Blog – Page 2 – Open Policy Ontario

04May 2020 by johnastapleton

COVID-19 and compensation lessons from the Barrie Tornado

This is a tale of what happens when governments attempt to compensate people for losses incurred in the context of a disaster. When governments do that, the rich get compensated and the poor lose out. The rich own more and the poor own less. And the poor pay less for things like shelter and food in the first instance. This is a cautionary tale that can instruct governments to compensate based on need and income as opposed to losses and how much they pay for things Listen to my story. On May 31, 1985, a swarm of tornadoes broke out across southern Ontario. The one that hit Barrie was an almost 'unheard of' Category 5 while Category 2’s hit Orangeville, Dundalk and a few other towns especially along Lake…

27Apr 2020 by johnastapleton

Recommending against clawbacks: Why is the federal government so reluctant to tell other governments how its money should be spent?

It took federal Minister Carla Qualtrough an agonizing 19 days to inform the public that she wanted Canada’s Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) to be exempt from clawbacks under provincial and territorial social assistance and disability support programs. The CERB was introduced on March 25, 2020, and her public admonition came on April 13 in a statement through her spokesperson to the Toronto Star. She did not make the announcement on television. She did not make the announcement at all. “Our government believes the CERB needs to be considered exempt by provinces and territories in the same way as the Canada Child Benefit to ensure vulnerable Canadians do not fall behind,” said Marielle Hossack in an emailed statement[1]. Some of us had been asking for this for over two weeks and…

19Apr 2020 by johnastapleton

They departed a day apart: John Prine and Pat Capponi

On Sunday August 16, 1977, I drove my 1976 Honda Civic east on Kingston Road past Woodbine Avenue with no memory now what I may have been thinking about. I was listening to the radio. A news flash came on –they didn’t call it ‘breaking’ back then. I don’t know what they called it but they said that Elvis Presley had died at the age of 42. I turned left on Brookside and stopped the car. I looked around and thought that some part of the world had come to an end. Just a few weeks earlier I had been shopping at Canadian Tire and was able to buy two tape cassettes they called 8-tracks of the ‘King’ singing his greatest hits. The 8-tracks were in a bin where the…

18Apr 2020 by johnastapleton

Scarborough and the COVID19 response from governments

Just the other day, I was asked an interesting question by a concerned Scarborough resident who knew that I had worked in social policy with the provincial government. She also knew that I was someone who had studied and had written about the effects of social policy in Scarborough since I left government. Her question: “What will be the effect of the COVID19 crisis and how will we come out of it in Scarborough?” I was actually surprised by my reply as I had not yet put the question to myself. Here is what I said as I thought through the question: First, you have to remember that Scarborough has more poverty than the rest of the City of Toronto, the GTA, and much of the rest of urbanized…

24Mar 2020 by johnastapleton

The time for income tax auto-enrollment is now

Bee Lee Soh and I were members of Jean Yves Duclos advisory committee on poverty reduction which completed its work in August 2018. On the last day of our deliberations, we all decided that each of us would have an opportunity to raise the one issue of greatest importance to each of the 17 of us. Bee Lee is an anti-poverty activist who continues to live in poverty and she took her few minutes in front of Minister Duclos, his staff and the rest of us to make a plea for Government auto-enrollment for tax refunds. She explained that filing her taxes was the last thing that she would ever do when she was homeless. She told the Minister that people living in poverty often don’t know how to file…

04Mar 2020 by johnastapleton

Hot’s Frozen Wake

(A short stream on delivering meals on wheels) Looking at the EE cooler starting to sing “The Martian Hop” after pronouncing EE - driving now down Curlew from the North to Bridgepoint. Forever sameness Thursdays using a google map to time it from 10:25 for the free half hour. All assembly starting from the Velcro frozen to the Velcro carry bag and plastic tray ready to jam bread and dessert plastic in the back of a car. Volunteers shout “Hi” from the back of a parked van wondering about overdue chocolate maybe dreaming of a cruise as finally warm enough to watch crags of ice melt for a short time and a visit to the ground level loo and a weekly cull of car garbage and mung from the back…

02Mar 2020 by johnastapleton

And what are we to do with Charlie?

“Canada’s banknotes — one of our national symbols — have been fixated on monarchs and prime ministers for long enough. Civil rights pioneer Viola Desmond is the first, and so far only, Canadian to break that mould[1].” When we think about our money, the Toronto Star editorial concerning who should be depicted on our money is right ‘on the money’. For too long, we have restricted our modern bank notes and coinage to just two species: Prime Ministers and British royalty. The Star is right that this should change in a more wholesale way. Viola Desmond is just the first Canadian who was neither a PM nor a member of British Royalty to appear on a regular issue of our modern paper money. There have been many examples of commemorative…

23Feb 2020 by johnastapleton

Tales from the deep end of the poverty pool: How Ontario Works keeps ODSP from rising and what Oliver Twist might ask

Setting the scene In early 1941, the number of people with disabilities receiving ‘relief’ exceeded the number of non-disabled people for the first time since the early 1930’s. The reason was that the outbreak of World War II resulted in the cancellation of all relief for single people. General welfare was not reinstated for this group until 1958. Social assistance for people who don’t have disabilities has been renamed many times. Recipients were formally called ‘relief’ recipients from the 1930’s to the mid 1950’s, ‘welfare’ recipients from the late 1950’s until the 1990’s and Ontario Works recipients in the post millennial era. For people with disabilities, unless they were blind, they were called permanently unemployable (PUE) from the 1930’s to the early 1950’s, PUE and disabled from the mid 1950’s…

16Feb 2020 by johnastapleton

Thrown in the deep end: The strange history of Ontario’s social assistance for needy 60-64 year olds

In 1982, Bob McDonald, then deputy minister of Ontario’s Ministry of Community and Social Services, was called to a meeting arranged by Premier Bill Davis with a senior religious leader. The topic of the meeting was the low amount of money received in welfare payments by single women over age 60 who were either single or widows. At that time, needy women in that situation received a maximum of $266 a month ($700 today). Following the meeting, it was clear from the deputy that the Premier wanted action. The social assistance policy branch of the day became involved. Looking back at the history of these payments, it’s easy to see why the Premier was concerned. The Widows and Unwed Women legislation had been folded into the Family Benefits Act in…

12Feb 2020 by johnastapleton

Scarborough 2020: vision and hindsight

I moved to Scarborough in 1978 and bought a house. I remember that my property tax bill was added to our mortgage payment and that it was easy to remember: It was $100 a month or $1,200 a year In 2020 terms, that $1,200 a year would now be $4,410 a year. My latest tax bill for the year 2020 – just got it in the mail – came in at $3,650 If my taxes had really gone up with inflation over the long haul, I would be paying about $760 more per year. Multiply our one household by about 220,000 Scarborough households by $760 a year and you would have extra yearly revenue of $167 M dollars That’s in Scarborough alone. And it’s not chump change. But just because…