A FEDERAL BUDGET TO DO OR DIE BY ...
This Tuesday is going to be an historic event, much like last Tuesday was for the installation of the forty-forth U.S. President Barack Obama. However, how historic this event becomes is the choice of the federal Conservatives.
The doors to the federal Parliament are being unlocked tomorrow after the dust had settled for the better part of six weeks. I suspect somebody went in there during the weekend to dust the shelves, the oak wood and other parts of the building to lift that abandoned building smell before the chickens come home to roost.
To remind Canadians who have been hiding under logs or staying away from the television or newspapers or even the Internet for the past six weeks or more, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, at the very risk of losing a confidence vote over a particularly partisan economic statement, sought to hide behind the skirts of the Governor General to prorogue Parliament until tomorrow.
It is not like nothing is happening behind the scenes. The attack ads are out painting the prospective coalition government in waiting as an undemocratic exercise that defeats the results of the vote that Canadians voted for. Of course, anybody that understands basic Grade Ten politics understands that this is not true and once again, fuels fire on the brains of the largely uneducated public.
The federal government, as well as both Opposition Parties, have hit the road over the past several weeks to consult with Canadians, business, unions and others, to determine what should go in this oh-so-important budget that's coming up. I was part of the NDP's consultation by default because I happen to live in an NDP riding and two associates of mine work in that MP's constituency office. I also sent my written remarks to the government and the Liberals as well.
My remarks would not surprise anybody here, but would involve careful infrastructure investments including new transit systems (using Canadian companies to manufacture buses and rail cars), more help for persons with disabilities for whom there is "always a recession" and to aid in the development of a diversified economy that would meet the needs for more Canadians and not just those losing jobs in factories and oil fields.
At the riding's town hall meeting, Jack Layton came down to attend with our MP, Malcolm Allen. Malcolm Allen is the only non-Conservative MP we have in the Niagara Region. Although I do like Rick Dykstra and Rob Nicholson as well (and do not know Dean Allison well enough to have an opinion one way or another about him), Niagara needed a different voice. From that meeting, it appeared that Malcolm Allen is providing a very different approach.
People came from all over Niagara and beyond. Some came from as far away as Whitby and Burlington to talk about job losses and the failure of their governing MPs to accept petitions that thousands of people in their respective ridings have signed. People are worried about housing, health care, the NHS system changes (which Jack Layton seemed to be aware of), increased child and general poverty, the rights of persons with disabilities and aboriginal Canadians, as well as transportation issues. These things are all impacts of huge job losses, accompanied by the failure of governments to turn things around in a careful manner.
Unfortunately, the way things are with politicians and policy makers who have no clue about what goes on at the ground level is that things sway to either extreme. Governments can invest billions and billions of dollars into job training, infrastructure and other programs, only to put us all into a major deficit without any real economic gains. Or governments can focus on tax cuts for upper middle classes and wealthy classes, actually believing these folks will spend more money locally if they kept more of their own. Even billionnaires won't buy more local necessities than they have to ... and why would somebody buy yet one more expensive car, when they already have five in their garage?
Job training dollars can be useful if targeted correctly and if they are done inclusively and in concert with improving the employment environment for disadvantaged workers, so that they can actually get hired in jobs that respect their abilities, education and career aspirations instead of spinning them on to one call centre or another, or to train them to be Wal-Mart greeters. Even among those jobs, there are only so many people required and yes, these jobs should be for those that are less skilled and educated. However, that is NOT what is happening ... as I can point to endless examples of people placed in policy positions that have no clue what they are doing, or well educated people referred to low-paying, low-aspirational work.
One example of poor policy advice that was given was a few years ago, a group of disability organizations wanted to review the federal disability tax credit and make recommendations about how to make that credit more accessible to persons with certain types of disabilities, such as mental health problems. I work in the legal field in administrative law and I can tell you, I have read their recommendations and final report, including their lack of impact on any changes whatsoever for mental health issues, that people with mental health issues will be struggling for years to come, unless their disabilities are so severe, they cannot function independently. That is why you don't have poorly educated "consumers" representing consumer interests in these policy discussions.
