RETIREMENT: A PRIVILEGE FOR THE RICH?

Canadians worry about outliving their savings
Toronto Star
About one-third of people over 60 fear they will run out of money after retirement, new poll says
Jul 16, 2007 04:30 AM
Gregory Bonnell
CANADIAN PRESS

One-third of Canada's senior and near-senior citizens are worried they'll outlive their bank accounts, and half of those over 60 holding jobs say they're working because they need the money, a poll suggests as a record number of Canadians face the so-called golden years.

If projections hold true, tomorrow's census release on aging will reveal seniors, specifically those older than 80, to be the fastest growing segment of Canada's population. That trend will only grow in coming years, with the first of that demographic population bulge known as baby boomers having just recently turned 60.

So, what's on the mind of Canadian seniors? Finances, health and their continued independence, according to the poll by Decima Research provided exclusively to Canadian Press. While 44 per cent of respondents 60 and older said they were not worried about outliving their resources and assets, 33 per cent said they were.

When asked to agree or disagree with the statement: I have to work for financial reasons, 32 per cent agreed while 21 per cent strongly agreed. One-third of respondents 60 and older said they were working either part- or full-time. Nineteen per cent indicated that their financial situation was worse or much worse than five years ago. "The truth of the matter is, a lot of baby boomers and wartime babies have not adequately prepared for retirement," said Bill Gleberzon, spokesperson for CARP, Canada's Association for the 50 Plus. "Many of them, if you look at the amount they have actually stored away in their RSPs, among those who have RSPs ... the amounts are around $60,000. That's not going to get you through 30 or 40 years of your life after you retire."

Roughly 3.4 million Canadians were 65 or older in 2006, making up 13.3 per cent of the population, according to projections published by Statistics Canada last fall. An additional 1.6 million people were five years or less away from 65, and there were almost 1.2 million people 80 or older.

The first of the boomers, the generation born between 1947 and 1966, are turning 60 this year. While they're regarded as the most affluent group in Canadian history, society can expect to see an economic "division of the baby boom," said professor Doug Owram of the University of British Columbia. "There's going to be a group of baby boomers for whom all of this image of affluence and consumption isn't reality," said Owram.

One poll question that elicited a unified response from the majority of respondents centred on the worry they could lose their independence as they age. Fifty-four per cent agreed that was a concern. Some 23 per cent neither agreed nor disagreed; 21 per cent said they weren't worried about losing their independence. The Decima Research poll's results were based on 4,000 online respondents, aged 42 and over, conducted from March 25 to April 22, considered accurate to 1.6 percentage points, 9.5 times out of 10.
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We heard for years about how our population is getting older. That means the average age of Canadian residents has been increasing over the past several years.

There are many reasons for this: people having less children, older people living longer, etc. We hear so much hyperbole and rhetoric from the financial services industry about investments and long-term financial security. One commercial in mind is for Ameriprise, which is targeted towards the first wave of baby boomers who are preparing to retire in the next few years. Planners use a dream book, where couples can plan what they can do in their golden years and their financial planners will ostensibly make it possible.

When people speak about baby boomers, they refer to them as marketing targets, potential customers and folks with deep pockets. While it is true that a portion of the Baby Boom will retire well, this is only because of the social programs, job security and company pension plans that were available to them since the 1970's. During "their days", as one might call it, people got jobs, worked up the corporate ladder and held on to their jobs for the majority of their lives. The company provided health benefits, disability benefits (if they become ill before 65) and some type of defined benefit pension plan. In addition to the defined benefit pension plan, these folks also paid into CPP for most of their lives, which means the government will top up their company pension as well with at least another $1,200 - $1,500, depending on their highest earning years. Also, as these people were part of the more secure labour force, they likely had some money to put away for retirement, especially as their children left home and their mortgages got paid off.

Governments - who only think about their short-term political futures - have not done a damned thing about the volcanic explosion of elder poverty that is slowly creeping up the ladder as our population ages even more. Those retiring now benefited from strong social programs and job security of the 1970's - they hailed from a period of time when employers felt they owed some loyalty to their employees. We are now seeing 30 and 40 years into the past as the most wealthy among the Baby Boomers are able to retire.

What about the volcano? For the rest of the Baby Boomers that started their working lives in the mid to late 1980's, their career paths will be very different. People in what I often refer to as the "second half" of the Baby Boom have not held a job for more than a few years at a time, often changing employers and career choices along the way to find an employer who is willing to pay them more, offer more benefits and provide greater incentives. Company pensions are not designed for "job hoppers", as the term is often used. Benefits may still be available to a declining segment of the working population, but it is said that today - less than 30% of all companies even offer pension plans for their employees and among those that do, plans appear to be shifting away from defined benefit plans to shared RRSP contributions that can be locked in until retirement.

What about the rest of us that don't work for companies that provide any kind of pension? We are told to SAVE our money - put away ten percent of your earnings each year into an RRSP or some other retirement planning instrument. Many financial analysts are now becoming extremely critical and blaming of Canadians because it seems they are seeing the upcoming volcano of elder poverty, except they blame the poor for it. We didn't save enough money for our retirement, they say. We didn't manage our money very well.

This always brings up the odd scenario I presented a few years ago to a group of people on the myths of poverty, particularly around the idea that the poor are poor because they don't manage their money properly. I can't even repeat that scenario today because when I did these presentations, the "poor" of those days had 40% more to work with than they do today. I can't even get to the word "go" with people in receipt of Ontario Works. First, our government theoretically wants people to only use Ontario Works as a resource of last resort - which means people have to spend themselves almost completely down to nothing before they can even become eligible for what meagre benefits Ontario Works offers. One resource such people are forced to divest themselves of is any retirement savings they might have, as long as it is not locked-in. That means, people in need must spend down their entire nest egg, plus pay substantial withdrawal penalties and taxes while doing so before the state will cough up its meagre support of $536 a month! I don't even know how people can obtain a room on this amount, let alone an apartment -- and our city's fathers point too much to an alleged growing problem with homelessness. Instead of dealing with the poverty that leads to homelessness, all politicians want to do is make the homeless disappear.

Draining one's retirement account is also a pre-requisite for those who must qualify for ODSP as well. People often believe that those who built up a significant work history wouldn't have to turn to this route because CPP has its own pension plan that pays out regardless of how many assets you have. CPP also pays out even if you are married to a millionnaire, so they actually believe working people should have no trouble getting CPP Disability. I am not bragging, but I know I *do* have a great track record for winning CPP-based appeals - BUT I also know that I only take on CPP cases that have a chance of winning. For ODSP, I am less picky because their "definition of disability" is not as strict as the terms set out for CPP Disability.

CPP Disability only pays if you can prove that you had a severe and prolonged mental or physical disability at the time of your Minimum Qualifying Period (meaning a certain period of time must have passed first *after* you stopped contributing to the program). Severe means that one is not able to regularly work in a remunerative way due to a mental or physical disability. If you can regularly contribute 4 - 6 hours a week for example, you do not qualify. Further, your disability must be prolonged meaning it will last a substantial period of time or result in death. Basically, CPP only pays if you cannot hold down a "regular" job and it is likely your disability will last a long time, perhaps for the rest of your life (or for an "indefinite" period of time). The disability can be cyclic, meaning sometimes it gets worse and other times, it gets better; however, the "better" periods should not be regular and predictable or last long enough for a person to reinstate themselves into a paid job - even for a short time, such as a year. I've won cases for clients on this criteria, but in order to know why I won, you need to know the clients. None of them will likely work again. Most are incapacitated by their disabilities to such an extent that even personal care and community living is hindered. They suffer from chronic pain, have lost their sight or their hearing, can no longer walk unassisted, require some forms of personal care, etc. All this - for a lousy $900+ a month ... and most of my clients do not even get NEAR this maximum!

However, it goes without saying that one of the fringe benefits for my clients that DO get CPP Disability is that the years they receive it are not "counted" for the purposes of calculating their CPP Retirement Pension, so they may get a little more that way. However, most people with disabilities do not qualify for CPP - most end up on provincial ODSP or even worse, many can't even get their act together enough to jump through the seventeen hoops required to get ODSP - so they get stuck on Ontario Works. Both Ontario Works and Ontario Disability Support Program do not allow its recipients to retain any retirement pensions unless they are locked in. That means it is more than likely they will retire very poor. Even if somebody could manage to save money while on ODSP (and somebody yet has to show me how they can do that these days), they are not allowed to save more than $5,000 (or they lose their ODSP) or if they are a family, $7,000 + $500 per additional dependent. That means if you are part of a couple and have two children, your family can only have $8,000 at any given time in "liquid assets". Retirement savings, including those in RRSPs and most other instruments are considered to be "liquid assets".

How about other people who work? As stated above, people are changing jobs more often. It is often said that not only do people change jobs, they may even change entire career areas several times in their working life. It is known that not only are less employers apt to provide a retirement pension to its staff, they are likely to pay people less and offer fewer benefits. It is said that one in four workers works in a non-standard job; that is, self-employed, independent contractor, short-term employment, etc. These jobs are not stable and do not usually offer any benefits or security. Jobs outside the one in four are also becoming less stable. Higher-paid manufacturing, research and resource development jobs have been disappearing in droves, only to be replaced by jobs in the service sector that pay less than half as much and offer little to no job security. Despite the fact the average wage has declined since even the early 1990's, prices have substantially jumped since then. It puzzles me how one is supposed to work in one (or two or three) of these low-paid jobs and still have money left to put away for retirement after housing, transportation and groceries are paid for.

In addition to this reality, there is a growing reality for young people trying to enter the paid labour force. It is said that in ten years, 70% of all jobs will require a post-secondary education. Young people attempt to seek post-secondary education more than they did in the past; however, most graduates end up with substantial debt burdens that are not unlike a mortgage, except with higher interest rates. Interest relief programs have been cut and private collection agencies have been contracted to collect defaulted loan payments from defaulters. It is said that more than one in four students ends up in collections. What does all this have to do with retirement? Young people have no money to put away. They need to pay off their student loans, get settled to live on their own and obtain their first job (which is becoming more and more difficult for anybody, apparently). More young people are postponing leaving their homes of origin, living with their parents well into their thirties ... as they shift from job to job until they find that right job that will support them.

