Category: Blog

Emily Lawe (pseudonym): Guest blog Social assistance (Ontario Works) serves as a critical safety net for those facing severe financial hardship. This program purports to offer temporary support while promoting a transition to a life that does not require social assistance. But stereotypes often paint recipients as lazy or unambitious simply because they are experiencing hard times often considered their own responsibility. Stereotype: Equating poverty with personal failure This viewpoint was echoed by Ontario Premier Doug Ford, addressing the Empire Club of Canada in Toronto  in 2023: “It bothers me that healthy individuals are at home, collecting your hard-earned dollars. We need to encourage them to contribute back to the province and find gainful employment.”. The Premier’s comments reflect a distinction between taxpayers (makers) and welfare recipients (takers).  This framing perpetuates divisions…

On weekday nights at 6:00 p.m., the CBC news comes on my TV station in Toronto. At one time long ago, I turned it on right on the hour to get the most important news stories. In the last few years, I began to turn it on at 6:10 and now I am up to 6:22 p.m. before I turn on this one hour long newscast. My reason is that the first 22 minutes are mostly taken up with shootings, knifings, death, mayhem, police reports on the above and very occasionally with the news stories I would find of real interest on politics, city services, finances, government or human interest. I tune in generally right after a commercial and then get the weather report followed by everything else. Most evenings, the…

How faulty imagery protects unproductive frames and hides real evidence Scurvy Anyone who has read the Wide Wide Sea or The Wager will know that - until Captain James Cook was able to correctly apprehend that scurvy resulted from a lack of fruits and vegetables - this seafarer’s disease wreaked havoc on most long voyages.   A question to Chatbot GPT reveals: Before the cause of scurvy was understood, people had various misconceptions about what led to the disease. Before the discovery of vitamin C's role in preventing scurvy, theories about its cause were based on incorrect ideas about air quality, food spoilage, lack of exercise, or humoral imbalances. It wasn’t until the 18th century, with James Lind's experiment on citrus fruits, that the connection between diet and scurvy was made…

On CBC radio news at 11:00 a.m. on September 1, 2024, there were three news items: A shooting on West Eglinton Avenue after the close of an after-hours club The search for a young person who has been maiming and torturing various animals and pets in the city; and A piece on drug overdose deaths in the city and what may happen after the ban on harm reduction centres near schools That was it. Nothing else; then the weather and back to regular programming. On the 1:00 p.m. World Report again on CBC radio, it opened with the killing of 6 Israeli hostages, followed by a number of other killings by drone attacks in Russia and the Ukraine, paralyzed children contracting polio, and ending with an item on dying Monarch…

It’s interesting to listen to scholars and others talk about the importance of evidence based decision making - and I couldn’t agree more – but much decision making is often done with bad evidence or no evidence at all. This is certainly the case when it comes to the grey tsunami which refers to … the large wave of baby-boomers who have … started to reach age 65. The alleged threat is based on the assumption that a relatively larger number of retirees will become dependent on a relatively smaller generation of people in the traditional ‘working ages’ of ages of 15 to 64. And, there has been a secondary worry that longer life spans will mean additional strains on savings and pensions needed to support longer retirements [1].  Both…

My purpose in writing this blog is to make it very easy for the uninitiated reader to understand what is going on with Ontario Works in Toronto and what could be done. The narrative First of all, the simplest definition of workforce development in this context is that employers looking for workers represent perfection. That is, they have the jobs and the workforce development goal in Toronto and across Ontario is to supply employers with Ontario Works recipients to do those jobs. It doesn’t matter how much the jobs pay, the number of hours that employers provide, where they are located, the benefits and supports they may provide or whether the worker is actually self-employed as opposed to being an employee. Whatever the employer legally offers is just fine. Employers…

Since 1978, when federal national Health and Welfare Minister Monique Begin announced the refundable Child Tax Benefit and elicited an agreement with Provinces and Territories to exempt it from social assistance (aka income assistance), every single major new federal income security benefit (until the CERB) was implemented in the form of an exempted refundable tax credit.  This includes the Canada Child Benefit (CCB), the Canada Workers Benefit (CWB), the Goods and  services Tax Credit (GSTC), the Climate credit and in Ontario, the Trillium Benefit and the Ontario Child Benefit (OCB). In the pandemic, 5 of 6 credit extensions directly to individuals were in the form of refundable tax credits or special payments to those already eligible for payments.  With the CERB, the federal government broke with that tradition and ended…

I received an email message addressed to my website recently that noted a particular strain of public opinion regarding immigrants and seniors benefits. Since 71% of all seniors in the Toronto region are immigrants (Census 2020-21), it seemed to be a good topic for a blog. Here is the uninterrupted text of the email that was sent to me for reply: Could you please help me respond to people that I meet who do not want immigrants to come to Canada because they feel they are here so that others will have to support them although they have never worked or contributed to our economy. From your published documents it appears that one can come to Canada at an older age, receive OAS and GIS at age 65, even if…

After World War I, the world’s major powers redrew the planet’s political maps at Versailles in 1919[1] with a grotesque ‘winners take all’ result. As we all know, this project failed spectacularly by 1939. But with the end of World War II - following a worldwide Depression - the massive weakening of the British Empire became more apparent along with the ascendency of the United States and the Soviet Union on the world stage. At both Bretton Woods and at Yalta[2], there was little appetite to repeat the singular mistake of artificially and hastily redrawing national boundaries. But that did not mean that there would be none of it. Redrawing borders in 1945 In August 1945, the mistake was repeated on behalf of the US government by two US Colonels[3] (Rusk…

As I watched the 2024 Summer Olympics on CBC, I came to realize that a 12 hour 'binge' results in at least 12 ‘reverse mortgage' ads and up to 24 ads for ‘no-medical, no blood test’ life insurance. Next day: rinse repeat. Juxtaposed against this are about 36 advertisements a day touting some types of prescription drugs - usually weight loss – or cures for gastric or skin upsets.  All the drug ads contained approximately 10 to 20 seconds of  dire and memorable health warnings concerning side affects. Although noted quickly, they are clear and impactful. In other words, side effects, however complex, are communicated and at the very least, somewhat known to consumers. The analogy of medical health to home finances in the form of the phrase ‘financial health’ is…