Up until now, I suppose this didn't matter anyways for the majority of consumers with mental health issues, as most were on disability allowances and did not have much taxable income to benefit from anyways. However, the concept of making this credit into a refundable one, or tying this into eligibility for the Registered Disability Savings Program, especially with the bonds and grants part of it (as most of these people don't have family to contribute to this type of account either), makes access to additional resources more desirable, but still out of reach.
Of course, this program was a Conservative initiative, whereby they only know of the families that might have approached them about concerns about the livelihoods of their children (most of whom have severe physical or intellectual disabilities) and voila, they solved the problems of poverty for all persons with disabilities with a single pen stroke! In reality, I believe this will benefit approximately 5 - 10% of my clients with disabilities, including those only seeking the grants and bonds portion. Many of them are older than 49 years old, and thus no longer eligible to receive such grants and bonds that would otherwise be available to those unable to contribute. That is why organizations supporting poverty-reduction for persons with disabilities should only acknowledge this, but not focus too closely on it. Continue to fight for help for ALL low-income persons with disabilities, instead of falling to divide and conquer which seems to work well.
Many people who support this type of government have never seen want or need. Most grew up in relatively middle class households with supportive parents who likely covered at least part of the costs of their university education; many even gave them a car and taught them how to drive shortly after their sixteenth birthday. They have no clue there are many Canadians who grew up without this advantage, or who later lost this support for whatever reason (e. g. parents having died or became ill themselves). They have no idea that telling this latter group to pull themselves up by their bootstraps is useless, as they have no bootstraps to pull themselves up with.
Unfortunately, the only federal support the Conservatives see for persons with mental health issues is by continuing to push for the assumption that most are homeless, incompetent and unable to manage their lives, so they funded five pilot projects to sort out what needs to be done for homeless persons with mental health issues. I know many people who have been diagnosed with mental health problems, including bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Ninety-nine percent of this group have never been homeless, even though some are forced to live on low incomes.
The few I know who have lost their homes have done so when they had no money, not because of their mental health problems. Many others have lost their homes as well and never have had any mental health issues. And besides that, what is this government going to do to FORCE employers to hire people with mental health problems and pay them a decent wage?
The whole premise behind the Conservative budgetary choices is that those who fall into desperation are NOT like us; there is something WRONG with them, not the economy, not employers that refuse to hire qualified persons with disabilities, not with social assistance rates, and certainly not with families that have frequently abandoned them. This is supposed to reassure us, but however, it does nothing to reassure the people that these things happen to despite doing everything in their lives right: getting an education, getting married, trying to work or start a business, etc. Unfortunately, this is what the current economy is about ... creating desperate situations for people who never expected to find themselves there.
There are lots of pundit views as to what is going to happen with the budget. Some say there will be sufficient infrastructure and social spending to satisfy the Liberals, but there will also be large tax cuts for people who already have a significant disposable income. As usual, there will likely be nothing more for persons with disabilities, nothing for low-income workers, nothing for laid off workers (who cannot survive on existing EI rates, even if they miraculously do qualify). Ignatieff is not playing his hand until the actual budget is laid out. Layton said even if the budget includes everything they want, they don't trust the Conservatives to follow through with it.
My concern is the Conservatives' obsession with tax cuts. Unemployed workers do not pay taxes. Persons with disabilities living on low incomes do not pay taxes. Low income pensioners do not pay taxes. Low-wage workers pay only a small amount of taxes, so if any tax cuts are given to these people, they wouldn't even notice. Such tax cuts do not pay the mortgage for these people, nor do such tax cuts pay the grocery or utility bills. Desperate people will remain desperate and continue to have little or no disposable income.
