BRIGHTER PROSPECTS FOR WHOM?

There is no comfort when a stubborn recession hangs through the clouds, as I walk about this region.  As I walk about this city, the familiar faces straggle about the street corners, the Tim Horton's and the bank machines.  On average, I am asked for change or for a couple of bucks three or four times each time I do walk this walk.  These walks are becoming more dreary lately.  While our city is admittedly trying to spruce up the downtown, one cannot help but notice the developing contrasts, potential for gentrification of housing developments, even in the downtown, which has already been identified as one of the many "priority" neighbourhoods in the Niagara Region.

My walk to my office as I start out each morning reflects more of the same old, same old ... and less of the hopeful prospects our politicians always want to get us to see.  It is not that the presence of the 1% in this region goes without being noticed.  I walk by places like Critelli's Furniture, which is located on the same strip of land and asphalt that includes many of our homeless and destitute and persons soliciting pocket change. Critelli's sells good quality furniture for thousands of dollars apiece. I note the quality is good, but who can pay $3,000 - $4,000 for one chair, $750 for a drink table to set beside a recliner or $2,000 for a mirror? Even many of my colleagues can't put out that much money at a shot for that kind of purchase!  For most, even one of these items cost more than they earn in a month!  In my mind, I ask who among the 1% would dare walk downtown to visit a place like this to buy this kind of furniture, while just outside their windows, the problems and miscreants of our society await. Across from Critelli's, there are two Japanese restaurants side by side, literally in direct competition with one another. I have friends that are laying bets wondering if they are both owned by the same company.  We also flip coins to see which one will outlast the other, which seems to be a major sport in the downtown area these days.  Betting any business will last beyond the year is risky.

The downtown corner where Tim Horton's is almost always occupied by people standing around smoking cigarettes and chattering, while across the street, a private college lets its students out at noon and at four thirty each day like clockwork.  I wonder mildly how many of those students going to that career college will find a job in their field after they graduate.  Maybe the concern these days is putting bums in seats, and not so much caring about how people will move on from there. How come I feel that we should care?  Life in the downtown is rather predictable.  I can almost tell what is going to happen before I even get there.  Once I am off the bus and start walking toward my office, I pass the building where the Landlord and Tenant Board holds its hearings, and dozens of people are evicted every time this takes place.  I have spent many mornings and afternoons in those hearing rooms, trying to bring reality to the minds of the adjudicators, trying to arrange deals for people that may be able to get a good start on paying their rent on time for now on, or enforcing orders for those that won't.

With all of my cognitive deficits imposed on me from various health issues, I sometimes have trouble reading faces, but I do know names.  Everybody represents a phase of my life, sometimes I yearn to return to, but cannot as everything I am involved with is just a phase.  I was once a big part of Occupy Niagara, which has sort of fizzled out.  I was involved in various environmental movements, meetings around transit issues, and various workshops on climate change, as well as recent gatherings about the social assistance reform.  In the past, I also participated in economic development activities and advocated for the small businesses in the area, as I don't see too many of them faring much better than those I witness begging for coins. I even had a hand in organizing a demonstration or two, which I might try to do once again if our provincial government insists on going the way of downloading administration of disability allowances to the region (which would be an unmitigated disaster in many ways).  People are silently suffering and crying out for change, though they can no longer mouth the words, as our voice has been squashed by the powers that be, imposing fear and anxiety as opposed to assurances and hope for a bright future ahead of us.

Brighter Prospects, the oxymoronic name for the recently released report on social assistance reform, tries to paint its recommendations as betterment for the masses, while I can't see this after reading the fine print.  I am trained to read the fine print and paid to do so by many of my clients - individuals and businesses alike, and being in the profession I am in, I don't see "brighter prospects" for anybody in this report.  I am asked almost daily and sometimes multiple times each day what is going to happen to "us", and by "us" the asker is referring to people who are on the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP). These are people who I successfully appealed their benefits claim, who I represented at the provincial offences court, or even on a charge of assault or trespassing in the Ontario Court of Justice.  They see me as part of "us" because I speak for those that cannot speak for themselves, or are afraid to.  I also speak for small and medium sized business and try to believe that hard work will get "us" somewhere as well, although I sometimes begin to doubt that as well.  I see us all as both sides of the same coin, all of us affected by the economy, the current endless recession and the increasing plight of bad attitudes all over.

