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 “Why does Canada have child benefits for modest income families and a child care deduction that favours the well to do?” Many of us fantasize what it would be like to brief an intelligent Martian on an earthbound topic. Recently a colleague and I got the chance. A spaceship landed in Scarborough Ontario and a female Martian (pronouns pho and dei) indicated through a telepathic translation machine that she wanted to understand our income security and personal tax systems in Canada. We set up a convenient time and began our conversation in Rouge Park. It proved too difficult to explain what coffee is - so we decided to get refreshments later. We started to explain to her (she has ten ears) that we have a tax and benefit system with…

Pandemic hardship is still a daily event for low-income workers who received pandemic benefits and must now repay those benefits. They must repay even though significant numbers of people were ordered to apply for them by governments that deducted them from other benefits. The CERB and CRB programs although cancelled in 2022, are still with us in the form of their cruel alter ego – the collection agency. A true Jekyll and Hyde story. The media reported that up to 65% of recipients were ineligible[1] for the programs. And high ineligibility is likely accurate because what CRA is enforcing now looks nothing like what they communicated and implemented back in May 2020. The federal government is enforcing much stricter rules than those they used for implementation. Here are just four…

A few Sundays ago, I woke up at 7:25 and turned on the radio to listen to the CBC regional news at 7:30.   There were 9 news items of apparently local interest: The first was a shooting that happened in Scarborough overnight The second was another shooting that happened overnight The third was another shooting that happened overnight The fourth was a report of a fire in a home. The fifth was a stabbing The sixth was another stabbing The seventh was the five-year anniversary of a mass shooting. The eighth was an arrest of a teacher. The ninth concerned a community event. The death totals in the news items amounted to eleven. We were informed as to where in the GTA the events occurred. I was assured that…

In Canada, poverty dropped by a whopping 55.8% from 2015 to 2020, a reduction that few if anyone really expected by 2030 let alone much earlier. But when Canada achieved this legislated goal in record time, there was neither announcement nor self-congratulation. There was no news release and no celebration. The problem for the Government of Canada is that it met its own legislated poverty goals largely through the implementation of robust but temporary pandemic benefits. There was no objective for these benefits to reduce poverty. They were put in place to help Canadians stay safe and weather the ravages of a once-in-a-century event. Now the government has the difficult problem of having reduced poverty temporarily. But it is doing more (and less) than that. It was silent when its…

The Myth[1]: Thousands if not millions of non-working people (those who did not earn the $5,000 CERB threshold) illegally collected billions of dollars and now do not want to pay it back. The federal government is right to go after them. These people took advantage of a hurried design with few safeguards and took advantage of the largesse of Canadians. The design encouraged people to stop working and they would not go back when their employers wanted them back and now they want to keep money they knowingly collected while ineligible. The Reality Pandemic programs like the CERB were rushed out the door with massive encouragement by governments for people to apply for them, collect and stay safe. The rules changed over and over in the early days. Even now,…

This short essay[1] attempts to make a difficult and perhaps unseemly comparison between the Government of Canada’s newest narrative on poverty reduction and the actions of a fictional antihero who decided not to finish a marathon race he had won in all other respects. The analogy I make is not perfect and is incomplete. I choose to use it, however, as I believe that it helps to explain the psychology and politics surrounding some important ambiguities in Canada’s directions for poverty reduction. When the Government of Canada announced that Canada’s poverty rate had fallen from a 2015 high of 14.5% to a mid-pandemic low of 6.4%, our nation achieved its legislated 15-year long 2030 goal[2] of a 50% drop in poverty [3] in one third the time previously planned.  …

Who would have ever thought - when the dust settled following the worst of the pandemic - that poor-bashing would make a comeback? When we all experienced the lifestyle changes and losses of freedom characterized by Covid-19, many of us hoped that this could bring diverse elements of civil society together. In many ways, it did. We ushered in a broad array of popular programs in Canada and the US to support us to stay safe in the face of fear and uncertainty. In Canada, we spent an extra $102 billion and increased our income security spending by almost 45% to get us through. Yet in other ways, the pandemic divided us. I only need to mention vaccines to make that point. In Canada, there is a famous nostrum that…

Indexation to inflation turns out to be a myth for all With higher inflation, increases in indexed benefits have been more noticeable lately. For example, Old Age Security (OAS) and the Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS) -which are indexed quarterly - have been increasing far faster than the cost of living as measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI) over the past ten years. But other benefits have been lagging behind such as Ontario Works (OW) and the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) payments. Still others appear to be increasing faster than the rate of inflation. We decided to delve a bit further into the numbers. That’s easy to do because the Bank of Canada provides a service to the public in the form of its Consumer Price Index (CPI) calculator…

In two earlier blog entries, I talked about the Federal Court case lost by Amanda Coscarelli. Her earned income in 2019 fell $7.26 below the $5,000 threshold required for eligibility for the Canadian pandemic benefits called the CRB. In the first blog, I made the case explaining why Amanda should have been found eligible on appeal and in the second, I attempted to counter a number of thoughtful arguments in support of her remaining ineligible as well as Court requirements for high standards of bookkeeping for very low-income earners. I raised several issues about fairness, evidence, double standards and conjectured that Amanda may have been eligible for pandemic benefits if, in 2019, she had received even $10 in the form of an eligible Honourarium.   For example, I personally receive…

Usually a blog is a one-off –some thoughts on a subject - over and out – not a treatise. The astonishing case of Amanda Coscarelli is not in that category. Amanda deserves more. And Canadians deserve more. Amanda is a woman that I wrote about here: https://openpolicyontario.com/achingly-close-a-tale-of-policy-intransigence-hubris-and-a-half-hour-of-paid-work/ I won’t reprise the argument. It’s all here for anyone to read along with the Federal Court case she lost - missing the yearly pandemic threshold income level of $5,000 by just $7.26. So what’s new? What more is there to say about Amanda? After all, there are lots of income eligibility thresholds and cut-off points for various income security benefits in Canada. For example, Employment Insurance (EI) has variable entrance requirements on receipt of EI benefits. Miss the eligibility threshold by a…