Stephen Hume(May
31, 2016 ). Vancouver Sun. http://vancouversun.com/opinion/columnists/stephen-hume-provincial-clawbacks-relegate-the-disabled-to-life-of-poverty
Amy Jane Brown, or A.J. as she prefers to be called, is an accomplished artist, once a
teenage ballerina, an advocate and a poster girl for the amazing abilities of
those members of the community we categorize as “people with disabilities.”
That categorization
is just a self-serving way of soft-soaping discrimination by providing an
identifying label — although A.J. defies labels.
A.J. was born in Vancouver 50 years ago.
She lives with the consequences of a birth accident which rendered her deaf.
She has cerebral palsy, a condition which has left her progressively more
fatigued. She lives with the lingering after-effects of recurring surgeries to
correct an idiopathic scoliosis, which is a lateral curvature of the spine.
These differences, she says, mean she’s
treated differently by the very people who profess to want to treat her like
every other citizen.
In spite of astonishing accomplishments,
she subsists on a tiny income that’s made even smaller by provincial
government clawbacks of federal benefits. The benefits are supposed to make
life easier for people coping with disabilities that ensure little prospect
they will ever enjoy incomes most of us take for granted.
There’s discrimination and there’s
discrimination. Acknowledging differences is one thing. Punishing people for
their differences is entirely another.
Like the Wizard of Oz, politicians are all
about grand mission statements, uplifting rhetoric and high-mindedness as they
promise route maps down the Golden Brick Road to the Emerald City. But behind
the carefully constructed curtain of tinsel and sham, what’s at work is a con
job serving the grubby principles of judgmental parsimony for the already poor.
I wanted to introduce A.J. to Vancouver Sun
readers because — and I admit my occasional complicity — one of the
problems with writing about provincial governments, bureaucracies, policy
analysis and the politicians who enable policy on the public’s behalf is how
often we cloak ourselves in statistics.
Statistics are a convenient way for those of
us in the mainstream to distance ourselves from the realities of the actual
human beings affected and marginalized by abstract decisions.
That’s certainly the case for commentary about
people with disabilities who are affected, in many cases hurt, by government
policies that are clearly discriminatory — although government almost
always denounces discrimination, even while those on the receiving end of
discriminatory policy beg to differ.
As a person and a mind, she
attended Balmoral Hall, a school for girls in Winnipeg, then Carson Graham
Secondary in Vancouver. As a high school student, her favourite subjects were
geography — she was fascinated by topography and how land elevations affect
weather — and mathematics.
She earned a bachelor’s degree at
Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C.
“I chose Gallaudet because it was, at the
time, the only university that would teach deaf people. Nearly everyone used
sign language. It was a whole new world for me.” And for her mother. “Mom
freaked because she said it was the murder capital of the U.S.”
A.J. majored in English literature with
a minor in music. It was a struggle. Her five years at university were spent in
a powered wheelchair because that’s how long recovery from the spinal surgery
took.
She graduated in 1990. Then came the real test
— finding a way to support herself despite her disabilities. Nobody, it seems,
was much interested in accommodating A.J.’s differences. She went back to
school at Capilano College and took business courses, then took more business
training at Open Learning University.
“By this time it was getting harder to speak.
So, being understood was becoming more hard to do. I was getting to the point
where all I could do was point and grunt. I didn’t want to be a cave woman.”
Technology intervened. Now she uses her iPad to write what she wants to say.
It took five years, but A.J. did find a job.
She then worked for eight years, first doing data entry at the Surrey Tax
Centre, later sorting mail for Canada Post, paying taxes and contributing to
her Canada Pension Plan like most other working people. But fatigue and her
physical condition eventually took their toll.
She now subsists on combined federal and
provincial disability benefits. With no clawbacks, those benefits would total
$1,450 a month, $544 from CPP and $906 from B.C. But the province reduces its
payment by the amount she gets from CPP and instead contributes only $342. This
the province characterizes as “topping up” her CPP, although it reduces her
monthly benefit to $886.
A.J. has to deduct her monthly rent — she’s
lucky enough to be in subsidized housing — from her monthly disability
benefits, leaving her $546 a month on which to live. This is about half the
average monthly income in Botswana. It’s about 15 per cent of the average
monthly wage in Canada. B.C., it seems, expects people with disabilities like
A.J. to live on third world incomes in one of the more expensive cities in the
first world.
“It is really punitive being on the B.C.
disability,” she observes. “I thought, as the name suggests, disability
assistance, that would be income on top of what I earn. I feel lied to. I
thought it was basic income. But it comes with severe limits.
“I feel like this is a bad experiment gone
wrong. I have difficult choices on what to eat. I’ve heard of old women living
from cat food because that’s what they can afford. I sure hope that won’t be
me!”
Any fair-minded person might see this as
discrimination directed specifically at people with disabilities because of
their disabilities, regardless of government’s self-serving Orwellian
definitions of clawbacks and discounted benefits as generous top-ups.
“Yes, you bet I’m discriminated against. I’m a
woman, first off,” says A.J. “I’m deaf so that is another cubbyhole. Additional
is my cerebral palsy and my back. The more things that are ‘wrong’ with a
person, the more cubbyholes there are.”
“I don’t get ANY of my CPP disability,” she
says. “The B.C. government helps itself to that money. It’s plain thievery.
It’s disheartening to have it gone, when I should have it.”
The limited income means difficult choices.
She passes on lunch with friends. She doesn’t go for the physiotherapy she
would like because at $75 a visit the cost is too high. She cancelled cable TV
and its closed caption programming because it cost too much — why haven’t our
cheapskate politicians designated closed caption TV an essential service for
the deaf since it’s the only effective universal emergency communication
service they can easily access?
Yet A.J. lives frugally so that she can save
enough each month to cover tuition for one art course at Emily Carr each term.
The total cost of her art courses for the year is less than Premier Christy
Clark earns for one day of swanning around at photo ops.
It’s not likely A.J. will ever
be invited to one of those face-to-face power dinners with the premier that
prove so popular with our business elites, but if she could, here’s what she’d
inform Premier Clark:
“You do know that clawing back
CPP and other sources of income (for people with disabilities) is abuse, don’t
you? Clawing back, or stealing, or deducting the money is wrong and should
stop. Please stop deducting.”