Our government is almost positioning this report as the panacea for the misery all around us, when indeed it feeds it and ignores the travesty of legislated poverty, the globalization of labour and the balkanization of all of our voices alike.  The report was not written with poverty reduction in mind, but instead was written to appease those that want to see the deficit trimmed, as if the poor were recently treated to some big party of massive spending and now we need to retreat. The Commission that produced Brighter Prospects did not get the memo that the poor are not responsible for this deficit, nor do they care.  All they want is a home, a job and a friend, which Brighter Prospects offers none of this.  Of course, it is not a problem to make cuts, when you are not the one that is affected, or not the one that gets to see the consequences of them.  I don't think "Brighter Prospects" is going to make my daily trek to the office and around to the coffee shop any more pleasant; in fact, I will see exactly what I know is going to happen to "us" as the people around me are currently asking - I can only see things get worse.

Brighter Prospects is about putting people with disabilities back on welfare in some misguided attempt to erase the stigma against people on Ontario Works, which many of my detractors like to bash and punish simply for having bad luck and not accepting their just desserts while they fell. Adding a whole new group of people to this "undeserving" bunch is not going to make the whole bunch look to be less criminal to the ignorant populace, but is simply going to add people with disabilities to this very misunderstood category of people, who will only become further legislated into poverty.  There is not one recommendation in Brighter Prospects that frees people from this legislative trap. It is not going to put more people into jobs, because evidence shows that time and time again, when people are forced to look for and accept jobs that don't exist, they are not likely to leave Ontario Works or any other program.  When other media reports point out the growing number of young people, older people and others who have no disabilities or minimal barriers, or even have a great education, who are not getting hired, who in their right mind believes that employers will suddenly wake up and hire people off the social assistance rolls?

I recall discussions with many of the employers I have been retained by in my legal office, as well as those I have consulted with while I was part of the Employment Standards Development Committee, as part of the implementation of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act.  After they got over the fact that I do not have three heads and get around to finally asking what the AODA actually is, they tell me they simply will not hire anybody who has been on assistance, yet at the same time some have told me that they should just "get a job".  I often wondered if this employer in front of me is not going to hire anybody like this, who will?  I guess this is going to take a lot of time to change people's minds.  I am quite aware of the struggle of the small business owners in my region.  They need people who will help them fulfill their business goals and who are reliable. I concur. I take issue and frequently point out boarded up storefronts along the downtown streets, or large offices that have moved out of the downtown region, often to locales that are difficult to reach by transit.  It is clear that some employers know who they want working for them, and it is not "us" as my friends refer to themselves.  I then turn to the government to ask them how they are going to force employers to take on members of the OW and ODSP community and give them lasting jobs to help them get off the system.  I know forcing them is not the answer, but ...

... another call for consultations takes place and we are all back in Toronto to communicate with one another, sector to sector, to answer these kinds of questions.  I am at these meetings, where many large employers, business associations, employment service providers, municipal managers, as well as people like me, are set up in round tables to talk to one another about what the answers should be.  I speak for the small businesses that can't possibly be there who need support, who need to know what they have to do and not have it cost them a whole lot.  I am there for those with disabilities that have the skills and want to work, to explain how to close that disconnect which seems to be in the wind whenever we go to these roundtables. The whole issue of putting people to work seems to be the non sequiter, but government policy types want to know the HOW.  I always want to explore the reasons WHY first, then the IF, and then the HOW, for those for whom it can work, but we cannot assume that no matter how well meaning we all are (and I have no doubts that all of us around those tables is well meaning), that more than two percent of people will ever work themselves off ODSP, particularly with the rules they currently have and the government refuses to change.