The truth is that the economy needs people who have disposable income AND a margin of need for additional products and services delivered locally. To give somebody earning $90,000 a year additional disposable income when they already have five cars, a six-bedroom house, a cottage in Muskoka and a regular gym and golf club membership is not going to add to their local spending. However, if somebody earning $25,000 a year gets an additional $5,000 a year, this additional $5,000 WILL be spent locally.
The fact that Conservatives want to deny and hide behind is they do not understand the true plight of low income Canadians. These people are NOT driving a car, NOT going to the movies, NOT eating out (even at McDonald's), NOT buying clothing, NOT sending their kids on school trips and NOT even buying things for their homes, because almost every last penny goes to rent or mortgage, utilities and food. Many rely on food banks to make their income stretch further. This does NOT help the economy. As more and more Canadians plunge into this situation, it is certainly not going to help by throwing more money at people who already have what they need and more.
In fact, any deep tax cuts at this point will likely plunge us further into a deficit and when times turn around again, of course the government will once again focus on shrinking the size of the deficit, which means only service cuts to those who can least afford to endure them. That means, among other things: cuts to medicare, cuts to EI, cuts to housing programs, cuts to job training programs, increases to tuition fees and student loans, etc. A decent lifestyle will become even less accessible to those of us among the disadvantaged and among future generations. At this point, I would not even count on having an old age pension if you are under 55 years old today. Retirement will become an opportunity only for the wealthy. The rest of us work until we die.
All of this is because we have managers and policy makers in government and politics that have no clue what it is like to want for anything. They do not even consult with other levels of governments on the rare occasion they do come up with some policy idea. Different programs often operate at cross-purposes to one another and not one single government has ever attempted to disentangle them. It works in the interests of those who work in these programs to keep people in them, thus keep the poor from ever becoming non-poor. This keeps them happy enough not to strike against the powers that be who have hired them.
To me, the greatest offender against the rights of persons with disabilities, for example, is the government and often, politicians that have no clue what it means to have a disability. Politicians in Niagara Region, for example, only see "disability" as being in a wheelchair, scooter or walker, as nobody else is granted relief from exorbitant transportation costs in Niagara. The provincial government has listed only 42 conditions that they feel merit a "special dietary allowance", when in fact almost EVERY medical condition has impacts through diet. They just don't want to admit that most people on any kind of assistance can't even afford a basic diet. And as I said above, the Disability Tax Credit definition leaves out many people for whom disability related issues carry costs to them, but do not qualify under their stringent criteria.
On one hand, government wants to say that people with disabilities are able and should remain independent and when one tries to assert that independence and get a job or start a business, but are prevented from doing so because of the prejudice of employers, they are then denied many kinds of disability benefits, as these OTHER benefits require people to be almost unable to manage their own funds (e.g. require a trustee), unable to live independently (e.g. live in a group home or high intensive supportive housing), unable to bathe/carry out person hygiene (e.g. need home care for personal assistance), etc.
To me, if employers do not want to hire people with disabilities then TAX THEM HEAVILY so that this money can be directed to be paid ON TOP of disability pensions and not clawed back, so that people forced to live on social assistance can at least eat and live decently, until such day a sympathetic employer will hire them. The number of disability programs should be reduced, but paid out more generously. My fear is that by the federal government using the Disability Tax Credit criteria, it may one day require all provinces to harmonize their definitions with theirs and guess what's going to happen? Exactly what they would never anticipate ... more people on the streets, more people in desperate poverty.
I just hope the federal government at least tries to put out a budget that will help low-income Canadians and persons with disabilities and bring them hope ... which is so foreign on this side of the border, just so soon after the inauguration of a wonderful man down south who made history as the first African-American President. I think we would be fooled to believe that Americans were asking for change desperately from the Bush administration to such a point they moved behind Obama in great numbers, that my fellow Canadians don't think the same way.
In other words, if Stephen Harper doesn't want to move with the mood for change, he may as well step aside and let somebody else take the reins. More and more Canadians are sick and tired of being left behind and for any politician that wants to remain in power, it is best they pay close attention in the next year or so.
