Funding Autism
Re: Accessing Autism services. Editorial, October 3, 2022
Unpublished letter submitted to the Toronto Star
Financial supports and services for ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) are virtually non-existent when you look at the range, breadth, and diversity of needs in the Autistic community while the number of people with Autism grows daily. Even medical professionals have a paltry and limited appreciation of the disorder.
First of all,we need to stop talking about Autism as though it was a childhood problem that can be helped with expensive early intervention therapies. The FC (Facilitated Communication) debacle should be a cautionary tale about unproven therapies that promise the moon but are proven to be fake. There are no longitudinal studies of current early intervention techniques. People are Autistic for life and they have a normal life-span. We need a long-term view, strategies and funding that will support Autistic people throughout their lives.
Secondly, Autism is generally a severe disorder. Only a very small percentage of people are high-functioning yet these individuals are often the focus of media attention. The majority need life-long intensive lifetime support in behaviour, language and social-emotional which is generally non-existent at the present time. The main fear of parents like myself who are often the sole-supporters of Autistic adults is what happens to them when I die? As well we need to disabuse ourselves of the notion that the supports that we currently provide in our education system are even adequate. Most services are general special education services and most support settings are general service “warehouse” approaches. Neither of these helps Autistic people grow or advance. ASD is an extraordinarily complex disorder that is multimodal (affects all aspects of life). The disabilities that the majority of Autistic people deal with each and every day and for which they receive no support are overwhelming. Our own 41 year old son needs 24/7 / 365 support and care with all aspects of his life yet he has been forgotten by the system. At 73 time is running out for my wife and I.
We are not alone. We and other parents of Autistic adults are in desperate need of a lifelong life-line that will let our children live out their lives in dignity. A few bucks thrown at the problem isn’t going to cut it.

ain fear of parents like myself who are often the sole-supporters of Autistic adults is what happens to them when I die? As well we need to disabuse ourselves of the notion that the supports that we currently provide in our education system are even adequate. Most services are general special education services and most support settings are general service “warehouse” approaches. Neither of these helps Autistic people grow or advance. ASD is an extraordinarily complex disorder that is multimodal (affects all aspects of life). The disabilities that the majority of Autistic people deal with each and every day and for which they receive no support are overwhelming. Our own 41 year old son needs 24/7 / 365 support and care with all aspects of his life yet he has been forgotten by the system. At 73 time is running out for my wife and I.
We are not alone. We and other parents of Autistic adults are in desperate need of a lifelong life-line that will let our children live out their lives in dignity. A few bucks thrown at the problem isn’t going to cut it.

R

Unpublished letter submitted to The Toronto Star

Re:   Parents upset at lack of rapid testing at schools, September 13, 2021.

With a lifetime of experience in elementary schools as a teacher and principal in Ontario I have noted disturbing trends that have changed the core of education more and more to custodial rather than educational and professional. There is a continuing shift away from the knowledge and facts that make up the curriculum, towards school as a social centre.

Homework and out-of-class learning are things of the past despite the fact that only about twenty-five percent of the material required can be learned while at school. There are only so many hours in a day and this time is being increasingly crowded out by out-of-school activities, family commitments, student work schedules, partying,  gaming and social media all of which are seen as having a higher priority than school and learning. Studying and learning have no place in busy teen lives with cellphones and social media to keep up with.

This change is also reflected in the comments of parents and media. When asked about why it is important for students to return to in-person learning they all speak about the main focus as being on seeing their friends. No mention is ever made of the tough learning that must go on to master an increasingly difficult curriculum. Schools have become primarily social centers where students are gathered to be custodially supervised by adult nannies.

School is about everything but learning.  It’s about social media, friends and fun not preparing students for the future. Education – real education – seems to have been pushed aside and replaced by a socially vacuous, superficial me-world crowded with personal commitments and perspectives where everything is no further away than your Smartphone – and that’s the problem.

Cellphones and social media are  replacing real learning and that is leading to a serious deficit with students studying to learn the information they need to lead society in the future.

These changes to society have led to a complete de-professionalization of education and the dumbing-down of Canadian and other societies around the world.

Re:  StrUnpublished letter submitted to The Toronto Star

ess test could take toll on house affordability, experts say. June 2, 2021.