Brighter Prospects has made a big deal about letting "social assistance recipients" keep an extra $200 a month before their working income gets clawed back at a rate that already far exceeds the average taxation level of even the wealthiest millionaires.  If our government suddenly announced that it will tax millionaires at the rate of eighty five percent of all income they receive, chances are they will balk and try to move to other locales that will not tax them so heavily for their "efforts".  So, why is it any different for poor people?  We are no more motivated to work when our income gets cut to the bone than anybody else, so using this strategy over and over again and expecting different results is insane.

I worry a lot about this region.  I don't see a lot of opportunities coming in for "us", as my friends refer to the group of people with traditional difficulties fitting in.  It will still be a recession for a long, long time for them, even if the economy turns around in Ontario and even Niagara is booming again.  While Niagara booming will be great for my small businesses, I still want the connect that is needed to make it work for those that haven't yet experienced the possibility of prosperity.  People with disabilities are promised things will be better when the economy turns around and when it does, nothing ever changes.  When the economy flounders, they are told they have to sacrifice even more to help pay off a debt they had no part of.  If the authors and promoters of Brighter Prospects really want to make things different, they should join me someday, as I get off the bus and walk my way to my office and join me as I meet with my people, and speak to others over the telephone.  They should walk with me as I meet with too many people who month over month seem to get their cheques put on hold by the region's OW office, the same office that wants to take over ODSP cases so the same abuse can be done to this group as well.

Once again I ask, Brighter Prospects for whom?

BE GOOD TO YOUR NEIGHBOUR ON CHRISTMAS AND BASH 'EM ON THE HEAD THE OTHER 364 DAYS OF THE YEAR

I don't know about you, but while I like Christmas, I have little tolerance for the hypocrisy of the charitable sector and the upper middle class and some wealthy families in our country. Many of these people are quite active in "adopt a-family" campaigns, "give a child a Christmas: and "Christmas hamper" programs that they forget that the other 364 days of the year, these same people bash the same people who they just sponsored for these Christmas charities as "leeches", "lazy", "failures", etc. While I don't think ill is begotten by these campaigns, but little thought is given to the targets of them, how they feel about being adopted, pitied, awash with charity and fake neighbourly love, while at the same time, other days of the year, punished for their very position and circumstances.

This does not include all people of upper middle class or wealthy sectors, but a good amount of them. This also applies to "back to school". Newspapers are awash with media poornography dealing with how "wonderful" some company or organization has been to raise so many dollars from all of their "fortunate" (therefore, respectable and heroic) members to donate to all those "poor, pathetic, down-on-their luck failures" in our society. While they would never identify such persons as failures, an alarming number of people that give to charities consider those that receive from the same to be failures. Surveys have been done of staff in the charitable sector, and it was found they are just as likely to hold prejudicial views of those that approach them for help that members of the general public do.

For example, it is believed by these people that people are poor because they do not manage their money well, that they were wrongfully discharged from psychiatric or penal institutions, that they have no skills or lack a high school education. This is becoming less and less the norm; in fact, the norm of those that turn to charities are people who are really no different than members of the general public. Poor bashing originates from the necessity to create "otherness" in the population of the poor and homeless. People that donate to charities think they still have their jobs because they possess a work ethic and "work hard". Research originating from Jones and Harris blames the "fundamental attribution error" for this way of thinking, where if something horrible happens to somebody, that that person is somehow to blame for their circumstances and if something good happens, that person somehow did something to deserve it. This attribution error has self-serving properties, as it assuages those of us that are not falling on hard times that it will not happen to us, as we lack the internal qualities we attribute to those that these things happen to (e.g. lazy, mentally ill, a criminal). I shown readers in an earlier blog that laziness does not only reside in some of the jobless, but many wealthy and working people too. Wealth today is less likely to be earned as it might have been decades in the past.

