Not poor enough
>> Despite losing everything in a fire, a family isn’t eligible for financial aid

by NOEMI LOPINTO

Photos by Jason Felker

Rebecca Fuentes, 30, her boyfriend Jody Cokeley, 26, and their two daughters, Olive and Kika, have lost everything: their home, their clothes, their furniture. But what really hurt are the lost memories. “The pictures of my pregnancy and my daughter’s babyhood were destroyed,” says Fuentes.

When a fire broke out on Ste-Dominique on Monday, February 18, Fuentes was in her adjacent St-Laurent apartment drinking coffee with her father. Her five-month-old daughter Kika was sleeping in her bassinet. Police arrived suddenly and evacuated them so quickly Fuentes only had time to grab the baby’s snowsuit and her wallet. “I looked out the window and saw (the neighbour’s) place was on fire,” says Fuentes. “At the very far end of the roof I could see smoke and I could see fire in the skylight. It was so far away I wasn’t worried.” She sat at a nearby coffee shop breast feeding and watching 150 firemen from 15 fire stations try to control the blaze. Soon the fire spread from Ste-Dominique to her building. It quickly became an inferno.

The family stayed at a friend’s house overnight. They called Sun Youth and met with an agent who gave them clothes and non-perishable foods. They were in shock. “Fires are so common that the organization has a procedure for it,” says Cokeley. “Show up and they give you so many bags of non-perishable goods and take you into a locked room [where you take] three shirts from this shelf and two pairs of pants from that shelf, but we had no idea what we needed. We just numbly took stuff to wear and left.”

Cokeley works full time while Fuentes stays at home with the baby. They discovered that they made too much money to be eligible for financial aid, but not enough to not need it.
“The firemen told us to go to social assistance, welfare and the City of Montreal,” says Fuentes. “They checked our income and told us about a fund we weren’t eligible for. Welfare called us back and said we surpassed the minimum income requirements, which we already knew. The assistance would have been [a one-shot] $1,500 plus $200 per person. The low-rent housing (HLM) people said they couldn’t help us because we make just over their maximum. The City of Montreal refused us help on the same grounds. The woman told us right there in her office that she wasn’t going to support our application. I was devastated and angry that there is no recourse for people like us because we are working poor.”

The welfare ceiling

The assistant director of emergency services at Sun Youth, Anne St-Arnaud, says Cokeley and Fuentes will have to depend on the community. “There is not much money in the system for these people,” says St-Arnaud. “People have called us offering their help, mostly to donate clothes and furniture. It’s very difficult for fire victims to find a home, especially on short notice. The apartments that are available are not cheap.”

Media representative Joanne Hachey, from the regional office of the Minister of Revenue, says applicants must not be earning more than $1,200 a month in order to be eligible for assistance. “We look at the family situation to see how much revenue they have,” says Hachey. “If they have more revenue than what welfare would give them a month, they simply are not eligible. Social assistance is a last resource. They have to have exhausted all other options before they come to us. “

Jody Cokeley and Rebecca Fuentes are no longer looking for help from government agencies. “Our tax money hasn’t helped us one bit,” says Cokeley. “People we don’t know have tried to help us—the guy from the local dépanneur, neighbours, the daycare.”
“It’s surprising because we kept to ourselves in our little apartment,” says Fuentes. “We weren’t the socialites of the neighbourhood. We can stand up and wear clean clothes because people are there for us.” In the meantime, however, their three-year-old sleeps on a pillow on the floor. Fuentes says landlords are requiring full credit cheques, SIN numbers, the make and year of their car, bank account numbers, references and employment checks. The last apartment they applied for was twice the rent they paid before. “We are at the mercy of landlords,” says Fuentes, “but we need a place to live, so we’re giving them all the information they ask for. I really miss my old landlord. He was the best.” :