In non-metropolitan areas, young people need to finance and obtain their own vehicles if they expect to find a job that pays more than minimum wages. The price for a vehicle can exceed $7,000 per annum - especially for younger people who tend to be hit with higher insurance premiums and higher financing fees. How can a young person who is busy trying to make enough money to survive, let alone pay off student loans and cover the costs of owning and maintaining a vehicle, be expected to put away 10% of their earnings for retirement? They postpone marriage so they can pay the rent. They postpone having children, so they can possibly own a home someday. A mortgage is yet another expense people take on that take twenty years to pay off ... if at all. Studies show many people are taking out second and third mortgages to manage what used to be quite an affordable lifestyle. None of these people will put away a dime for RRSPs, at least until their kids have left home (which as I said is getting to be later and later), the mortgage is paid off and other debts are paid down ... by then, many of these people are probably ready to retire anyways - but they have NO money!

I think this is something we should all worry about. The number of working people per retired person is decreasing as time goes on. It is not likely that the tax base will be as solid as it is now with the first wave of the wealthy Baby Boomers retiring. We can allow tons more immigration, but studies have shown that even that is not going to reverse this demographic deficit. Governments must plan NOW to put away a portion of the surpluses it currently takes in to use for future retirement incomes for the less wealthy retired. Government pensions many need to be clawed back for those who make a certain amount from other sources to allow lower income retirees to keep more of their incomes. Work should always be a choice for the retired, not a necessity as 50% of those interviewed for the above study indicated. The idea that a very large number of people may be forced to work at menial jobs until they are one foot in the grave is very real.

It is not because we are not saving enough. It is because we have less money to save. If the government wants us to have more kids, why are they making it so expensive and impossible for many people to do so? I have two kids myself and I can tell you they will not even have the opportunities I had (which were also few and far between), so I can't even imagine what retirement is going to be like for them -- if there will be such a thing when they get to be that age. There are MAJOR things the government must do NOW to protect itself from this growing and inevitable volcano. These steps include:

1. Setting aside a portion of its surplus into stable investments to be tiered instruments to pay for pensions of people in the future who are unable to draw more than the poverty line;

2, Reduce government pensions for those whose investments or private pensions bring them past a certain level of privilege;

3. Mandate employers to provide some form of portable pension instrument to its employees and allow these employees to lock the pension funds in if they change jobs (but take it with them);

4. Allow older people to continue working for as long as they desire to - but take steps to make sure that older persons that wish to continue working are not mired in prejudice. Earnings past one's "official" retirement age should not impact on government pensions, provided one's income is still below a certain amount;

5. Review the labour market and try to find ways to ensure that jobs pay wages that keep up with the cost of living and do not leave people destitute;

6. For people whose work opportunities are limited by disability, family responsibilities and other situations, the social safety net needs to be restored so people are not left destitute by an illness or the need to care for somebody else;

7. Examine the prospect of a negative income tax to use as a redistribution instrument;

8. Increase taxes on wealth and inheritances worth more than a certain amount;

9. Post-secondary education should cost less and not become a major financial burden for young adults; and

10. Better and more effective programs to help employment disadvantaged people get into meaningful jobs should be in place and accessible to everybody that needs this assistance. It should not just serve the low-range, entry-level seeking population.

Until we see MAJOR structural changes in both the labour market and the social safety net, we are going to face the inevitable "poverty bust" of the second half of the Baby Boomer generation that inevitably arrive at retirement's door empty-handed?

Thoughts?

Politics of the "Consumer/Survivor" Movement

This post is not going to be very popular among the so-called "progressive" folks that get involved with or support consumer/survivor organizations, not only dealing with mental health, but many other types of "consumer" based movements as well. I have no trouble with these organizations, but would appreciate their work more if there was better leadership and a bigger push that would benefit the whole, as opposed to the few.

In consumer-type movements, there is a void of leadership. Even when there are "leaders", the leaders are not the type to get it done or cause it to get done. They are more of the "charismatic" and self-important types that generate unearned credentials and act as though they are the only ones that are tapped into their communities. The unfortunate reason for this is that they can. Not enough "consumers" stand up to their "leaders" and call for them to account. Whenever they do, they are often turfed from whatever organization it is they are a member of. I know about this. I am aware of numerous situations where people have been very hurt by these actions. To me, in my work as a legal representative, at least I try to follow the motto "do no harm" and then the next, "listen to the client". Even if I worked with a client similar to the one before me in the past, I need to know about this one because to me, everybody is different and needs to be treated like an individual and respected for it.

Twenty or more years has passed since the dawning of the mental health consumer movement in Ontario and from the beginning of its time until today, I have not seen a single change in the following: (a) the unemployment rate among consumer/survivors in general; (b) the percentage of ODSP recipients that have as their primary disability, mental health problems (e.g. this has in fact gone up from 27% of all new ODSP recipients in 1988 to 36% today); (c) the number of mental health consumers being referred to and stuck in low-wage employment; and (d) the number of dollars spent on dealing with mental health issues per capita.

I remember in the late 1980's and the early 1990's, certain mental health consumer leaders would cite the statistic of over 85% of people with mental health problems were unemployed. Please note we are referring to serious mental health problems, not the everyday anxiety or depression that many "healthy" people feel. During recent Senate Committee Hearings, which wrapped up in 2005, these same people reported an 85% - 90% rate of unemployment among this same group. Through this longitudinal admission, the leaders of this movement are admitting they failed their people. To me, this calls for new leadership. No more of the same old, same old.

To me, poverty and unemployment are the two MAJOR issues impacting on people with mental health disabilities. If leadership from this population is unable to effect improvements, the times should be a' changing. My views are well known by many of the "leaders", but all I get is the brush-off. The fact of the matter is that as long as they have their positions and their well-paid jobs, they are "all right Jack". People with mental health problems want to work just as much as other people. Low OW and ODSP rates in fact are making people among this group and other disability groups much more desperate to find employment to top up their income so they can survive. Some are unable to and are resigned by this current government administration to live in poverty forever. For example, one case I am aware of tried working and has held 26 jobs over the past two years in a lame attempt to bring himself out of poverty. No doubt this desperate situation was not great for his mental health.

There are others that I am aware of that come from higher education and want jobs that exceed the typical low-paid entry level positions that consumers are usually referred to: food, filth, filing, fetching and flowers. I'm not saying people shouldn't work in these fields, but if they do - it should be a self-chosen career goal, not something that is imposed on them, or by its mere dominance in terms of being the only job opportunities offered. Those offering jobs in so-called "consumer-run businesses" aren't much better at alleviating this stereotype. While the leaders are the ones that hog the better-paid management positions, they only have the lower-paid part-time jobs in the five f's as earlier referred to offer others. The progressive community is silent on these issues. When you try to raise it with somebody, they say, "That's what these people want to do!". My response to that is: How can anybody be sure? Has each individual been truly consulted as to what their career aspirations are? I heard from hundreds of people who are not crazy about going for the low-paid five f's.

Further, the very idea that somebody received their training and work experience in a "consumer business" does not allow them the choice to NOT disclose to their next employer their status as a consumer/survivor at whatever point they may wish to move on. The names of the businesses are sometimes dead give-aways: Crazy Cooks, Raging Spoon. Or even if they don't have names like that, employers in these communities are generally aware that the business from which the candidate is leaving is 100% consumer-run. These businesses have an unusual amount of press coverage advertising to the world who they are and who works there, an unreasonable amount of government subsidy and generally low expectations of themselves when it comes to actually competing with similar businesses in their respective marketplace. This does not bode well for a person who may be seeking a supervisory or management position at new company - even if that person has gained the right training and experience to do that work in the "consumer business".

Others may not offer consumer businesses, but provide exclusive training opportunities for their "members" or "consumers" to pursue. The clubhouse movement is great for this. The clubhouse is set up on specific work units, which give its "members" an opportunity to learn the skills to partake in a work-ordered day. Again, the work units are usually based on the five f's: food, filth, filing, fetching and flowers. While there may be some advanced clubhouses I am not aware of that may offer more, the ones that I do know don't stray far from the five f's. When I raise this with the staff - many of whom are not necessarily from the dinosaur era in understanding the impact of stigma on employment opportunities - they deny this is job training or intended to route people in these specific directions. However, for those clubhouses that do offer off-site employment opportunities, the jobs are not much different than what was offered in the clubhouse environment.

A third example is a specific one that is available in my community and a few other communities across Canada. That is the BUILT Network. While I have never worked there or participated in its programs, I know people who have, either locally or via the Internet. Again, this is another one of those programs that thrive on placing people into low-wage, entry-level jobs, regardless of the person's education or aspirations. The people who run the BUILT Network locally seem nice enough and probably motivated by solely good intentions, as are likely the people who run its other offices across the country. However, based on the training given and career directions offered post-program, the average wage is $8 - $10 an hour. A few make a bit more, but in general - one is not going to get into the door of a high paying career using BUILT Network as a stepping stone. One thing I did consider when I first learned of this program is that it is obvious that program staff and its leaders are making considerably much more than the average wage of its participants. I have no doubt many of them are educated, but then again - so are many "consumers" that come to them for help.

I have no idea of the success rates of these programs, because basically there is really no way an outsider can ascertain if a program is successful or not. I have seen programs across Ontario that claim a placement rate above 90%, but there are no actual empirical studies to back these figures. I suppose if I run these programs, I would know more accurately how successful we actually are and may find ways to present the statistics to make it look like we are doing even better than we are, but that's not the point of this article.

This article is to state there is no real leadership among this particular movement. Yes, perhaps "leadership" can be defined in different ways by different people, but when I envision "leadership" - I think of someone who is able to make an impact, effect change and support and/or advocate for a diversity of opinion and strengths. I already shown that nothing changed with respect to the unemployment and poverty among consumer/survivors, despite valiant attempts by its "leaders" to fix this. So there's been no impact or effective change in these areas. What about other areas?