It is apparent to even any logical, untrained eye that the rapid rise in home prices over the past ten years has more has more to it than simply young people chasing their first homes in a market that  prices everything in the millions while the average family brings in approximately $67K a year. Prices do not rise by hundreds of thousands of dollars yearly and sell by the same amont over asking in bidders-wars unless there is smethjing else quite sinister going on.

What the government and the real estate industry does not want to admit is that organized crime has taken over the housing market across the country. They are the only ones who could have the massive amounts of money ready for laundering through the Canadian real estate market and have been pouring cash into Canada while the government, real estate agents and the RCMP talk abut supply and emand and look the other way. Canada has some of the laxest laws regarding money-laundering. Organized ciminals and gangs from Russia, China, Italy, the U.S.  and around the world are rushing into Canada to get rid of their  money made in the illicit drug trade, human sex-trafficking  and other illegal activities. These are the nouveau-riche of the 21^st century. Real estate agents turn a blind-eye because they are picking up quick, fat commissions. They are part of the problem. The government prefers to ignore this problem.

It is high time that we had a real government that cracked-down on the illegal activities of organized cime of all kinds before the likes of Al Capone are running our real estate industry and our country. They could start by demanding that purchasers prove how the money they are using was obtained and banning short term rentals that have locked up the market. The RCMP should get off their incompetent butts and be focussing on real police work of arresting the big drug and rea estate kingpins, seizing property and cash in the process and breaking up this financial fraud not on beating up unarmed Indigenous people and other helpless individuals that are the low-hanging fruit of law-enforcement.

Unpublished letter sent to The Toronto Star

Re: York Catholic Board ‘bleeding senior staff’ April 22, 2021

The recent hiring debacle (again) at YCDSB is nothing new. The trustees have a professional history that includes playing politics relentlessly and playing favourites. They have governed a board where cronyism and questionable hiring practices for senior staff are the norm. The environment has been poisoned for decades. In the 1990s the board was taken over when trustees had run up a huge deficit and expected to force the government to pay for it (they didn’t). Budget cuts decimated the board. Their incompetence in hiring Directors is only the tip of the iceberg.

This has been going on for more than forty years with many of the trustees being re-elected again and again due to voter disinterest in trustee elections. The Board’s “inbreeding” led to other problems that directly affected the quality of education.  Rather than acting like an independent Board (trustees have no individual authority), trustees went against this mandate and became involved with local school parents  and the newly political school councils. They were constantly working behind the scenes, siding with parents, stirring up trouble against the principals and staff with the support of the Superintendents. It was all sides against the middle and many principals got ground up in the process.  Teachers and principals were also divided when Mike Harris took principals out of the unions on April 1, 1998, He effectively emasculated and silenced a group that could have held the trustees (and the Superintendents) at bay. You were guilty until proven innocent. YCDSB became a “yes” Board. Yes boards are bad decision makers. Principals were powerless. Trustees allowed an antiquated top-down system of administration to operate without oversight – my way or the highway. As a principal you were on your own in a jungle and if you didn’t play their game you were ostracized. You were always the last to know.

As a result, education has become a collection of  “yes” people attempting to satisfy everyone while satisfying no one. The YCDSB is no different than any other board in Ontario. If we ever want a good education system we need to give education back to professional educators – full stop. We don’t have doctors being dictated to or police officers or architects. There is a difference between input and control. The former is useful, the latter destructive.

Not exactly a recipe for “quality education.”

Re: Getting to the root of gun violence, December 19, 2020.

The COVID-19 pandemic has stripped capitalism bare and revealed a society that is a mile wide and an inch deep. In its drive for bigger profits, capitalism has hollowed out society leaving a thin veneer covering an accident waiting to happen. That accident was COVID-19.

It has revealed an entire global society that has been underfunded for decades as government after government cut money from healthcare, wages, benefits, pensions and full-time work while shifting jobs offshore to places like China, India and Bangladesh where salaries and protections are miniscule. It was like a social magician juggling balls. As long as he/she could handle it governments kept adding another ball to juggle. Everything seemed fine but as soon as there was a major crisis the jig was up and he/she dropped all the balls.  What the pandemic has revealed is not simply a healthcare system that is fragile and underfunded but an entire skeletonized society that has been stripped of everything of value as well. While we get daily briefings about COVID counts and response measures from the Federal and Provincial governments they do not reveal the real problem – funding.