Your thoughts?
The doors to the federal Parliament are being unlocked tomorrow after the dust had settled for the better part of six weeks. I suspect somebody went in there during the weekend to dust the shelves, the oak wood and other parts of the building to lift that abandoned building smell before the chickens come home to roost.
To remind Canadians who have been hiding under logs or staying away from the television or newspapers or even the Internet for the past six weeks or more, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, at the very risk of losing a confidence vote over a particularly partisan economic statement, sought to hide behind the skirts of the Governor General to prorogue Parliament until tomorrow.
It is not like nothing is happening behind the scenes. The attack ads are out painting the prospective coalition government in waiting as an undemocratic exercise that defeats the results of the vote that Canadians voted for. Of course, anybody that understands basic Grade Ten politics understands that this is not true and once again, fuels fire on the brains of the largely uneducated public.
The federal government, as well as both Opposition Parties, have hit the road over the past several weeks to consult with Canadians, business, unions and others, to determine what should go in this oh-so-important budget that's coming up. I was part of the NDP's consultation by default because I happen to live in an NDP riding and two associates of mine work in that MP's constituency office. I also sent my written remarks to the government and the Liberals as well.
My remarks would not surprise anybody here, but would involve careful infrastructure investments including new transit systems (using Canadian companies to manufacture buses and rail cars), more help for persons with disabilities for whom there is "always a recession" and to aid in the development of a diversified economy that would meet the needs for more Canadians and not just those losing jobs in factories and oil fields.
At the riding's town hall meeting, Jack Layton came down to attend with our MP, Malcolm Allen. Malcolm Allen is the only non-Conservative MP we have in the Niagara Region. Although I do like Rick Dykstra and Rob Nicholson as well (and do not know Dean Allison well enough to have an opinion one way or another about him), Niagara needed a different voice. From that meeting, it appeared that Malcolm Allen is providing a very different approach.
People came from all over Niagara and beyond. Some came from as far away as Whitby and Burlington to talk about job losses and the failure of their governing MPs to accept petitions that thousands of people in their respective ridings have signed. People are worried about housing, health care, the NHS system changes (which Jack Layton seemed to be aware of), increased child and general poverty, the rights of persons with disabilities and aboriginal Canadians, as well as transportation issues. These things are all impacts of huge job losses, accompanied by the failure of governments to turn things around in a careful manner.
Unfortunately, the way things are with politicians and policy makers who have no clue about what goes on at the ground level is that things sway to either extreme. Governments can invest billions and billions of dollars into job training, infrastructure and other programs, only to put us all into a major deficit without any real economic gains. Or governments can focus on tax cuts for upper middle classes and wealthy classes, actually believing these folks will spend more money locally if they kept more of their own. Even billionnaires won't buy more local necessities than they have to ... and why would somebody buy yet one more expensive car, when they already have five in their garage?
Job training dollars can be useful if targeted correctly and if they are done inclusively and in concert with improving the employment environment for disadvantaged workers, so that they can actually get hired in jobs that respect their abilities, education and career aspirations instead of spinning them on to one call centre or another, or to train them to be Wal-Mart greeters. Even among those jobs, there are only so many people required and yes, these jobs should be for those that are less skilled and educated. However, that is NOT what is happening ... as I can point to endless examples of people placed in policy positions that have no clue what they are doing, or well educated people referred to low-paying, low-aspirational work.
One example of poor policy advice that was given was a few years ago, a group of disability organizations wanted to review the federal disability tax credit and make recommendations about how to make that credit more accessible to persons with certain types of disabilities, such as mental health problems. I work in the legal field in administrative law and I can tell you, I have read their recommendations and final report, including their lack of impact on any changes whatsoever for mental health issues, that people with mental health issues will be struggling for years to come, unless their disabilities are so severe, they cannot function independently. That is why you don't have poorly educated "consumers" representing consumer interests in these policy discussions.