I want to be gentle on this next point because I am not trying to attack people; however, many consumer "leaders" have adopted what more conservative folks may deem to be a "politically correct" paradigm. To me, people are free to believe what they want - but when they purportedly represent a larger group of people than themselves and their own personal networks, it is time to throw that paradigm out the window and actually LISTEN. I have attended various conferences in the past where consumer "leaders" were featured as presenters. I did this as part of my own work as the executive director of a mental health agency - an agency that consulted broadly with both its members and non-members on a variety of issues. I simply let them talk and me listen. However, when I attended these workshops, I noted particularly offensive comments made by many of these "leaders" about: (a) educated people, many of whom are also consumers themselves; (b) conservative people, which also includes a significant swath of the consumer population; (c) traditional lifestyles (e.g. consumers who choose to become married, consumers who are heterosexual and traditional in their orientation, consumers who seek employment in a traditional business setting); and (d) consumers who do not believe the mantra that it is only possible for men to be violent against women and not the other way around.

I personally have no problems with people whose political views differ from my own, because we need diversity and a variety of ideas in this world. In fact, many of my own friends are rabidly "left wing" in their perspectives and they enjoy my company because there are *some* issues we may agree on, such as the lack of a social safety net and the increasingly pervasive level of poverty among people in one of the richest countries in the world. I also have no problems with people who live non-traditional lifestyles (e.g. in a same sex relationship, no children, living common law, etc.). However, we are not going to wipe out prejudice and stigma by creating further prejudices of our own - by marginalizing members of one's own community by pretending there is no such thing as a "consumer" who is also a professionally trained service provider, or pretending that "consumers" cannot possibly last and thrive in a traditional heterosexual marriage and have children, etc. I also felt marginalized when consumer "leaders" talked down to many of their consumer audience members like they were two years old and didn't understand anything. This is a bold assumption that one can only be a "true consumer" if one were uneducated, illiterate and ignorant of the ways of the world. Further and probably most important is the assumption that "consumers" only want to live with and/or work with other "consumers". By making these bold statements, my members who attended these conferences or who heard the tapes from the conference and/or read the minutes, were very turned off by what was said - and 90% of these folks were also people who were "consumers" and a few were family members of consumers!

I am not saying these consumer leaders are mean-spirited or intend to attack many of their own with their comments. They are likely not aware of the vast diversity among their own people. I am also saying these leaders are either not listening to their followers or being very selective as to who their followers are - only allowing people who are more like they are into their tents. Now, doesn't this sound very much like what many of these same people accuse the broader society of doing to mental health consumers? These leaders have their own refined sense of their experiences and by their comments, actually believe others share the same experiences in the same way and have come to terms with its meaning in exactly the same way. They also do not seem to think there is a need for a diversity of leadership or a periodic rotation where a set of leaders retire to be replaced with new leaders with a new vision that better reflects changing times and changing ideas. Unfortunately, the same people who were "speaking for" the so-called consumer/survivor movement in the 1980's are the same people who are doing this today ...

I actually researched the web, spoke to members over the Internet of various "consumer/survivor" organizations across the province. Fifteen to twenty years ago, our provincial government poured a pile of money into funding these organizations. I don't know why because none of these organizations appear to be doing much lobbying and advocacy for change in the quality of life for its highly impoverished membership; henceforth, many do not seem to seek the most qualified people to run their organizations. I personally would rather have none of these groups funded than allow sanctioned mediocrity to continue and proclaim to be representative of this part of the population. Remember the anti-education stance that many of the leaders have taken over the years, that being a consumer/survivor in itself was sufficient to be a manager, supervisor, program developer, or spokesperson. I directly confronted a few of the directors of these groups at a conference for the CMHA a few years back about why there was not much emphasis on employment and poverty reduction on their agendas. I was told that their members did not want to lose their disability pensions. Yet, at the same time, I hear only minimal squealing from this gallery about the push for changes in employment supports and other initiatives that may well lower this risk for this group. Consumer members of anti-poverty groups tend to be from other disability groups, than from the organized "mental health" movement.

Among the hundreds of consumer/survivors in my region, 99% of them do not and will not join a "consumer" group, but some have told me on numerous occasions that the only three people who seem to be speaking up for people who have been through the mental health system or who have mental health problems are me, the director of a progressive community development agency next door to my office and another individual who is active with the Canadian Mental Health Association. In my opinion, I don't have to have an organization to be considered credible on these issues. I think we rely too much on the word of people that head organizations about what their respective constituencies want and need. There is scant proof that leaders in these organizations are always aware of what their people want and need; it appears many of them tend to govern and speak up only on the basis of their personal opinions or on the opinions of those closest to them - but certainly not on behalf of those they are paid to work with. While there is nothing wrong with expressing one's own opinion, but when you are paid to work with a large group of people - it is the concerns of your people and not you that need to be heard.

Thoughts?

Two Incomes, Two Cars and the Joneses

Many times, I am tired of living in the community I live in.

In the Niagara Region, the legions of the poor are quite large: one in five, I heard. However, Niagara is different than other regions, such as Toronto and Hamilton, in its approach to dealing with it. We have major food banks, leadership of which is only glorified and revelled. We have agencies that pursue "middle class" solutions to 'help' the poor. They recognize the problems, but want to get poor people to mingle more with rich people with the hopes that some of the wealth just might be contagious. Niagara is known like many other places for its addiction to charity ... every week, somebody is chopping off their hair to donate to Wigs for Kids or some related cause. It is getting old. People organize walks for MS, Heart and Stroke, Cancer Research and even recently, a walk was held to raise awareness about schizophrenia. One thing Niagara never has walks for is anything to raise the awareness of the plight of its poor.

Niagara Region is a study in contrasts. There are very wealthy people living among us. Niagara-on-the-Lake is known to be a haven for the wealthy, particularly the retired wealthy. Social class is very structured in Niagara as well, meaning people who are in each class know which class they "belong" to and what opportunities are availed to them. Niagara's tourist economy reminds me about the feudal system as I learned about it when I first studied law and the history of real estate and property rights. There are the Owners, those who own those lovely hotels, tourist attractions and cinemas and so forth ... There are the Managers (or the Landlords), Petite Bourgeoisie, those that own the largest farms and wineries, as well as a few smatterings of those among the Merchant class. Finally, there are the workers ... most of those who work for the Owners, Petite Bourgeoisie or the Merchant class are almost always low-waged and seasonal labourers.

Another industry that is designated along class lines is the Auto Industry, which is a weakening, though still present concern in this Region. There are the Owners/ General Managers, the Union Workers and those who are unable to even set a foot in the door because all the jobs have been long since hogged by the Union Workers and members of their families. The latter group are often shunted off to work for places like call centres, large retailers (such as Wal-Mart) or Tim Horton's. Niagara's fathers want to keep the Auto Sector moving, even though its presence appears to be declining. However, the force among the Auto Industry is not missed by even the least observant person. Whole lots are being ripped apart and flattened out throughout the Region to do one of two things: (a) Create parking lots; or (b) Create more automobile sales firms. After all, we need to create an outlet for the Union Workers, Petite Bourgeoisie, Merchants and the Owners to purchase new cars year over year, don't we? It is this class of people that are probably the only people that can afford to purchase them anyways.

If you are somebody in Niagara that is not an Owner, General Manager, Union Worker, Petite Bourgeoisie or a Merchant, or married to one, you are likely not likely going to become one of them. Why? Because Niagara Region, as well as many regions of similar size and scope, accepts a very rigid class structure that is based upon membership to the above groups, or association with the same (such as through marriage) - but if you are NOT - if you are one of the one in five people in the Region who are considered poor, your chances of EVER climbing that supposed ladder to the next level are nil and none. It's the Family Compact or nothing in Niagara.

The fact of the matter is that job hogsmanship is very much of a reality here in Niagara. If somebody is a Teacher, for example, they are most likely married to an Owner, General Manager, Union Worker, Petite Bourgeoisie or a Merchant. They are less likely to come from single income families. These are the people that will have the vast majority of pension funds available to them upon retirement. These are the people who think nothing of taking a drive and going to a cottage somewhere north of Toronto most weekends in the summer. They usually have a backyard pool and their children are the first to get the best "summer jobs" the system has to offer them because these families have the contacts.

Unfortunately, these are also the very same people who are part of the new movement to "simplify things", "become green" and "give to the poor" (usually meaning African poor and not local poverty). They try to imagine or make the rest of us imagine that life can only be simpler if we all had our own little gardens and grew our own vegetables, cooked everything from scratch and cut coupons. These are all good ideas, but the one in five people I spoke of earlier are not: (a) likely to have a yard, let alone room to put in a garden; (b) have the time to play in the dirt to develop one even if they had a yard (e.g. most are working two or three minimum wage jobs just to pay the rent and feed the kids); (c) have the time or energy to cook from scratch; and (d) most do not have a vehicle in which to travel from one end of town to the other to "catch" various specials and use different coupons to save a dollar or two on the price of milk. Poverty is indeed expensive.

Poor people do not have the money to start and maintain a garden. They do not have the transportation to pick up the essentials for a garden, nor do they have the capacity to even retrieve free or low-cost items others may have for sale or give-away on the Internet or through the newspaper. Poor families in Niagara that do not have a car stay poor, regardless of how well educated and skilled they are. Employers do not want anybody who does not share the values and lifestyles of the Owners, General Managers, Union Workers, Petite Bourgeoisie or Merchants. Employers cannot relate to people who do not have an easy pick-up-and-go type of the lifestyle that they enjoy. People want to hire other people who are just like they are.

The expression "keeping up with the Joneses" has been around for a long time. People who have money have the means to compete with other people with money. People who are poor watch this happen and only feel left out of the game. The Joneses do not know that poor folks exist in Niagara, even though the Joneses may once in a blue moon drop off a non-perishable food item to the Food Bank or hand over a quarter to the occasional panhandler, but nobody in the Jones family or those who try to keep up with them have ever bothered to ask why there is so much poverty in Niagara Region, or if they do, why it is okay for the poor to accept their crumbs and not share the same opportunities for upward mobility that they have. People who are dual income earners tend to believe other adults come from the same background. I've met teachers that assume all parents can afford to send their kids to various field trips and pizza days. When they don't, the fault of course rests with parents or with the child who may not be "responsible enough" to bring in the required money for these things. Unfortunately, while our Board of Education pretends to respect all students equally, they in fact, do not. They expect low-income parents to beg for financial assistance from the schools in order for their children to be treated equally ... thus requiring these parents to give a type of personal disclosure that is not expected of other parents. They do not think for a minute that such disclosure only labels them as "damaged goods" and serves as a barrier for people to succeed in the community on their own merits. Receipt of "charity" is not as confidential as you think. People who accept "charity" are not the same people who get hired for the good jobs.