In the recent Toronto municipal election, people elected Rob Ford because he appeared to be "an ordinary guy". People like Rob Ford and his brother, Doug Ford, both ran and won in the past municipal election. Both grew up as and remain to this day to be multi-millionaires. They own a company that was handed down to them by parents and likely grandparents that started it and made it successful. One only need see that if either Ford has enough time to be full-time councilor and Mayor, respectively, they are obviously not "working hard" in their business that they seem to be so responsible for. Being a member of a corporate board of directors or an owner of a large company is really not that much work. You just pay other people to run it for you and stop by once in awhile to make sure they are doing a good job. It is likely other people, perhaps, other members of the Ford family or perhaps, even hired management is doing the real work in this company. While I am not saying the Fords are doing anything wrong or their gains were ill-gotten, they cannot realistically portray themselves to be "ordinary guys". In my view, a single parent that works three part-time minimum wage jobs to keep her family's head above water works much harder than any CEO and nobody will convince me otherwise.

They, like most other wealthy people, won what is known as the Ovarian lottery. The "ovarian lottery" was named by Warren Buffet, one of the world's richest men, one of the few who will actually speak out about the nonsense of further tax cuts for the wealthy. Most wealth, high incomes and high level opportunities are inherited in some way - either by money given to them by living parents to complete their education, a business successorship, an inheritances after the parents or other close relatives die or similar circumstances. More about Buffet's analogy is written in Linda McQuaig and Meil Brooks' book entitled "The Trouble with Billionaires".

Before those of you reading this think this is a "left wing" commentary (which I don't understand as I don't relate well with the so-called left either), this book and its analysis was rated very positively by the managing editor of the National Post, typically a small-c conservative publication. There are others that are not as famous that also speak out about the wrong-headedness of further tax cuts for wealthy people. Tax cuts for corporations has never been proven to increase the salaries and benefit levels of those working for these companies, nor have they proven to distribute wealth or even opportunity equitably among the whole population. The founder of Wal-Mart, for example, was also one of the world's richest men, but we know people working at Wal-Mart earn very close to minimum wage. The same applies to the Weston family who still owns the largest stake in Loblaw's grocery stores and most workers in these stores are minimum wage and part-time.

Moreover, in their latest book, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, authors of The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everybody, comparisons among so called "rich" nations are made and various factors, such as infant mortality, incarceration rates, prevalence of certain kinds of health conditions (such as diabetes, heart disease), high school graduation rate, etc. were compared on the basis of a single independent variable: the gap of wealth and income within the nation's population. Wilkinson is an economic and a medical epidemiologist that is a full professor in London, England. His co-author, Kate Pickett, is also a professor of epidemiology and is a Career Scientist with the National Institutes of Health Research.

In Harper's Canada, the only real career path of the future will be as a police officer, a correctional services worker, a probation and parole officer, security consultant and other "criminal justice" type careers. Harper's current agenda of being "tough on crime" is going to prove itself to be not only a dismal failure, but a financially irresponsible one as well. Our crime rate has actually dropped over the past couple of decades, as an aging population is less likely to breed a new (and growing) generation of violent criminals. Further, research cited in Wilkinson and Pickett has shown that non-violent offenders entering the penal system are further away from being rehabilitated and are more likely to commit further and more violent crimes in the future. In this age of "zero tolerance", economic distress is increased among those caught up in it who can ill afford to adequately defend themselves. Even the Provincial Offences Act of Ontario has taken on a very heavy handed approach to many of its offences, making more of them "strict liability" (which means there is less flexibility in defending oneself as well as range of penalties available regardless of the defendant's circumstances). The goal here is to send more and more people to jail, more and more people to destitution and more and more people into circumstances where they can come out much more distressed and recalcitrant.

