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Forced through the cracks >> Welfare horror stories beg the question: is the system designed to help people, or screw them?
by JACQUIE CHARLTON
It's not that he's a religious fanatic; it's more a case of reaching a point where an appeal to the patron saint of hopeless causes seems as good a strategy as any. In an era of deeper welfare cuts and mounting intransigence of government officials to reverse them, welfare rights workers like Langevin are grasping at straws. In the coming year, the Quebec government will spend $267 million less on welfare than it did last year. For welfare advocates, those cutbacks can only mean more people being cut out of the system. It's not the front-line agents themselves who want to punish welfare recipients, Langevin says. "Management is putting so much pressure on the backs of welfare agents. When you talk to them the agents always say they want to help people. But higher ups--bureaucrats, technocrats, deputy ministers--the people who never even meet anybody on welfare--are always telling them to control, cut, meet budget targets, tighten expenditures." Langevin's group, the Comité des personnes assistées sociales de Pointe St-Charles, put the Mirror in touch with four of the hardest luck cases to cross its desks recently. They all involve women, two of whom are now raising small children on their own. Each has had a more or less nightmarish experience with her local welfare office in the past year. Nearly all of them are in debt, a couple in the five-figure range. Together they form a partial picture of the province's welfare system in a zero deficit era.
Bogus schemes For Sylvie Guay, it's patently obvious that people want to get off welfare. The problem is getting support from the government to do it. After years on welfare as a single mother--she's also the daughter of a single welfare mother--she went back to school, completed Cégep, enrolled in graphic design and then came tantalizingly close to graduating. Only, her student loans are now gone (a four-semester program at the Académie du Design she attends costs nearly $18,000 and she's already hit the province's $25,000 maximum for student loans) and welfare won't give her any money because she's a full-time student. Completely broke, she's been evicted twice in the past six months for non-payment of rent, sold her stuff and is now living off the largesse of friends. And still going to class. What irks her is the brick wall she feels she has run up against in trying to get off welfare. The government, she says, is not willing to support people who want to obtain a higher education, and only too willing to put them on some low-paid temporary work scheme that will enable them to receive EI for a while when it's done. A friend of hers, a cook, has been doing the welfare to work-scheme to EI circuit for as long as she has known him, two or three years. Some of these work schemes, she says, now even request candidates with diplomas, training and previous experience. As well as being a low-paid workforce, she says, "We're like a bunch of little hamsters on a wheel. I wanted to open a door and get out."
Babies and bureaucrats When Nathalie Grenier gave birth to a daughter eight years ago, she was asked whether she wanted to keep her alive. With eight congenital malformations, baby Audrey defied science; doctors had never seen a baby so messed up, and still breathing. Grenier told them to keep her alive, even though she knew it meant her child would undergo years of operations (she has had 29 in her life) and the indignity of a potential lifetime of diapers, catheters and colostomy bags. Grenier has been on welfare ever since. Her daughter still requires specialized care, and since Grenier can't find a babysitter willing to do things like insert catheter tubes four times a day, and a health care professional costs $80 a day, she can't go out and find a job. Welfare was supposed to pay for all her daughter's diapers, colostomy bags and catheter tubes throughout all those years--a cost of about $600 a month. But welfare agents stalled for about three years in giving her the money she was entitled to, a total of almost $10,000. She says welfare agents have asked her for one document of proof after another, lost some of those documents, claimed to have computer bugs that snafued procedures, sent the agent involved with the case on vacation for a year and threatened her with an investigation because they suspected her of working under the table to be able to afford all her daughter's medical expenses. (Grenier has actually borrowed the money from her family.) Grenier says they've done everything in their power to avoid paying her the $10,000 she's legally entitled to. Such was her frustration that at one point, when welfare cut her cheque declaring she was forthwith available for work, Grenier brought her daughter in to the welfare agent's office and undressed her in front of her. "My daughter was crying. I was crying. But I was just so angry at them." That afternoon the agent redeclared Grenier unavailable for work. And earlier this year, after years of waiting, they finally paid up the money they owed her.