There are probably more cars per capita here in Niagara Region than anywhere else. There is absolutely nothing policy-wise or environmentally that is being done to curb the use of private vehicles. Niagara Region has a substantial amount of gridlock on most of its roadways, as well as highways. The Niagara Region is the only incorporated Region that does not support ANY inter-municipal transit. Why, do you ask? Because the leaders of this Region actually believe that EVERYBODY drives. If you don't, they assume there is something wrong with you. If you complain about discrimination in jobs, they say jobs are plentiful in call centres, cleaning hotels, picking fruit and doing other menial tasks, regardless of your education or career aspirations. Yet in the same breath, these same people complain about the lack of population growth and the fact that young college and university graduates LEAVE while they can. People do not use transit in Niagara unless they are: (a) one of the one in five people who are poor and marked for life; (b) mentally challenged (because we don't expect developmentally delayed adults to drive cars, do we?); (c) frail seniors (usually in their 70's and 80's); and (d) students, who are usually landlocked by student loans and cannot afford to keep up with the Joneses right now (though many of them come from these same types of middle income families from elsewhere that will eventually get them set for life). Unfortunately, this is a stigma that is carried over to employers and others in the Region, which has only further castrated our population into solid social classes and cultural division.

The reality that society has to face is clear. Not everybody has family support. I can count the number of my hundreds of clients I worked with over the years who are on social assistance or some other financial support who have families assisting them on my left hand. While this is true, governments continue to focus only on those people on my left hand who have families who are (a) available; (b) able; and (c) willing to provide financial support to their disabled relatives. There are whole workshops dedicated to issues like the Henson Trust, Registered Education Savings Plans, Registered Disability Support Plans, Segregated Funds, etc. To the vast majority of my people, these things mean absolutely nothing. It does not apply to their reality - because their loved ones may be dead, fragile themselves or they simply turned their backs on them years ago when the going got tough. Many of these people never settled into their first jobs and they are now in their 30's and 40's. Some have never driven a car. This is not going to happen for them without concerted and ongoing efforts on the part of government and community support organizations to get their heads out of the sand, to stop trying to keep up with the Joneses (as in my view, the Joneses do not need any more government help than they already get - which they do in fact get) and walk a mile in the shoes of my clients. We need to return the learning curve to normalization and integration, as opposed to marginalization and segregation, which is what we are doing so wrong today.

My clients want exactly the same thing everybody else wants:

1. They want to live in a home that is clean, safe and secure (e.g. poor people do not *need* staff to babysit them or tell them how to spend their money);

2. They want enough money to allow them to make a reasonable number of choices with respect to their lives (e.g. housing, food, transportation, telephone, entertainment, and support services that they choose). If they make mistakes, they want the right to accept the consequences and move on;

3. They want the right to continue their education, receive additional training and skills and have them count for something (instead of being blithely turned away from every job opportunity because they don't already have their own vehicles, know somebody who already works for the employer or belongs to the union already);

4. They want the right to access employment opportunities that reflect their actual skills, education, training and work experience, as opposed to low-wage ghettos they usually get referred to;

5. If they cannot work at all or are limited in their capabilities in working, they want to ensure that they have an income that can be counted on to cover ALL of their costs of living a reasonable lifestyle; and

6. They want the right to retire at some point in their lives without having to accept a McJob to subsidize the pithy government pensions they will be expected to live on.

These are things that folks with two incomes, two cars and an obsession with keeping up with the Joneses do not understand. They do not understand there are people who will not get to retire at all due to the declining value of public pensions (which do not keep up with the actual cost of living) or get to choose where they live, who their friends are or where they work. These are people who are quite often bullied at work, but say nothing about it because they know the only alternative is living on the streets, which is something apparently enshrined somewhere in Ontario Works legislation - that people in receipt of it should be pleased to even have a home, even if it is a garbage dumpster or a homeless shelter.

But most of all, this group does NOT understand that the reason that they are able to do so well is because so many others are not. Many middle, upper-middle and upper class families have the poor to thank for their positions, because if they had to pay their employees decent wages, pay the kind of taxes they really should be paying, or to cover the full cost of their consumption habits (like the poor seem to be expected to do) - they would not be able to keep up with the Joneses, or perhaps there may not even be any Joneses to keep up with. Other middle class folks, by virtue of their jobs, rely upon the existence of poor people to keep them in business. They certainly don't want to see poverty eradicated. As one of my readers, this should be easy for you to understand by now how one is ethically tied to fighting for one's own elimination if you happen to be one of those people who work to "serve" the poor.

SKIRTING THE INCONVENIENT TRUTH

By now, all of my readers likely heard about former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore's fanciful tour about the planet ranting on and on about the "inconvenient truth"; how global warming and climate change is all our fault and that it is pretty well too late. The planet is doomed.

Nevertheless, despite this gloom, more and more of us are becoming "green". We are joining the "green train" of sorts, whereas everything we buy, ingest, bathe in, drive or ride in, or become a part of must be environmentally correct. That is, we must reprimand fast food outlets that dare to still use styrofoam packaging for their high trans-fat treats they continue to sell unabated to a knowing, but evasive population. The least they can do is wrap their toxins in biodegradable packaging!

At the same time, most of us continue to drive our cars to these fat food places, use their drive throughs, idle our engines to no end and as we leave, we bitch to the passengers beside us about the high gas prices. In fact, people like this are all over the Internet. People are becoming quite manic about the rising price of gas, yet at the same time they do not blink an eye when they drive their SUVs to the corner store or around the block to their children's school. Nobody walks or takes the bus anymore. The interesting thing is none of these folks seem to associate the rising rate of obesity among certain populations with this very behaviour.

Once, a friend of mine tried to get me to pass along a major protest against gas prices to other people on my address list. They wanted EVERYBODY to boycott the big oil companies and only use "independent" gas retailers during some specified day or week or month or so. I wrote my friend back to tell them the only way the price of gas is going to come down is if people drive less. Gas is like a drug. People use gas for almost anything. We heat our homes with it, drive our cars with it, power our lawn mowers with it, operate our boats with it, etc. It just seems to me whenever I tell people that the ONLY way to cut the price of gas is to drive less, they get into a real frenzy. Well, as long as people are addicted to the wheels of their car, the suppliers of fuel will hike their prices to whatever they think people will pay to keep this circus moving along.

There are websites like http://www.torontogasprices.com/ and http://www.gastips.com/ that allegedly tell people via the web where the cheapest gas prices are in town, encouraging every man, woman or small child in a gas powered trike to drive over there to fill up. That is also stupid too, because all you are doing is increasing demand at that one source, which will eventually have to hike their own prices imminently to protect their supply. Are we really being smart anyways with all these gas price protests? When we learn that all of our petty protests fail to bring gas prices down, we turn to the government. Can politicians *really* do something about the price of gas? Put it another way. Can government *really* control the prices of anything else, ranging from chocolate bars to ice cream to clothing to furniture? If they can't do anything about these other prices, why do people think the government can wave it's invisible hand over the gas markets and force the prices down? Bad news, folks. Gas prices are expected to go up even further.

So, people - we are facing another inconvenient truth. We are facing the truth about the price of ownership and operation of motor vehicles. At one time, Henry Ford stated with pride about how he can reproduce his product more efficiently and cheaply by inventing the assembly line ... but today, we need to question why so many gas guzzlers are still coming off the line and why so many people are still buying them. Somebody told me that gas guzzling cars like SUVs and Hummers have actually increased their sales by over 20% over the year prior ... and yes, right after we were shown Al Gore's piece of rhetoric, many people just went out and did what they want anyways. That is probably why people like Gore say it is too late.

What about other things that people do to waste environmental resources? I walk up and down our main drag several times a day to meet with clients, check on existing files, take pictures (where relevant to a case), or do banking. In addition to the usual assembly line of dope deals and graffiti artists that run when they see me coming, I notice variety stores that continue to keep their air conditioning on full blast and keep their front doors wide open ... symbolically, I suppose, in a lame attempt to lower the temperature of the outside. Sorry, that isn't going to work. I also notice large garbage bins behind many business establishments that contain way too many recycleables for my liking. I've seen the following items being disposed destined for our landfills: old computer monitors, old floppy disks, burnt out light bulbs, plastic grocery bags, radios, televisions, organics, etc. Obviously, 90% of us do not practice the 3 R's: reduce, reuse and recycle.

Further along, I walk into our friendly neighbourhood courthouse to drop off some documents. After passing through security and avoiding the body cavity searches one more time, I approach the civil counter and find myself freezing all of a sudden. The court clerks all have coats on and people are running around wearing mitts and gloves ... I was surprised nobody tried to start an indoor snowball fight! There's no need for air conditioning to be kept at such low levels that winter-time memories are so near. Christmas is over. Give it a rest.

I then walk towards my bank. On my way naturally, I encounter the friendly neighbourhood hot dog man who uses natural gas to fuel his grill. I ask him about his suppliers. He told me he found a fine place in a city an hour's drive from here. Hmmm, there are no local suppliers? Anyways, I ordered a grilled sausage with all the fixings and a diet Coke and walked away. I ate on the run; after all, I do have to burn off the calories I am taking in with something, right? By the time I reached my bank, I noted there were no trash cans around to put the napkin and the Coke can away, so I walked a few metres to find one that was overflowing, leaving more on the ground than in the actual can. Recycling bins are nowhere to be seen, of course. It must be the city workers' day off.

