It’s hard to comprehend the cruelty of the United Conservative Party’s surreptitious implementation of a rent hike for Albertans who receive Assured Income for the Severely Handicapped and live in community housing.
Media reported Wednesday that last May Assisted Living and Social Services Minister Jason Nixon quietly approved a new formula for determining how much AISH recipients in community housing pay in rent, resulting in a de facto $220 monthly rent increase for some of Alberta’s most vulnerable citizens.
The formula achieves this goal by no longer exempting income used to determine an AISH recipient’s community housing rent, cutting their income by $220 every month staring on Oct. 1.
This blow comes on top of the UCP Government’s outrageous decision in March to claw back the $200 Canada Disability Benefit from AISH recipients as soon as it took effect this month by cutting AISH payments by the same amount.
Alberta was the only Canadian province mean-spirited enough to snatch back what was supposed to be a federal effort to reduce poverty among disabled people. It amounted to a near-10-per-cent tax on disability, Inclusion Alberta CEO Trish Bowman said at the time.
Last night, Marie Renaud, the NDP’s Community and Social Services Critic and a long-time advocate for disabled people, accused the government of Premier Danielle Smith of “deliberately targeting disabled AISH recipients with policies that inflate housing costs, further destabilizing lives already on the edge of deep poverty.”
Calling the Smith Government “astoundingly incompetent and corrupt,” she said “disabled Albertans have had the new Canada Disability Benefit stolen from them by the UCP and are told it’s all good because AISH is generous.”
“Intake for essential disability services is essentially non-existent, waitlists are hidden, and disability advocacy groups are being silenced,” Ms. Renaud added.
Here in Wild Rose Country, though, we presumably need the dough to run separatist referenda and bust up the most efficient public health care agency in Canada. Danielle Smith’s government certainly wouldn’t want Ottawa getting any credit for helping the poor and vulnerable!
Folk wisdom says we should never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. But in this case, the balance of evidence suggests malice played a more significant role in these decisions.
For starters, when the CBC broke the news about the rent hike to organizations representing disabled Albertans on Wednesday, it appears to have been the first anyone had heard of it. The UCP, which often pumps out six or more press releases in a single day on a variety of often picayune topics never published a formal statement about the change to the rent calculation formula.
As a result, advocates for the disabled were gobsmacked.
The change was outlined in an Order in Council signed by Mr. Nixon and signed without fanfare on May 15. A list of such cabinet orders is published on the government’s website, so some of the blame for Wednesday’s surprise must go to Alberta’s mostly compliant and under-staffed media. Still, is said here that Mr. Nixon, who is no dummy, knew perfectly well what would happen when the plan was not properly announced.
Mr. Nixon, moreover, appeared to have taken a powder Wednesday, leaving it to his press secretary to try to pass the change off as an effort to “increase fairness” in the way the government assesses rent.
And remember, while the AISH cuts were being planned and covertly executed, the same government was about to exultantly announce that the province had ended the last fiscal year with a bigger-than-telegraphed $8.3-billion budget surplus.
This, of course, had to be known to the government at the time the plans to push disabled Albertans further into poverty were being hatched.
Yesterday, meanwhile, the government was back flooding the zone with six news releases, some of little significance beyond their value as distractions, others aimed at engaging the UCP’s extremist base.
In a release headlined “New standards for school libraries,” Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides announced new mandatory rules that will result in many books containing “inappropriate sexual content,” whatever that means, being banned from school libraries.
“Our actions to ensure that materials in school libraries don’t expose children to sexual content were never about banning books,” Dr. Nicolaides insisted. Nevertheless, books will be banned.
Critics described the ban as an Alberta version of Florida’s #DontSayGay book ban. This would be on-brand for a government run by Ms. Smith, who has praised the Republican state as “a little bastion of freedom.”
Another presser yesterday announced the creation of performative regional health care advisory councils to provide “more opportunities for Albertans to bring forward their local priorities and offer input on how to improve the system,” as the canned quote attributed to Primary and Preventative Health Services Minister Adriana LaGrange put it.
Oddly, Mr. Nixon was available to contribute a quote to that news release extolling the way “these regional advisory councils will help us better understand those needs and ensure that assisted living services are shaped by the people who rely on them.”
Yet another release announced the three-year appointment of lawyer Jonathan Carlzon as commissioner of the government’s so-called Compassionate Intervention Commission, which will conduct reviews and hear appeals related to the government’s planned involuntary abstinence approach to treating drug addiction.
Yesterday’s crop of releases also included word that Alberta Sheriffs closed down a house in Edmonton said to have been used in the drug trade, announced a grant from the Aboriginal Business Investment Fund, and provided the latest list of Orders in Council.
Media are advised to look through that list to ensure there are no surprises lurking among the cabinet orders for unsuspecting Albertans.