Should poor seniors have to pay to volunteer
TheStar.com – News/World – Phillip Dufresne lives on $1,000 monthly disability cheques and gets an additional $120 monthly in honorariums for volunteering in the community. But when turns 65 in a few months, the government will claw most of that back.
Mar 29 2015. By: Catherine Porter, Columnist
Do you think very poor seniors should have to pay to volunteer?
By very poor, I mean Phillip Dufresne. He turns 65 in a few months. He lives on about $1,000 a month, all in the form of government disability cheques and programs. He has no savings and no paying job.
But he works part time as a volunteer with the Dream Team, a group of psychiatric survivors who tell their stories to high school and university students, hospital staff, government officials and anyone else who will listen.
They open minds and shatter stereotypes about “crazies” and “bums.” They successfully lobby for supportive housing, so people like them can live with dignity. Plus, they fight discriminatory laws.
Dufresne was among the Dream Team members who took four municipalities, including Toronto, to the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal for bylaws that required a minimum distance between group homes — the thinking being that too many people with mental health issues in one area would be dangerous at worst and bad for house prices at best.
All four municipalities have since rescinded those bylaws.
This makes Dufresne not just a volunteer, but a human rights hero.
His story is particularly poignant because Dufresne was homeless for a year, after being hospitalized briefly in the psychiatric ward. You might have walked by him outside Union Station, where he racked up loitering tickets.
His apartment in a supportive housing building gave him stability, he says, and his work with the Dream Team has given his life meaning.
Up until now, it has also helped him financially. He speaks about twice a month, and is usually paid an honorarium of $60 for his time and travel costs.
When you are living off $12,000 a year, $120 a month goes a long way. Dufresne spends it on chicken, fish and vegetables.
Last year, he made $1,490 in honorariums for public speaking with the Dream Team.
He should be congratulated for his courage, pluck and industry.
And he was. Until this year, the Ontario government let him keep that little extra money he earned.
But now that he’s turning 65, the government will take the bulk of it.
“The very poorest seniors are taxed the most,” says John Stapleton, a social assistance policy expert who has spent the past five years untangling the antediluvian social security programs for low-income seniors in Canada.
What he’s found, time and again, is the federal and provincial governments penalize seniors who try to feather their thin nests through grit and hard work.
His latest discovery: seniors like Dufresne who get pocket money to cover their expenses for volunteer jobs see that money subtracted from their old-age government assistance cheques.
“These unsuspecting seniors are paying the cost of their own speaking engagements. They have to prepare the material, get to the venue, pay their own way back home and receive a net benefit of absolutely nothing,” Stapleton writes in a recent blog.
In theory, our country’s social assistance policies are meant to be kinder to our elderly poor. They move off welfare or disability payments, and onto old age security plus a “Guaranteed Income Supplement” (GIS) from the federal government, and in Ontario, the “Guaranteed Annual Income System” (GAINS).
Here, on paper at least, this means someone like Dufresne will go from living off around $12,000 to just under $17,000.
But, in practice, he’ll be poorer, Stapleton says. There are many overlapping and mind-numbing reasons for this.
Here’s one: Under social assistance rules, a person under 65 can make up to $6,000 a year from “gifts” without seeing their government cheques decline. An honorarium is considered a “gift,” although Ottawa requires agencies that give more than $500 in honorariums a year to individuals to issue them T4As.
There is no such limit when they become seniors at 65, though. Under the federal rules, Stapleton says, Ottawa subtracts 50 cents from its old-age GIS cheques for every dollar listed on those T4As, while the provincial government withdraws the other 50 cents from its GAINS cheques until they run out at $1,992.
It’s not clear if these cascading clawbacks stem from punitive planning or sloppy neglect. Stapleton thinks it’s the latter. But one thing is clear, he says: “It’s about where power resides. The people who are taxed the least are the most powerful.”
People like Dufresne can’t afford accountants or lawyers or lobbyists. And soon, he’ll be less likely to afford the costs of speaking at all.
In that case, we all lose — the students and policy-makers who listen to Dufresne’s story, his fellow psychiatric survivors who have access to more supportive housing because of his work, and Dufresne himself.
All for a miserable $1,490.
I ask you again: Do you think very poor seniors should have to pay to volunteer?
< http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2015/03/29/should-poor-seniors-have-to-pay-to-volunteer-porter.html >
Tags: ideology, jurisdiction, philanthropy, poverty, standard of living, tax
This entry was posted on Sunday, March 29th, 2015 at 4:11 pm and is filed under Equality Policy Context. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
Leave a Reply
Recent Comments