At the bank, I grab enough cash so that I can go grocery shopping the next day. I then stop on my way back to my office at the office supplies store across the way. I pick up a number of items (on plastic as usual), including a toner cartridge (something that seems to perpetually run out, even in my laser printer), more pens (because clients perpetually steal them from the office when I have them in to sign documents), more disks and CDs, as well as a table fan. It seems the people that run my building don't believe in air conditioning, so I have to use my own air cooler (which by the way takes up more kilowatt hours than a regular air conditioner, but I have no choice). I then drop off the items to my office, take a sugar-free Red Bull drink from my small efficiency fridge and drink it to catch up on sleep I never get.

My office is on a street that time forgot. The downtown revitalization types believe that all we need to do is make St. Paul Street two ways again, instead of the one way traffic direction it is now. I don't see how that will help, other than give people an opportunity to see old, broken down buildings, graffiti and the engrained drug culture of the Garbage City two ways instead of only one. Besides that, I know from riding the bus that this street isn't even wide enough. One way traffic is difficult enough to manage with the hoards of delivery vans, people trying to park and others on foot trying to cross the street. If it becomes two way, cyclists will only drive their bikes more often on the sidewalk, which only further marginalizes pedestrians. This will only make St. Paul Street even more unsafe than it already is, which to me, only drives people away from downtown instead of attracting them to downtown. The two-way street advocates claim this is good for the wine route. In my view, would this not be better to be rebuilt into a pedestrian roadway instead of reverting to two-way traffic? The last time I heard, it was not safe to drink and drive anyways.

After my day is done, I go home. I usually walk home or bus it home. I do have a bus pass, so I never have to dig for change when I need to get on. If I do work late or the weather is inclement, I use a cab, as it is fifteen minutes from the nearest bus stop to my house. I wish other people used the bus too; if they did, the bus service would be more frequent and have more routes covering a larger geographic area. However, because no matter what public transit is available in our region, people still insist on polluting the environment with their SUVs and Hummers, while the rest of us have to breathe the air and put up with their "road hogging" behaviour, even when pedestrians or cyclists lawfully have the right of way.

Anyhow, the next day I do my grocery shopping. I don't have a grocery store in my neighbourhood (because I choose to live far away from certain parts of civilization I tolerate each day at the office). Therefore, we have to either take a bus to the grocery store - which is hefty if all of us go. It is cheaper and probably better for my waistline if we walked, although the walk can be forty-five minutes in length. The interesting thing is that our government and public health people try to cram down our throats that we MUST eat more fruits and vegetables and keep our shopping to the outer tier of the aisles. I live in a Region that includes a substantial number of farmers and agricultural businesses. Niagara's tender fruit industry is among the best known in the world. These same farms also produce a full range of vegetables as well. However, when you set foot in the grocery store, do we see any Niagara fruits and vegetables for sale? Of course, not!

We are told we can travel (meaning only drive) to Vineland or Jordan or Merritville Highway or wherever else to find ubiquitous fruit and vegetable stands put out by farmers or go to various markets located on the other side of Fourth Avenue or downtown as well. This is not practical unless you have a vehicle, which again is polluting the air as you get to the fruits and vegetables that are locally grown, so if you don't drive you are stuck purchasing fruits and vegetables that have been transported from even further away in order to get our daily requirements. Greenhouse gases increase the further one must drive to deliver what they have to deliver. Grocery stores that call themselves "fresh" anywhere in their name are lying to you.

Anyhow, it doesn't really matter what you eat anyways. You have to wash everything off the best you can, unless you can afford to purchase 100% organic product - however, even the term "organic" can't be relied upon anymore. In my household, we frequently run out of food before the next grocery day, two weeks' away. I will simply not purchase anything in between. It is the fault of people who eat too much during the first week if it can't last during the second week. Try to live on a budget for $850-$1,000 per month for groceries, only to have them run out on you before the end of the first week. I end up having to get fresh fruits and vegetables from the market uptown, or from the corner store, as I have to eat properly even if others in my household choose not to.

But, everybody wants to go "green", I hear. That could have fooled me. Until the day I see packed buses taking people to every corner of this city and this region, with less cars on the road and less use of fossil fuels for things like air conditioning to be blown full-blast to the great outdoors, I will believe this Inconvenient Truth is only too inconvenient for those among us that have the money to blow on higher fuel costs anyways, though it continues to be the Canadian way to bitch about these things, but do nothing. Personally, I wouldn't mind if gas for cars went up to $5 a litre, with an exemption only for those that use their vehicles for business or courier purposes. In many European countries, gas is running at about $3 -$4 a litre and probably getting higher; in addition, many of these same cities charge toll fees for private automobiles coming into the city. If our cities suddenly decided to take this turn and use the extra fees towards transit, people would throw a fit ... the Boston Tea Party and the American Revolution would mean nothing at that point. We would be taking the drug away from the addicts to a point that there would have to be a black market somewhere.

Our own Region wants to extend two different highways, add more lanes, as well as get the province to increase the number of lanes from four to eight on the Queen Elizabeth Way, as well as build a brand new Niagara-GTA corridor at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. To me, it just means more smog in the air for me to breathe, not a good thing for a region that already has a higher proportion of persons suffering from respiratory conditions, as well as more tax dollars sucked away from people like me for things I will not likely use. Big box stores will continue to dominate the market, forcing more and more people to stay in their cars to go to shop. Parking is "free" or so they think. Yet, people like me pay the same prices as those who park their cars at the same stores ... even though I didn't benefit from the "free parking" that I indirectly paid for like they did. People who drive continuously bitch that people that use transit do not cover the full cost of fares; yet, those who drive do not even come close to covering the true cost of their own addiction. Someday, I may just ask for my money back.

But then again, the Truth that I am telling you may just be too inconvenient for you to understand. You may be "green" in principle, but know absolutely nothing about what it means to actually BE "green". As Al Gore said, it may already be too late ...

The STIGMA in Mental Health is STILL the Same

Did you ever wonder why a student at Virginia Tech would suddenly blow a gasket, take a gun and go around shooting up his school?

How about another fellow who deliberately drank a twelve pack of beer, then walked into a Florida bar with a gun and shot up the establishment?

Of course, you are thinking ... these people have got to be mentally ill. Nobody in their "right mind" would dare to do something like shoot up a school, a bar or a former employer. That is insane!

On the more subtle side, we hear from "experts" that a disproportionate number of people that live on the streets are mentally ill. The implication of course is that such persons cannot stay in housing because they can't manage their money, they say. How about the man that was found in a Toronto apartment building surrounded by pigeons and other wild species - to a point that it got so bad, that the police shuttled him off to a mental health facility and the animal rescue people were called in to get the animals out of there.

Were these people "mentally ill" or is somebody just giving them a label because of their attitudes, behaviour and ideas? Who determined these people were "mentally ill"? Are you "mentally ill" simply because you spent a night in a mental health facility? Nobody knows "Pigeon Man's" mental health history, but they shuttled him off to a mental health facility anyways, so therefore, because he was sent to a mental health facility - everybody now believes that "Pigeon Man" was mentally ill.

How about the rest of the 99.999999% of people who apparently suffer from some type of "mental illness", whether that be anxiety, depression, schizophrenia or obsessive compulsive disorder or a whole whack of other "conditions" that continuously seem to be added year over year to the psychiatric Bible, known as the Diagnostics and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the short term being the DSM-IV? Are all these people like the "Pigeon Man", living among the homeless, or are they like Cho, the infamous Virginia Tech school shooter?

Let me tell you one thing. In a recent report of the Canadian Senate, it was cited that approximately 90% of those who have been diagnosed with serious "mental illness" are unemployed. Whenever somebody with a known "mental illness" wants to move to any neighbourhood, the picket signs go up and the stigma goes full tilt. People scream about the Chos, the Pigeon Men, the bar shooters and all the other horrific characters that are simply part of the 21st Century ... to no avail. People who are open about having a "mental health" history are as good as dead even in 2007.

What is the truth? First, there is NO evidence that people who have been diagnosed with a "mental illness" are any more dangerous than you or me. Second, there is no evidence that people with "mental illness" are any more likely to do stupid, outrageous things than you or me. You point to the "Pigeon Man". I point to Criss Angel, the Mind Freak, who has his own show on A & E, where he has done a string of stupid things, ranging from from lying in the path of a mega-SUV, had himself buried alive in a coffin under a ton of dirt, as well as pretended to walk on water over a swimming pool - all on national TV! We are entertained by Criss Angel, yet nobody carts him off to a mental health facility!

You tell me that people with "mental illness" should be supervised with their money. I point out that I know many well-paid professionals that go to the casino all the time and owe hundreds of thousands of dollars, often resulting in the break-up of their marriages and the loss of their homes. I also know of many individuals who are like you and me who buy a new car every two years, put everything on credit cards, and live the life of envy of most and beyond their means, but yet never get labelled "mentally ill" or told that somebody has to manage their money for them.

What about the homeless, you say? Okay, let's make this one simple and straight forward. Can you manage to pay for a place to live, food to eat and other necessities with a sum total of $536 a month? In most places, this is even becoming difficult to do with an ODSP cheque of almost $1,000 a month. Yes, some of these people may be "mentally ill", but many of them are also physically disabled, blind, suffer from migraine headaches, or not suffer from any conditions at all. Let's be honest about this one. This is an income problem first. Once we resolve the income issue, then we can look at everything else -- too many people with a direct and financial interest in the outcomes of these issues want to put the cart before the horse and receive money for what they do, instead of allowing the people who need it the most to use it to pay for their own needs.

In my line of work, I handle appeals for various kinds of disability benefits among other things. In particular, the appeals I handle for people seeking ODSP benefits are difficult because roughly half of my appellants end up having at least one spell of homelessness while waiting for the government to get their act together. The people that end up homeless have all kinds of disabilities, e.g. very bad backs, multiple sclerosis, arthritis, Parkinson's disease, deaf or hard of hearing, spinal stenosis, cancer, etc. as well as a few that have a so-called "mental illness". In fact, most of my homeless appellants have not had a history of "mental illness". They just have a hard time convincing the peons of government bureaucracy they have a legitimate disability and they cannot compete adequately in today's labour market to sufficiently earn enough money to support themselves on a persistent basis. This has also happened to several of my worker's compensation appellants ... people who held legitimate jobs, but sustained injuries while working that disabled them. The proof is in the pudding. Welfare rates are grossly insufficient for people to live on, let alone maintain a home. Because we often have to fight uphill battles to obtain just about anything else on behalf of these folks, welfare becomes the income of first resort - not last resort - and because this income is grossly insufficient, many fall behind in rent payments and get evicted or lose their homes to forclosure. Some may be able to keep their homes, but end up in a serious debt crisis. I am working with a man who has put well over $75,000 on his credit card in order to prevent what is often inevitable if he were to turn to the welfare system.