Public health officials beg society to be responsible and adhere to the guidelines to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed but the reason that they are being overwhelmed is because of the gross underfunding that has been going on for decades. Over the years the problem has never been our capacity to respond it has been our capacity  to fund. Hospitals have been miserly closing beds for years as funding levels were reduced instead of keeping them open and ready for just such a crisis as we have today. COVID-19 should have been a timeto increase the staffing of doctors, nurses, PSWs and to increase spending on PPE and related protective gear while opening extra beds in hospitals to accommodate the increased need. Instead we are confronted with hospitals that are holding the line on staffing and even cutting staff expecting the same number of staff to carry a massively increased load.

We’ve got the head and the tail of the donkey reversed. We shouldn’t be locking regions down to spare the hospital capacity we should be expanding hospital capacity to meet the need and that means increased funding. What we are seeing is years of neglect by successive governments, cutting back funding levels so that healthcare corporations and the private sector in general could make more money. Now we are paying the price – in deaths, suffering and massive increases in government spending on the wrong things. As a society we should be opposed to lock-downs and in favour of increasing the funding to hospitals so that they can do the job.

Unpublished letter sent to the Toronto Star

Re: Ontario in line for $7B chunk of $19B economic aid package. July 17, 2020.

As Justin Trudeau is unloading buckets of taxpayer’s cash in an a vain attempt to soften the blow of the pandemic and even Conservative Premiers like Doug Ford are opening up the traditionally tight provincial purse strings to help, Corporate Canada and the private sector have contributed an insignificant amount of cash to help. No level of government has said a word about raising corporate taxes to offset the hit to the economy. This would be a real, tangible way for corporate Canada to pay it forward and give back some of the billions in corporate welfare they have benefited from in the past. Bombardier and GM are only two of many that have benefited from free cash. A ten percent toll would go a long way to taking the edge off the final bill. Wealthy individuals should also willingly pay an extra ten percent surcharge over and above their regular taxation. The one group that makes and owns all the money in society hasn’t shared a penny of it with working taxpayers.

Regular workers (male and female) are taking a personal hit after being laid off from their part-time minimum wage jobs but as well will have to pay back every cent of the money that has been lavished on them to this point including the money paid out to business. No one, not the least of which is Bill Morneau wants to let the taxpayers know how they are going to balance the books again. Its not itme to talk about the twenty-year depression that is going to follow the pandemic.

In an era when hundreds of inequities have been exposed those with the most have given the least. The wealthy corporations and individuals who keep telling us in their commercial advertising that we are all in this together have yet to step up. These are companies who have seen their corporate taxes massively shrink over the past fifty years and who have pocketed the cash. Whether it is the oil industry, air lines or hospitality they have all made billions in the past but now they all don’t have any cash. Shat happened to saving a pool of cash for just sucn emergenceis as individuals are told to do? During the time of big profits the economy has remained stagnant as have wages and benefits while corporate profits went through the roof.  These same companies pay out all their profits to rich shareholders and cry poor when the government comes calling with more corporate welfare. Corporations around the world are totally unscrupulous in the way that they drain every cent out of governments claiming they are just getting by. When in doubt they go bankrupt leaving clean-up costs to the taxpayers again.

Instead of buying a new Bentley for the driveway or a new yacht for their home in Monaco corporations should be paying it forward.

Unpublished letter submitted to the Toronto Star

Re:Money coming from Ottawa not sufficient, Tory says. June 2, 2020.

During the COVID-19 pandemic every area of society and the economy has been hammered with the exception of corporations. It has exposed the gig economy as a fraud made up of millions of low-paid contract and essential workers living from cheque to cheque – many of them women. The federal government has been pouring billions of taxpayers’ dollars to support the economy while running up an historic deficit to keep everything afloat. These are unprecedented times.

Recently, when discussions have started to turn to how to pay for this avoidable disaster the mayors of cities, businesses and the premiers have been seeking even more money from the federal government to avoid massive property tax increases or even worse – cuts to essential services – exactly what got us into this mess in the first place.  Historic under-funding of society by the private sector is the real problem. The government has already put us all in the hole for generations. We repeatedly hear ad nauseum that we are in this together. Not quite.

