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…
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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…
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