Nevertheless, once I do get the appellants on disability and they receive their retroactive back pay, they *are* able to find and secure housing on their own. This includes those with "mental illness", if you must call it that. I don't know of any of my appellants subsequently losing their housing, except for one or two -- one I do recall had an addiction to crack and his behaviour when he was using it caused him to lose one apartment, but nevertheless, he got help (at my urging) and is now housed and has been for the past five years. Yes, these people can and do get housing - however, as I often write in these columns, eating is quite a different matter. This is why a *substantial* increase in social benefits are in immediate order. Third world style malnutrition is not difficult to find among many recipients of social benefits; it's either that or substantially increased health care costs. I know of people who have been forcibly incarcerated in nursing homes because they were unable to afford proper nutrition for themselves and their health suffered the consequences. As a society, we need to consider if we could afford to continue allowing this to happen.

One person once tried to convince me of the alleged inherent stupidity in these folks by telling me that many people on ODSP have to use the direct pay system for their landlords, so that is why they don't lose their housing. That system is actually in place *because* many landlords, upon learning that you are on social assistance, actually demand it. It has nothing to do with the recipient's own ability to manage their funds. I know this because I represented landlords before the Landlord and Tenant Board, which have made arrangements upon the recipient moving in, or as a condition of them staying, to receive direct pay. Some of my ODSP clients also offer this to prospective landlords to make themselves more desirable to rent to ... many landlords still do not like renting to people on any form of public assistance. To add a tidbit to this discussion, the vast majority of people who I helped landlords evict are tenants with jobs, some of whom were making good money. They just don't like to pay rent.

However, in spite of all this, we continue to hear the bells tolling by the so-called mental health sector that want people with "mental illness" to live in segregated housing or to work in jobs created just for them. Despite their goodwill gestures here, this actually adds stigma to the vast majority of people with mental health issues who can and will manage their lives well despite their problems. Many just can't get jobs because people believe the Hollywood images of psychos, or listen too much to the so-called "experts" who have pre-diagnosed people like Pigeon Man and thousands of others through the media before they can turn their lives around. Those people with serious mental health issues that DO get jobs LIE about their histories so they can be hired on the basis of their qualifications only, nor do they DARE ask for accommodations fearing their prospective or existing employers will treat them differently upon learning they have the red scarlet letter on their forehead of "mental illness".

There are other stigma producers, such as those who believe people with "mental illness" all want to live with others who also have"mental illness" or work with them. They create housing that is specifically made for "them", even though none of these people if asked likely will demand this kind of "support" and suffocating lifestyle these set-ups entail. Those in these types of housing are mandated to take their medications, attend counseling sessions and have "life skills" training in areas they likely already do well in. Some of these programs will actually evict someone if the resident chooses to stop taking their medications, for example. To me, this is not a "home". They may as well remain in the hospital with regards to the choices they are given under these circumstances. If one desires supports, they should NEVER be connected to the home they live in and only be delivered by whomever one chooses and in the manner and to whatever extent is desired by the person. This would be no different than somebody who - for example - requires assistance with bathing three times a week and help with light housekeeping, but can manage most other aspects of their lives. These other supports are provided to people because they request them, not because somebody else says they need them.

People with mental health conditions often get sent to work in settings that are disproportionately within the five "f's" - food, filth, filing, fetching and flowers, regardless of the person's own education, training and career aspirations. Some of these settings are non-profit groups ironically set up by other consumer/survivors, as they call themselves today, that will hire people for a few hours a week in these jobs that also smack of stigma. Only a handful of people who work in these places actually hold higher-paid, full-time management positions, while the vast majority remain on their disability pensions, which these organizations ultimately leave out of the picture when they make their calculations of costs for the purposes of marketing their programs, what their actual costs are versus what subsidies they actually get. To me, ODSP subsidizes these programs just as much as any other government funding it receives if people are not likely to get off their pensions or reduce their reliance substantially in a dignified manner. Further, if you or I have a disability and run our own businesses, why are WE not *also* entitled to the same government subsidies these people get?

The real clincher is if somebody worked for one of these places for a number of years and wants to move on, despite any valuable skills and experience they may have gained, they are forced by identifying the name of the employer to disclose to *all* prospective employers that they were diagnosed with a "mental illness". I continue to advise my clients NOT to disclose to employers their mental health history and ONLY disclose this fact AFTER they get hired and ONLY IF they feel they require certain accommodations under the Human Rights Code. In circumstances where job seekers are moving on from these "special programs", they are not given the dignity of this choice. Wearing the scarlet letter almost guarantees a lifetime of unemployment, particularly for those who were not in management or supervisory positions (who may otherwise try to hide behind that fact, because many employers don't think "mentally ill" people are capable of working in higher level jobs anyways).

The chance that a person with a known mental health condition getting hired in a supervisory or management position is slim because when people believe the stigma that people with "mental illness" are unable to manage their own money, how can they handle the money of somebody else or that of an employer? Even those who have been trained and established in a profession have difficulty finding work for employers that would hire somebody in that profession, because again - people cannot envision the possibility that somebody with a "mental illness" is capable of working in a profession, let alone holding a low level job. Remember, they are all homeless, cannot manage a budget, babble to themselves as they walk down the street and don't know any better, right? That is why I am so emphatic about HOW people - including many advocates - express themselves about the circumstances of persons with mental health issues.

As long as the media continues to publish stories about people like "Pigeon Man", the legions of homeless get diagnosed long distance via the media as being "mentally ill", and people like Cho who shoot up schools get labeled as crazy, people with "mental illness" will never be thought of in any other other way. Even those who put forth so called "positive stories", such as a non-profit cleaning company for example that hires only "mentally ill" consumer/survivors, can also plant ideas in people's minds that folks who have been through experiences that society deems to be "mental illness" can only do jobs that fall within the five f's - food, filth, filing, fetching and flowers, and forget ever hiring them to do anything in management or other positions that might actually get them OFF disability and securely housed, let alone actually *own* a home for Christ's sake. Scary.

As a result, society relies on its non-existent social safety net to support these individuals, as nobody seems to want to hire them. Those who are not lucky enough to get on ODSP must survive on a total of $536 a month ... try getting even a hole in the wall for that amount of money almost anywhere. If they get on disability, they usually spend at least 70% of their cheques on shelter, leaving very little left over for food, transportation and personal care. Then, if they have trouble keeping their housing because their income is so low, then we blame them for being poor money managers. If any "middle class" person had to survive on what they get, I am sure they'd have lots of trouble too. But instead, because we want to keep the possibility of homelessness and destitution as far away from our own lives as possible, we try to convince ourselves that the homeless are different people than what we are. So different, that we are willing to shame those who are different into believing their differences is what causes them to suffer their misfortunes - and while doing so, we are only further denying the problems that we and the governments we elect have created. Shame, shame.

Disability Must NOT equal Poverty

People do not ask to become disabled.

They do not wake up one morning and tell themselves, "Hey, today I'm going to get hit by a bus" or "Hey, maybe I will stand in front of that burning refinery and inhale the air and hope to contract lung cancer." Seems silly, right? However, many people in our society like to believe that those of us who are disabled are actually either faking their conditions or were at least in part responsible for them. Hey, uncle Joey ate himself to balloon to four hundred pounds so it is HIS fault he had a heart attack and can no longer work. Aunt Ellie smoked two and a half packs of cigarettes a day, so is it not HER fault she got lung cancer? Maybe I have trouble with these same people suing fast food companies or tobacco industries for their supposed misdeeds of promoting and selling a legal product, but I DO have trouble when the assumption that often follows is that it is the person's own fault ... so in order to provide equitable retribution by our society, it seems that it is alright to force these same people to live in endless and perpetual poverty.

I DO think if we are going to assign blame for these people's situations, then we should ALSO assign blame to those who drive motor vehicles, as they have a far greater chance of becoming involved in an accident than those who use public transit or bike their way through town. We should also blame wealthy businessman who have two martini lunches for the eventual damage to their own livers. How about those who vacation to the sunny south a lot or use tanning beds for the eventual spread of melanoma? How about we in general blame anybody who lives in a large city because they inhale pollutants and become sick as a result? This blame game can become perpetual and can and will encompass us all. Nor is it very productive. Those among us who are unfortunate to lose their ability to create their own wealth or earn it become poor - period. This is because our country has made the conscious choice of not providing a meaningful social safety net to protect them from poverty.

You may think poverty isn't so bad. The people next door to you who are getting by on welfare have a television set, their kids have clothes and compared to those underdeveloped fat-bellied children we always see in commercials about poverty in Africa, we actually delude ourselves into believing that poverty is only a state of mind here in America. However, poverty is an insidious and hidden destroyer of community unity and various publicly-funded budgets, such as health care, education, policing, corrections and other services that we ALL pay for through our tax dollars. Think your taxes are too high now? Think again, as the costs of health care triples, the cost of policing and corrections double as we need to build more prisons and hire more police officers to protect the rest of us from desperate people who will try to make money any way they can ... and our education costs go up, because well-documented studies have shown that children from low-income families require substantially more resources just to obtain a basic education than children from middle and upper income families. Mental health and cognitive conditions such as ADHD, depression, learning disabilities and so-called "developmental delays" occur more frequently among children of low and modest means than the children of the so-called middle and upper classes. If you ask any teacher, they can accurately tell who the poor children are in their classrooms just by the prevalence of these issues. We are paying a FORTUNE to keep one in five among us in poverty! Now, we know that accepting and maintaining poverty is everybody's business, let's move on.