Up until now, I suppose this didn't matter anyways for the majority of consumers with mental health issues, as most were on disability allowances and did not have much taxable income to benefit from anyways. However, the concept of making this credit into a refundable one, or tying this into eligibility for the Registered Disability Savings Program, especially with the bonds and grants part of it (as most of these people don't have family to contribute to this type of account either), makes access to additional resources more desirable, but still out of reach.
Of course, this program was a Conservative initiative, whereby they only know of the families that might have approached them about concerns about the livelihoods of their children (most of whom have severe physical or intellectual disabilities) and voila, they solved the problems of poverty for all persons with disabilities with a single pen stroke! In reality, I believe this will benefit approximately 5 - 10% of my clients with disabilities, including those only seeking the grants and bonds portion. Many of them are older than 49 years old, and thus no longer eligible to receive such grants and bonds that would otherwise be available to those unable to contribute. That is why organizations supporting poverty-reduction for persons with disabilities should only acknowledge this, but not focus too closely on it. Continue to fight for help for ALL low-income persons with disabilities, instead of falling to divide and conquer which seems to work well.
Many people who support this type of government have never seen want or need. Most grew up in relatively middle class households with supportive parents who likely covered at least part of the costs of their university education; many even gave them a car and taught them how to drive shortly after their sixteenth birthday. They have no clue there are many Canadians who grew up without this advantage, or who later lost this support for whatever reason (e. g. parents having died or became ill themselves). They have no idea that telling this latter group to pull themselves up by their bootstraps is useless, as they have no bootstraps to pull themselves up with.
Unfortunately, the only federal support the Conservatives see for persons with mental health issues is by continuing to push for the assumption that most are homeless, incompetent and unable to manage their lives, so they funded five pilot projects to sort out what needs to be done for homeless persons with mental health issues. I know many people who have been diagnosed with mental health problems, including bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Ninety-nine percent of this group have never been homeless, even though some are forced to live on low incomes.
The few I know who have lost their homes have done so when they had no money, not because of their mental health problems. Many others have lost their homes as well and never have had any mental health issues. And besides that, what is this government going to do to FORCE employers to hire people with mental health problems and pay them a decent wage?
The whole premise behind the Conservative budgetary choices is that those who fall into desperation are NOT like us; there is something WRONG with them, not the economy, not employers that refuse to hire qualified persons with disabilities, not with social assistance rates, and certainly not with families that have frequently abandoned them. This is supposed to reassure us, but however, it does nothing to reassure the people that these things happen to despite doing everything in their lives right: getting an education, getting married, trying to work or start a business, etc. Unfortunately, this is what the current economy is about ... creating desperate situations for people who never expected to find themselves there.
There are lots of pundit views as to what is going to happen with the budget. Some say there will be sufficient infrastructure and social spending to satisfy the Liberals, but there will also be large tax cuts for people who already have a significant disposable income. As usual, there will likely be nothing more for persons with disabilities, nothing for low-income workers, nothing for laid off workers (who cannot survive on existing EI rates, even if they miraculously do qualify). Ignatieff is not playing his hand until the actual budget is laid out. Layton said even if the budget includes everything they want, they don't trust the Conservatives to follow through with it.
My concern is the Conservatives' obsession with tax cuts. Unemployed workers do not pay taxes. Persons with disabilities living on low incomes do not pay taxes. Low income pensioners do not pay taxes. Low-wage workers pay only a small amount of taxes, so if any tax cuts are given to these people, they wouldn't even notice. Such tax cuts do not pay the mortgage for these people, nor do such tax cuts pay the grocery or utility bills. Desperate people will remain desperate and continue to have little or no disposable income.