I don't care what proponents of tougher crime laws want. They have a false sense of security with tougher crime laws in place. They tell us, "if people just think before they commit the crime, then they won't get punished". That is easy to believe from a middle class, supportive familial context, where opportunities, money and resources are not a problem. Those of lesser circumstances are not necessarily more violent, but they can get caught up in things that will now can result in a penal sentence. This list includes failure to pay child support, failure to appear in court (e.g. sometimes it is hard to notify somebody of their court date when the defendant does not have a fixed address), driving under suspension, alcohol and drug related offenses, prostitution-related offenses and some property related offenses. Yes, these things can result in jail terms. They say there's no debtor's prison in Canada, but there are more than a few ways where unreconciled debts and fines can eventually put one in jail.

Persons with mental health issues can sometimes join a diversion program where they can participate in a treatment program instead of going through the penal system, and for this group of people, this has proven to be effective. However, most of the people who are caught in these cycles are not always involved in the mental health system, have few supports outside of the same people that got them in trouble in the first place, and very little money. A broader crime prevention and neighbourhood rehabilitation strategy would be much more effective than a "get tough" approach on crime. Open, supportive and non-traditional supports to persons living in disadvantaged situations can prevent people from going that direction in the first place, or get them to change their behaviour.

I am not opposed to tough sentences for child molesters, murderers, organized crime, etc. In fact, I would also like to see a "tough on crime" movement for corporate crimes, such as tax evasion by company executives, pilfering of pensions funds from employee trusts, embezzlement, contractor fraud, etc. by so-called "white collar criminals". These sorts of "white collar types" are least likely to go to jail in Canada, even though they destroy many lives and are often unrepentant for what they did and usually repeat their crimes many times before they finally get shut down. If they do go to jail, it is usually for short terms and usually in favourable conditions (e.g. minimum security, early release for "good behaviour").

It is so ironic that those that support continued and increased inequality in our society seem to believe that "welfare fraud" is a huge problem, while corporate fraud is not. It is in fact the other way around, especially given the government's own statistics, as cited by others. This information came up during the inquest into the death of Kimberley Rogers, who was convicted of "welfare fraud" for having the audacity to use OSAP to get her college diploma while trying to get by on a very reduced welfare cheque. Rogers ended up getting house arrest and being barred from receiving welfare as her penalty ... as a result, she fell very far behind in her rent and was basically a prisoner in a very overheated apartment lacking air conditioning during that hot summer. She died, while she was also pregnant with her first child. Welfare fraud was studied and was found to constitute less than 1% of all monies paid out to recipients. Income tax evasion or fraud is known to be much more common and involve greater amounts of money, but only rarely gets prosecuted. The reason for this is that those that subvert our income tax laws often have the resources of highly skilled accountants and tax lawyers and can afford to front a strong defense, if charged.


At the same time, the same people that endorse policies that lead to a more unequal society tend to give to charities that do nothing to advance the interests of the poor. I have yet to find a single person who was brought out of poverty as a result of seeking help from a food bank, a homeless shelter or any similar charity. After they get their nourishment this month, they will only be hungry again and in need of help the next month, all the while those giving and perpetuating these charities continue to benefit from charitable tax deductions and other ways to hide their wealth. To me, a business would do a hell of a lot more for the poor by hiring people off the welfare rolls, qualified to do the work of course and paying them decent wages. For those they cannot hire, they can sponsor scholarships and trust funds to allow low income people to get a post-secondary education and/or to develop their own assets.

Organizations like Social and Enterprise Development Innovations provide an alternative to perpetuating poverty among the poor and treating them so much like outsiders like we do now. There are programs they develop to assist low income people into developing their own businesses, setting up individual development accounts and furthering their education. The Metcalf Foundation of Toronto also sponsors research and programs that assist in change development as well, much of it through awareness of how current welfare programs serve to keep people in poverty. Social class mobility in Canada has substantially declined since the late 1980's, given the tightening of social program eligiblity and the softening of the labour market. To argue that everybody has equal opportunity may be true, but for many, that opportunity is very, very difficult to access when society continues to put barriers in place to those that need this access the most.

Your thoughts?