Poverty means a whole lot to many people. That usually means they can no longer live in the living accommodations they have, even if they stayed there for years. They will have to find cheaper accommodations if such a thing exists in their communities. A family of four that once earned a comfortable income of $45,000 to $50,000 a year, now makes less than $20,000 a year. They will have to give up the car, which for many in non-metropolitan communities, means not having a job or being stuck in the low-paid job syndrome this causes. They will have to deplete any retirement savings they have created for themselves before they became ill. If they remain on government benefits, they will likely carry nothing to their retirement age and we will be supporting more and more seniors living in poverty as the years pass. For many, poverty means they will not be eating very much and if they do, not very well. Poverty is linked to obesity and malnutrition. I know of people that have less than $50 a month for food for themselves, and while they can supplement this amount by going to a food bank here (which is only possible every two months), it is impossible for them to obtain the types of food that will keep them healthy. Most eat a disproportionate amount of starch and other unhealthy forms of carbohydrates, which for many, only lead to weight gain. I know many people in poverty that are morbidly obese. Four times as many poor people get diabetes than those of middle and upper means. Poverty is a degrading and painful process, which can and will kill, but not without years of expensive debilitation first.

For the children, they often cannot relate with the other children in their schools. Children who have lived most of their lives in poverty do not know what it is like to go on a family vacation, have a family car to take a road trip in, or to even participate in extracurricular activities, such as sports, music, theatre and dance. All this mish-mash about "over-scheduled children" means NOTHING to them. These children cannot go on field trips with their classmates and some have to resort to wearing hand-me-downs from an older sibling or a cousin. These things do not go unnoticed by other children, who often shun and ostracize them. Poverty is just another reason to bully another child. As a result of many of the effects of poverty, many of these children drop out of school or require special educational interventions which cost you and me taxpayer LOTS of money. In the meantime, their parents can't climb out of poverty. For a growing segment of the poor, class mobility is impossible.

Many people think that if people just went and got themselves a job, they would get out of poverty. According to food banks, more and more users are working full-time, all year. Minimum wages have not kept up with the cost of living. It is cited that those in receipt of ODSP, an average of 73% of their monthly income is required to maintain their housing. Many working poor are just one paycheque away from living on the streets. For people with disabilities, the climb out of poverty is much harder. Most employers and even many agencies that work with persons with disabilities assume that disabled people are only capable of performing low-level, repetitive tasks for employment and are incapable of doing work that usually gets better remuneration. There is an assumption that people with disabilities want to remain on their pensions and only to work a few hours a week to supplement what they receive. This assumption costs a LOT of money for you and me in higher taxes, because the longer a person lives with a disability in poverty, the more complex and more expensive medical care they will require. Many people who were previously capable of living independently with the right help are now stuck living in nursing homes or other over-institutionalized facilities because they can no longer remain healthy eating less than a couple of dollars a day worth of food.

Agencies often ignore the education and career aspirations of those they work with as they attempt to make more low-wage, entry-level placements to contribute to their "success" stats. Government agencies that fund them are complicit in the way that only placements, not quality of placements, count towards success. I know no less than five individuals with disabilities who have been trained and once licensed to practice law as a lawyer. All five are now on ODSP. I know several teachers, social workers, a dental surgeon, a PHd holder, two engineers, a couple of electricians and a former professional mechanical contractor, all of whom are ALSO sitting on ODSP. To me, this is disgusting! One of them was referred to a job at Wal-Mart to stock shelves at a midnight shift; another was referred to work in a scrapyard. Others were simply refused support because the funding formula for agency service providers makes it impossible to help their clients achieve success beyond the minimum call centre type job. Call centre jobs are only a valuable resource for those individuals who are able to keep their eyes on two or three different tasks at the same time, not necessarily good for somebody who is taking a lot of medications for example.

I wrote an Open Letter to Madeleine Meilleur, Minister of Community & Social Services and Minister Responsible for Persons with Disabilities, last March. Among other things, I did ask her if she would -- after she left politics -- accept a job that paid her $8 - $10 an hour, despite the fact she is trained as a labour lawyer and has substantial political and administrative experience. If she wouldn't, why should she expect that persons with disabilities that have similar training and experience accept these types of jobs? The fact of the matter is even if ALL persons with disabilities that can and want to work accepted these types of jobs, not a single one would move out of poverty. They would make the shift from the welfare poor to the working poor, which in my eyes is NOT an improvement. These people would still suffer from all the issues I described above regarding paying high housing costs, and not having money to give their kids a life beyond poverty and stress, etc. They would also not be able to save for retirement and the chances are 100:1 or even 1000:1 that the employer has no retirement pension plan of its own to offer these workers.

Maybe the trained lawyers, social workers and teachers, etc. in my life that are on ODSP or even worse, Ontario Works, may not be able to return to their former professions. However, sending them to Wal-Mart or a call centre is a very poor use of their education and transferable skills. If a person used to make $80,000 a year in their job before they became disabled and now make just over $10,000 a year, this definitely has to hurt a lot more than it does for those who have always been poor and were sort of comfortable that way. It is hard to get stats for this type of thing, but I read that 40% of those on Ontario Works in Toronto are highly educated and the employment supports offered by that program are totally inadequate for this group. Among persons with disabilities, about a third have post-secondary education ... and I am sure this is reflected in the ODSP rolls, although a good FOI request should be able to confirm this. Employment Supports under ODSP, as they are now administered, will not help this group one iota. These people are not interested in working at Wal-Mart, Tim Horton's or at some call centre that will likely fire them once they learn the person has a disability (e.g. yes, call centres are that cruel -- I am aware of numerous successful lawsuits and/or substantial settlements that arose from legal actions that have arisen from these issues). Agencies that wish to work with this group *must* develop the skills and contacts necessary to help make good things happen for this population ...

There are many reasons why people with disabilities are disproportionately poor, some of which has already been raised in this tome, but here is a summary in my view -- all a result of policy choices that were made by successive governments at a federal and provincial and to some extent, municipal levels, over the years:

1. Job discrimination/employers unwilling to accommodate various
disabilities

2. Lack of a social safety net -- people coming into my office were
often forced to access Ontario Works assistance of first resort, not
last ... and as a result, by the time they get to my office, they have
lost their homes, cars, savings and in many cases, their families

3. Lack of a social safety net for people who cannot work at all or
only a little

4. A shift in the economy towards low-paying, no-benefits, unstable
jobs ... many of which will not or cannot accommodate persons
with disabilities (e.g. some have told me they don't have to adhere
to human rights laws and the employee can only fight this if they
had the resources to start legal action)

5. A mean streak in the social service system, which allows
bullies to operate unchecked (e.g. I am aware of a number of
employers that people are still being sent to that have abused
employees on OW or spouses of ODSPrecipients, only to be
told if an employee reports them or quits, the employer will
report to OW or ODSP theyhave been fired with cause to
enforce the "quit/ fire" rule that may lead to a loss of benefits
for 3 - 6 months)

6. Employers that continue to ignore the Human Rights Code
with abandon, by requiring all candidates to have a driver's
license and reliable vehicle (something most people on OW/
ODSP don't have and many people with disabilities are medically
restricted from driving)

7. The lack of a coordinated effort to assist people with
disabilities with varying levels of education and transferable
skills to get jobs that better reflect their skills and work histories

8. Professional regulatory bodies that impose huge fees for licenses
to practice, or standards of conduct that may infringe upon the
abilities of a person with a disability that is otherwise qualified,
from registering and qualifying

9. Attitudes/stereotypes exist in anybody from employers to licensing
bodies to employment agencies to even some peers with disabilities
that people with certain types of disabilities are only able to do low-
level, repetitive boring work and that people with these kinds of
disabilities are less responsible than able-bodied

10. Government policies that prevent people from having incentives
to take jobs, particularly for those thatlive in low-rental housing

There are lots of solutions attached to the above problems, but whenever these solutions are played out before the powers that be, we are told the government is doing SO much to help people with disabilities ... like a 2% increase is really going to help when inflation this year is pegged at 2.6% and we're already on average spending 73% of our incomes on housing costs.

Until my country begins to see these problems for what they are and starts to address them in an intelligent way, I will be embarrassed to carry a Canadian passport if I ever get to travel to any of the Western European countries, in particular, whose economies are worse off than ours, yet they manage to take care of their people and maintain a much lower unemployment rate.

Comments?

In the Best Interests of the Child

I am dealing with a large number of people who are suffering from what appears to be abuse of child abuse laws and by those who are paid to enforce them. In the last two weeks alone, I spoke with three clients -- all separate individuals who don't talk to one another but talk to me -- who have all had similar experiences with children's aid authorities. The children's aid has an incredible amount of authority and an unweildy amount of clout, particularly as those they tend to "visit" tend to be people of low income, racial minorities and persons with disabilities (e.g. especially of the cognitive set). They claim the cause of their visit is that they received a "report", usually from some unidentified source that is never held accountable for their slander, and that they are mandated to investigate all "allegations". The Children's Law Reform Act, at least the way I was taught when I was taking law, is supposed to rule only in the best interests of the child ... the Child and Family Services Act is supposed to set up agencies/councils and so forth to enforce the protection of the interests of children. My legal training was on the cusp of when the swing of the pendulum was towards family unification and parental support. Only as a last resort would the children's aid apprehend a child and when they did, you, me and the doorpost would all agree that the child needed to be apprehended.

These agencies were and are still very necessary. If you read the series of books by Dave Pelzer, who was so severely abused as a child by his mother that his life was literally saved just by apprehending him from school and sneaking him off to a foster home. In his day, this was not done very much ... and he recalls how child protective workers saved his life. They still do save many lives and I cannot underestimate the toll this type of work takes on its workers. I had a special friend of mine who recently succumbed to a stroke who had for twenty-three years worked in the field of child protection and he can certainly tell me stories of abuse and neglect ... but then again, his training was much like mine, when I was trained in the law, when Bill 77 came out - to maintain family unity, unless family unit is unsafe for the child. We need these workers in our communities, just like we need a police force, a food and drug enforcement agency and a public health agency, all with mandates to protect the Rest of Us from the bad deeds of some.