The truth is that the economy needs people who have disposable income AND a margin of need for additional products and services delivered locally. To give somebody earning $90,000 a year additional disposable income when they already have five cars, a six-bedroom house, a cottage in Muskoka and a regular gym and golf club membership is not going to add to their local spending. However, if somebody earning $25,000 a year gets an additional $5,000 a year, this additional $5,000 WILL be spent locally.
The fact that Conservatives want to deny and hide behind is they do not understand the true plight of low income Canadians. These people are NOT driving a car, NOT going to the movies, NOT eating out (even at McDonald's), NOT buying clothing, NOT sending their kids on school trips and NOT even buying things for their homes, because almost every last penny goes to rent or mortgage, utilities and food. Many rely on food banks to make their income stretch further. This does NOT help the economy. As more and more Canadians plunge into this situation, it is certainly not going to help by throwing more money at people who already have what they need and more.
In fact, any deep tax cuts at this point will likely plunge us further into a deficit and when times turn around again, of course the government will once again focus on shrinking the size of the deficit, which means only service cuts to those who can least afford to endure them. That means, among other things: cuts to medicare, cuts to EI, cuts to housing programs, cuts to job training programs, increases to tuition fees and student loans, etc. A decent lifestyle will become even less accessible to those of us among the disadvantaged and among future generations. At this point, I would not even count on having an old age pension if you are under 55 years old today. Retirement will become an opportunity only for the wealthy. The rest of us work until we die.
All of this is because we have managers and policy makers in government and politics that have no clue what it is like to want for anything. They do not even consult with other levels of governments on the rare occasion they do come up with some policy idea. Different programs often operate at cross-purposes to one another and not one single government has ever attempted to disentangle them. It works in the interests of those who work in these programs to keep people in them, thus keep the poor from ever becoming non-poor. This keeps them happy enough not to strike against the powers that be who have hired them.
To me, the greatest offender against the rights of persons with disabilities, for example, is the government and often, politicians that have no clue what it means to have a disability. Politicians in Niagara Region, for example, only see "disability" as being in a wheelchair, scooter or walker, as nobody else is granted relief from exorbitant transportation costs in Niagara. The provincial government has listed only 42 conditions that they feel merit a "special dietary allowance", when in fact almost EVERY medical condition has impacts through diet. They just don't want to admit that most people on any kind of assistance can't even afford a basic diet. And as I said above, the Disability Tax Credit definition leaves out many people for whom disability related issues carry costs to them, but do not qualify under their stringent criteria.
On one hand, government wants to say that people with disabilities are able and should remain independent and when one tries to assert that independence and get a job or start a business, but are prevented from doing so because of the prejudice of employers, they are then denied many kinds of disability benefits, as these OTHER benefits require people to be almost unable to manage their own funds (e.g. require a trustee), unable to live independently (e.g. live in a group home or high intensive supportive housing), unable to bathe/carry out person hygiene (e.g. need home care for personal assistance), etc.
To me, if employers do not want to hire people with disabilities then TAX THEM HEAVILY so that this money can be directed to be paid ON TOP of disability pensions and not clawed back, so that people forced to live on social assistance can at least eat and live decently, until such day a sympathetic employer will hire them. The number of disability programs should be reduced, but paid out more generously. My fear is that by the federal government using the Disability Tax Credit criteria, it may one day require all provinces to harmonize their definitions with theirs and guess what's going to happen? Exactly what they would never anticipate ... more people on the streets, more people in desperate poverty.
I just hope the federal government at least tries to put out a budget that will help low-income Canadians and persons with disabilities and bring them hope ... which is so foreign on this side of the border, just so soon after the inauguration of a wonderful man down south who made history as the first African-American President. I think we would be fooled to believe that Americans were asking for change desperately from the Bush administration to such a point they moved behind Obama in great numbers, that my fellow Canadians don't think the same way.
In other words, if Stephen Harper doesn't want to move with the mood for change, he may as well step aside and let somebody else take the reins. More and more Canadians are sick and tired of being left behind and for any politician that wants to remain in power, it is best they pay close attention in the next year or so.
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