During all this time and before there has been one area that has had nothing but big tax cuts over the past fifty years and stratospheric profits with little social responsibility – corporations. It is astounding how transparent the corporate sector can become in times of crisis. Corporate taxes have dropped precipitously from around 90% after World War II (another worldwide crisis comparable to the pandemic) to around 14% in 2020. It is high time that corporations started kicking in some serious cash.  The Feds need to raise corporate taxes by 10% immediately while cutting the interest rates on credit cards by the same amount. A Guaranteed Annual Income (GAI) must also be implemented because it would cost the government less than all the combined programs expenditures thus far. A GAI would also make corporations honest in what they pay their employees because the common threat of starvation and poverty would not be part of their calculus ever again. These three simple measures would cost less than all the other money already committed. are needed now to begin to restore the social balance and to ensure this does not happen again. Individual taxpayers cannot and should not be expected to continue to carry the burden of society while corporations carry nothing – except money.  Its time for corporations to put their money where their mouth is.

Because we’re all in this together – aren’t we?

Unpublished letter submitted to the Toronto Star

Re: Class action alleges care homes failed in virus response. April 27, 2020.

While the pandemic has exposed serious weaknesses in our public and private care homes from staffing, the type of care patients receive and PPE, the problem is much, mch larger than this. From our hospital infrastructure and the required integration of staffing and resources required to keep people well from doctors and nurses to laundry workers and the cleaning staff to our city infrastructure of roads, sewers, sanitation services and everything related to it to retail grocery clerks risking their lives for minimum wage these are all symptoms of a much larger problem – the ongoing damage that capitalism is doing to our societies around the world. Every problem that exists in the world can be traced back to capitalism in one form or another. In the drive for profits and cost-cutting capitalist private sector owners of long-term care homes have slashed the staffing and the protective equipment to the bone while telling us they know what they are doing – the private sector knows best leading to the horrendous damage and death that is occurring presently. In the drive to lower costs it has driven governments to cut the funding to hospitals and long-term care public facilities leading to the disaster we are now experiencing. All through society jobs have been cut back and their wages cut to the quick by a greed and profit mentality that knows no limits. As long as this philosophy is dominant in our society we will get sharply reduced quality and service in every aspect of our lives while paying ann increasingly premium price for it.  Profits should be taken after all the things that they have not done are covered – god wages with benefits, full-time work, pensions and well-funded infrastructure and equipment – similar to the kind of society we had before globalization. If we do not come to our senses and see where the root causes are for this pandemic’s impact on our society we will continue to pay more and get less. The answer is to get more and pay less for a quality society that we deserve. Only then should the private sector allowed to take a small profit.

Unpublished letter sent to the Toronto Star

Re: Business groups pushing for higher wage subsidies, March 26, 2020

Both the Federal and the Provincial governments should not be subsidizing the private sector during the COVID-19 crisis or at any other time. This is the group that constantly asserts the independence of the private sector from government when times are good and the entrepreneurial spirit that takes on all crises in making their businesses a success. This is one of those crises that is part of the free enterprise system. They can’t have it both ways – taking all the profits when times are good and then running to the government (taxpayers) when times are bad. Government is for the people – not for the private sector.

This is the group that has laid off millions without wages during a health crisis that is beyond their control. This is the group that under normal circumstances advocates for ‘voluntary’ compliance and recoils at government regulation. This results in tsunami of problems which they disavow from industry dumping toxic waste into our watersheds to plastic pollution to poisoning bees with noenicitinoids and on and on all in the name of profit. This is the group that during the good times is always trumpeting for the government to stay out of their way and asserting that the private sector knows best and does things better than the public sector whom they constantly demean. This is the group that whines constantly about being over-taxed despite corporate and business taxes being at an all time low and corporate profits being at an all time high. This is the group that has made ‘contract’ work the new standard; meaning low paid, part-time minimum wage ‘precarious’ employment has now become the standard among workers around the world. This is the group that has not increased the minimum wage or real incomes a cent in thirty years. This is the group that has made trillions in profits during this same time that they have salted away in banks and offshore tax havens as their cushion for bad times like this. This is the group that has been sympathetic but has spent token amounts of their precious profits to help workers by at least paying their wages during this crisis instead of taxpayers subsidizing them once again. And yet this is the group that lines up without shame to ask for more money from government as though they were deserving and in need.

When profits get shared equally with the people who create them and the private sector starts pitching in directly in the COVID-19 crisis with their profits only then should governments consider subsidizing t the private sector. Until then say no to business.