Students denied Haidia Annabi uses a term many single mothers use when they give their reasons for going back to school: she wants to be somebody. As if a mother of kids isn't anything already. The hurdles can seem insurmountable sometimes: Annabi, who's studying interior design and has just a few more months to go before she graduates, has reached her maximum student loan limit of $25,000, and owes two months' rent and about $1,900 more to babysitters, Hydro, Bell, credit card companies and municipal tax coffers. All the time being the mother of three kids, aged five, seven and eight. She's been declared ineligible for welfare because she's a full-time student, and she and her family are eating thanks to financial help from her father in Tunisia. Like Guay, she marvels at the lack of encouragement she gets from the government to get off welfare. But talk to Annabi long enough and what emerges is that there has been an entirely different government policy responsible for her impoverishment. Three years ago, Annabi had been married, had a house in the suburbs and furniture. Then the Casino de Montréal opened. Her husband was seduced. He gambled away all their money, fell behind on their house and furniture payments and one day saw everything they owned carted away by bailiffs. Haidia left him then as well, taking the three kids with her. "Before, he was okay--he was nice," Annabi says of her husband. "Like all couples we had our problems, but it was okay. But then he started to lie about his losses of money, and then he started becoming aggressive. I had a life of hell. The casino destroys homes. They don't know what harm they're doing."
Fraudulent accusations Francine Gascon, at 46, is older than the other three women. She was a nurse for 20 years, but health care cutbacks caused her to lose her job two years ago. When her EI ran out she went on welfare and set herself the task of cutting out every superfluous expense. Her car, which she'd borrowed $10,000 to pay for, became too expensive to keep: she sold it for $8,000. But she still needed to find the rest of the money, $2,000, to pay off her loan. She cashed in her one RRSP and paid it off, and had a little money left over. Somehow someone at welfare learned of the left-over money. Though they didn't accuse her overtly of fraud, she says the agents treated her with a hostile mistrust. They informed her she would have to repay twice the amount she had received from welfare as a penalty, a sum of nearly $3,000. People on welfare are allowed to have RRSP savings up to a limit of $60,000, and can only cash them in to pay off debts. Gascon hadn't even known she had done anything wrong; all she wanted to do was pay her bills. Of the four, Gascon's case might be the saddest. The self-sufficient nurse with a car and RRSPs who slid down the respectability slope to poverty and the shame of suspicions of welfare fraud. "Ten years ago you'd never have seen this happening to someone with my qualifications," she says. She worries about not having the money for a decent hairdo if a job interview came up.
Sheepish bureaucrats Marc Lortie, an information agent at the Department of Social Solidarity (the PQ's pleasant new name for its welfare department), is adamant that these stories do not mean the welfare system is unsupportive. And he insists that no one is pressuring welfare agents to meet budget targets by tightening the screws on their clients. "We know these people are poor," he says. "We do everything possible to get them their money as soon as possible. We do not tell anyone to put sticks in people's wheels or cause obstructions. There are some agents who work less well than others, or their attitudes leave something to be desired. But in general I think they do their best." In any event, says Lortie, "The government's employees have to work with the rules that exist." Full-time students aren't allowed to get welfare. He invites people who've reached the limit of their loans and bursaries to visit their Centre Local d'Emploi for a career advisory session." And as for RRSPs, if welfare recipients cash them in, they have to pay off their debts right away, foregoing any urges to hold on to the money. But Langevin, who works with welfare recipients every day, still believes the government will use any excuse to cut people's cheques. "Welfare is cutting $267 million from this year's budget. They say it's because there's less people on welfare, but it's because they're acting like bouncers with welfare recipients."
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When he's got a really desperate case, when every avenue of appeal is spent and he's left writing one last letter to the government, Denis Langevin, director of a Pointe St-Charles welfare advocacy group, has been known to photocopy a prayer to St. Jude at the bottom of his missives.