::::::::
WHY SHOULD AN ELECTION DECIDE IF I HAVE ENOUGH MONEY TO EAT?
Today's Must Read
Helen Henderson in the Toronto Star on Ontario Politicians and the coming election
Put politicians on the hot seat (please press this link
September 18th (that's a Tuesday), hopefully hundreds of interested citizens will be at Alumni Hall at the University of Toronto. As Helen Henderson says, "Be there."
This is the all-party debate on poverty and disability to help determine the Province's next Premier, cabinet and provincial parliamentarians.
What it will NOT do is determine how to end ACUTE poverty for those of us who suffer it daily since 1995 TODAY. This could have been achieved any time during the past 12 years, but the Parliament of Ontario has not seen fit to see this happen!
Instead, during that time, despite inflation and a diabolic payment benefit rate thrown in disabled people's faces back THEN, disabled people in Ontario have only seen a 5% raise in their incomes; hardly nice when you consider that the MPs voted themselves a 25% raise only recently.
And what HAS McGuinty and his crew done to alleviate mass distress, more stress-related illness and a yawning prosperity gap ..? He's come up with a PLAN .. a plan to do NOTHING except get voters to vote for them again, saying if elected they, those big-hearted LIBERALS will PROMISE to raise the Ontario Disability Support Payment and stop the downloading of services to the municipalities. Hey, Dalton! You're full of C-R-A-P. Because I am disabled doesn't mean I am STUPID! I watched in horror as Dalton appointed someone heartless towards the disabled to be Minister of Health.
I meant to write this is a less explicit way but what I want to really bang away about is that this fine article (and it is) is buried on page four of the Saturday Living Section of The Star. It ought, rightfully to placed on PAGE ONE, as supposedly this is THE election issue. McGuinty made sure that it IS the election issue -- because by now we've all seen how this issue affects everyone in Ontario to one degree or another.
My friend, my "adopted son" Dave, died in the streets of Toronto last winter. He had given up. He was excruciatingly disabled, but he never received one penny in disability payments; he never found a doctor who would help him get the benefits he deserved. And so, although he quit drinking, he resorted to the Marijuana Maintenance Program as his lifestyle "choice". There really was no choice about it; he did it merely to survive a hopeless existence.
In the past year, rather than help me and my son get settled for good, Ontario has paid out a minimum of $100,000 in hospital fees related to ongoing stressors in our lives.
I have been given no money to get a computer as an assistive device, nor the equipment I need to make being online a comfortable proposition. Name me one person who's mind is intact these days who "makes do" without computer access. I have waited six months to get a cane! because no one informed me that their had to be a DIAGNOSIS on the doctor's prescription until I broke down crying on the phone to my ODSP office. It took me one year to get orthotic shoes and it's still a hard trek to get to my subway station; my bus stops running at 7 pm on some days. Some days I cannot make to the subway and miss my doctor appointments.
But to live at all, I am told I must work or volunteer for eight hours a week! And how am I to do that ..?
Between my son and I we go without nourishing food a minimum of 14 days a month; our clothes are tatters; we have no entertainment of any kind - no cable TV, no money to rent videos .. our wellbeing is continually at risk and antidepressants are not the answer.
This meeting should be attended, not just by the disabled, but by everyone who works on the "frontlines" with them, their families, their loved ones and just plain people who CARE!!
And The Star should move this "issue" to page one and write many many nasty major editorials about both political parties who have left this waft on and on and on ... how many more of my friends are going to die before steps are taken?
Virginia Simson
--
Tell people something they know already and they will thank your for it. Tell them something new and they will hate you for it.
http://www.ladybroadoak.blogspot.com