However, like many police forces, government agencies and other organizations, these children's aid societies can and do make mistakes ... and they can and do make lots of them and many times, decisions made can do a lot of harm, not only to the family but also the children involved. I know these workers don't set out to do this when they wake up in the morning, and many times - they truly believe they are doing the best for the child. But like any human being, they are not infallible. Like any system, it is not infallible. We hear of police organizations being particularly difficult with racial minorities, for example. We also hear about police officers shooting down a suspect they believe is acting erratically. Over the years and it is still happening, these organizations have started to build in better systems of accountability, as well as offer better training to their officers in dealing with people from different cultures or people who may be taken down in the midst of a drug-induced "high". Using sensitivity awareness and case de-escalation training is useful for all of us that deal with people in trouble. Also, recent attempts to hire more officers from racial minority backgrounds and promote some of them from within different departments also works well. For example, the Toronto Police Services has set up a program to work with members of the gay/lesbian/transgendered community to try to understand their issues and better handle members of this community when they find themselves in trouble.

Unfortunately, children's aid societies are light years behind many of the other authorities in dealing with these issues. All somebody in authority needs to understand is that those that feel harmed by errors made do not have the power and the resources to fight back to correct the wrongs and undo years of damage to their families, careers and personal relationships, that an error made by a child welfare official can potentially make. One problem that keeps getting brought to my attention is that it is not the children of the doctors and the lawyers and the politicians that are usually the subjects of apprehension orders, even though circumstances that can warrant the same can and do occur in these families as well. The families that are most often impacted are those of low-income, racial/cultural minorities and those with parents that have some kind of disability, usually a cognitive disability or a history of mental health issues. Mothers who have suffered through post-partum depression, newly single parents or families without a parent working are usually targeted, not suspected necessarily of abuse but of neglect. If the parent was a former ward of the children's aid, they are also particularly hot targets. You might as well paint a red and black target on their forehead and say, "here, here" and the investigators will turn up at their door shortly after these people do bear kids of their own. It is my experience that an ex-ward's own history is often used harshly against them in their own assessment of parenting ability. Once caught in their game, it is often very difficult for a vulnerable family to break out. I've had lawyers tell me they find these cases the most difficult, as the parent is almost assumed guilty and they must climb some kind of ladder to prove their own innocence - this Napoleanic justice has been seen in countries that Canada claims to be so different from, but indeed, we are very much built of the same cloth when it comes to people living in poverty.

It is lawful for example that a person in a position of authority, such as a teacher, principal, counsellor, doctor or other "respected authority type" reports any "signs" of abuse and neglect to the proper child welfare authorities as soon as it is discovered. A professional in my position to some extent as well is also required to report, as there could be situations where I am dealing with clients with major problems, such as addiction issues or where a parent has been incarcerated. However, it may surprise you to know that many of these parents are actually much more stable for their children than a foster home might be. Frankly, I would report more of what I see if there was a guarantee that workers wouldn't just barge in, take the kids and force that family through many difficult years of litigation and deepening poverty - so in many ways, I become an advocate for the family myself - connecting them to services, advocating with community agencies, appealing income support claims, climbing the ladder at subsidized housing complexes to ensure that the family's environment is not an issue. I do know if I did not get a client of mine moved within an unnamed subsidized housing network from their former residence to a new undisclosed and unlisted address (also in the housing system), children's aid would have stepped in to take her children. In her old complex, this family was mired in a dispute over drugs with her older son only playing a minor role in it ... but a case of mistaken identity brought a rival gang into their yard throwing "firebombs" into their yard, breaking a window, which could have got somebody killed ... once at their new surroundings, this family was much more at peace and the children were no longer even remotely involved with the "wrong people".

In another case, there was an illegal eviction leaving the family with nothing but the clothes on their backs. I knew where they slept for a few nights until they finally asked for my help. I know if children's aid knew this happened, the kids would have been gone immediately - which would have only further mired this fragile family unit in deepening poverty. Fortunately, this did not happen as we were able to access some emergency funds to house this family until they were able to get their cheques started again and find another place. In other similar cases I've become aware of where children had actually been apprehended, children's aid would not give them back until the parent or parents found more suitable dwellings. One of these situations was at the place rented to a client by one of the slumlords I might have written about earlier here. Living on what was then called "mother's allowance", and fully aware that her income would significantly drop once the two children were out of her custody even for a short period, it was damned near impossible for this client to get her life back together without my help, knocking on doors, filing a prosecution against her slumlord and threatening publicity, but that is a story for another day ... she did get her kids back, but I swear this whole experience is worthy of labeling as a PTSD-inducing incident for both her and her children.

I mentioned I would report and liaise more with children's aid related agencies IF *real support options* were offered to the parents, who are in even many of the worst cases, going through a temporary crisis where divine intervention might be needed, but not with the big stick of apprehension. Unfortunately, *real crisis support* is not what is offered to the parents, and given a few high profile inquests during Mike Harris' reign over some children's aid societies that watched children being starved and/or beaten while under their so-called supervision, lots of political pressure yielded these agencies to today's new reality ... the pendulum these days has swung to the "take the kids and ask questions later" side of the coin, which is what is disturbing me more and more ... and in many cases, the so-called "neglect" reported is simply poverty of the child's family and not any kind of deliberate pattern of denial. As the investigator digs deeper into the family, they learn other things, usually small things, but they become crucial indicators of the fact these are *unfit parents*. I've had clients tell me her child's social worker told her that her husband's musical taste was not good for the children. I've had clients tell me that their choice in homeschooling their children was what triggered the assault in the first place. I've had other clients tell me they found their child eating out of other children's lunch boxes, so therefore - it was concluded they were being starved at home. When I hear what *really* happened, I recall my own younger days - while not filled with bliss and glory themselves, but let me tell you -- because my parents were always working and even when my mother was low-income she *always* held a job, she was never suspect of anything by any child welfare agency, nor was my father - even when he was separated from my mother and raising his second wife's children.
Yet, in the households where I grew up, the situation was less than ideal. My parents were kids themselves when they got married and had kids of their own, so there was really no fault here.

But I do remember times I ate out of other kids' lunch boxes, not because I was starving, but because like most of the kids, we all got bored with what our parents put in our lunches day after day and this often happened between many of the kids. I've even seen situations where some of the kids just dumped what was given them and because they didn't feel like eating, in these days - they would be seen as starved! Also, in my day, most parents used the belt as a form of punishment ... this would *never* be tolerated today because kids often know their rights and will tell a teacher or somebody else that their parents are beating them if a belt is used on them now and off to the children's aid they go. In my day, even schools used the strap in some cases - it was widely accepted that in certain situations, it was warranted.

However, we never used corporal punishment on our own children. We never had to. Our children are not always the best behaved, but they never needed any form of physical punishment and I still don't have major problems with them. However, in some situations, with some children, it might be necessary for some parents -- not a beating - just a whack with the hand on the buttocks or a slap on the wrist of a child who decides to cross a busy street in front of a car, for example. The Supreme Court refused to void s. 43 of the Criminal Code, which permits reasonable corporal punishment - however, this whole debate is not over yet ... and most children's aid societies take a strong opinion against any form of corporal punishment against any child at any age in any situation ... and for many, this creates protection issues. There was in fact a high profile case a few years back when a very strict family from a religious order became targeted by children's aid over the use of a strap as a disciplinary method. It turned out that none of the children saw this to be abusive, nor did this impact on the family dynamic ... and these kids appeared quite well-adjusted, but then again some of the anti-s.42 advocates were out at full force at this time pushing for apprehension of all of these children. I personally don't support the use of the strap, but then again - I can't dictate what another parent and family feels is right for their children. I am not standing in their shoes, so who am I to pass judgment - esp. when this is not a beating or done in an abusive or vindictive way?

Anyhow, back to main topic ... I sometimes see a lot of things happen to people that breaks my heart. I truly think accountability is in order for any agency or organization that carries such a huge level of power and authority, especially over vulnerable people. However, at this point, there are complaint mechanisms but they are largely internal and based on legislative authority and internal policies. It is much like what people talk about when they see police being overseen by other police, lawyers being overseen by other lawyers and doctors being overseen by other doctors ... there is no true Holy Grail one can look to in order to make an agency like this accountable for some of the mistakes they make. This agency, while now overseen by the Provincial Auditor, is not overseen (at least yet!) by the Ombudsman ... and the only way an aggrieved parent or prospective employee or somebody else that was hurt by an action by children's aid can fight this is to sue them. Rev. Dorian Baxter, a few years ago, successfully sued the Durham Children's Aid Society for siding with his ex-wife over slanderous abuse allegations for which there was no objective merit. Even though Baxter "won" in principle and in law, he lost almost everything he had in order to challenge an agency that saw no limits to its own authority. I can only imagine what my clients feel about trying to pick a fight as a David against a Goliath, when they really have few resources of their own ...

... but I do truly do believe in truth and accountability; I also believe in the power of the pen, which I am told is mightier than the sword. I believe collective action is more powerful than the action of one David. We can all be Davids. We can all fight the same fight. It is not just about children's aid or even the abuse of government authorities as a whole. It is about the empowerment of the vulnerable. No, we don't want to see children's aid stop fighting the abuses of many vulnerable children out there ... because many people including Dave Pelzer who I referred to earlier had lives they owe to the many fine men and women who work for these agencies. But, we need to fight to make sure there is true accountability, a better way to correct egregious errors and to restore reputations when they have been lost and to re-unite families if they have been wrongly divided ...

... and to restore the social safety net that has been lost over the past decade, where for whatever reason, has made the services of children's aid, the police, the jails, the public health system, the health care service, as well as many other "band aids" necessary, whereas our politicians can only see wisdom in increasing their ever-rising budgets, as they slash the resources for the poor, the homeless, the sick, the disabled, the elderly ... how else will we ever let the politicians know this is just a dangerous shell game they are playing? ... how else can we let the taxpayers know where their money really goes? ... how else can we let people who are one pay cheque away from losing their jobs know there is no social safety net to catch them when they fall anymore ... that they will only be caught by the powers that be, whatever vice haunts them will punish them thrice, and all hope and dignity is lost, as well as that blessed term called accountability.

Your thoughts? E-mail me.