To put this in laymens terms the NHL has decided to change the set up of the league so that there are four conferences now, each being more geographically specific than is currently the case.  So the league would look more like this:
* New Jersey, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, New York Rangers, New York Islanders, Washington and Carolina

* Boston, Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, Buffalo, Florida and Tampa Bay

* Detroit, Columbus, Nashville, St. Louis, Chicago, Minnesota, Dallas and Winnipeg

* Los Angeles, Anaheim, Phoenix, San Jose, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Colorado

Obviously trying to keep the travel schedules and rivalries based on geography makes more sense than back in the days when Montreal and Los Angeles were in the same conference.  This much I have no problem with, what I don’t like is the idea that’s been floated for the Stanley Cup playoffs.  To quote www.mapleleafs.com :

“The top four teams in each Conference qualify for the Stanley Cup Playoffs. The first-place team would play the fourth-place team; the second-place team would play the third-place team. The four respective Conference champions would meet in the third round of the Playoffs, with the survivors playing for the Stanley Cup.”

What I find problematic with this is that it could lead to a situation where the best teams aren’t being rewarded.  Say there’s a conference where there are only two teams above .500 and the rest are terrible.  Then at the same time you have another conference where all the teams do really well but only four of them make the playoffs.  You would have poor teams being rewarded over better teams which makes no sense to me whatsoever.  I think alternately we should keep a West and East Conference with the top 8 teams in each making the big show in April, and go with a 4 division format instead where the two best teams in each division are gauranteed the top 4 spots.

I take this logic from years of watching baseball and seeing teams with records below the Toronto Blue Jays making the playoffs because their entire division is terrible.  What compounds this is that the Jays play the Rays, Yankees and Red Sox sixteen times each which often negatively affected their record.  At the same time you have a poor team in a very weak division playing weaker teams repeatedly.  Divisional play can be really exciting, but I think the point of sports is to reward the winners, or those most capable of winning.

The one thing the NHL has right regards balancing the schedule so that every team plays every team at least twice.  It made no sense to me in the past why the Leafs had to play good teams in the northeast 8 times in years past yet would not make a west coast trip to play one game against Edmonton, Calgary and Vancouver.  Scheduling like this, and in baseball as well, skews the statistics so that you really don’t know how well a team would have done if they were given the chance to showcase themselves against every team.

Furthermore, I can’t understand why the NHL Board didn’t adopt no touch icing.  Just tonight Michael Del Zotto took a nasty spill against David Steckel trying to reach an iced puck in the Rangers/Leafs tilt.  It’s the one thing I think the NHL has to change if they want to keep preaching players safety as a priority.  The problem with the NHL is they are always tinkering with the game and changing it, sometimes for the better granted.  Look at baseball whose rules haven’t changed much in 120 years, there’s something stable about a game that doesn’t try reinvent itself in a reactionary way whenever someone thinks Americans will like the game if there’s more goals…or what have you.

The game is fine…let them play.  Where do all these changes end?  Will I recognize my game in 30 years or will it be completely different.  Will it be different for the better or will it be different to market and cater to American audiences.  For Bettman to have allowed Winnipeg to get a team again must have felt bitter, it was the moment he realized that his whole marketing scheme was a failure and that only northerners truly understand the game, we like it the way it is and there’s very little wrong with it.  That’s my three cents….

I was working mostly nightshifts in the Downtown Eastside when an afternoon of CPR on a corpse was the final straw, I was a broken man by the time the fall of 2010 was under way.  Leah and I managed to tour eastern Canada with the help of Joel Kaiser, Liqourbox and of course Scott Dunbar, Jamie Guitar and Dave Soehner (was it ever fun), but it was getting harder and harder to tour and maintain a normal life.  I worked on David Roy Parsons new album Time and Travel, jammed with some bro’s, ran my radio show, maintained a monthly gig at the Railway Club while busking in front of the Liqour Store on Commercial Drive…but I wasn’t happy anymore and I really wasn’t a working musician.  I felt everything I had worked for slipping away.

That’s when Luke Stackhouse showed up last summer, marooned from the Fred Eaglesmith Experience.  With Luke, Leah and I made the final move to our lodge in Wells BC.  We gigged a little but I felt a change happening.  A peace came over me.  I found it in the bush while Luke and I cut wood.  I found peace in my marriage vows to Leah at the Artswells Festival as Geoff Berner ministered over our wedding in front of friends and our community.  I found it with new puppies who loved me no matter what.  I found that peace by killing a lot of great fish in wild rivers and canoeing Cariboo Mountain lakes stocking our freezer and photo album.  We climbed mountains and earned the sense of peace we had in our hearts by pushing ourselves to go further than we have in years.  I got a 4×4 truck and drove to peaceful places, Josh brought a snowmobile over for us to use and the snow of the BC mountains could not contain me any longer.  I found work at Barkerville Gold Mines and my days became orderly and relatively ordinary.  Wake up early, work, come home, eat, relax and fall asleep early.

Friends.  I will be back.  I will make another album.  I will gig and tour again.  But life is so simple and easy here, I just can’t tell you when exactly that will be.  Thanx friends for all your support in making our life change, everything feels so much better than it did a year ago.  I don’t think I would have survived the city any longer, I was drained and didn’t know who I was anymore.  Here at 4000ft I know exactly where I am, who I am and why I love being here.  Take it easy, but you better take it…joey

If you are wondering where I am, I am in the Cariboo working in a gold mine, fixing my house and fishing as much as possible. We had a good fishing year, just killed a bunch of salmon but we’ve also had rainbow trout, speckled trout, bull trout and dolly virden’s land in our frying pans and freezer. This is where I want to be in life, I aint playing much music but I never been happier…cheers…joe

WOODY SEZ…
“I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim or too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard traveling. I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and your work.

And the songs that I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you. I could hire out to the other side, the big money side, and get several dollars every week just to quit singing my own kind of songs and to sing the kind that knock you down still farther and the ones that poke fun at you even more and the ones that make you think you’ve not any sense at all. But I decided a long time ago that I’d starve to death before I’d sing any such songs as that. The radio waves and your movies and your jukeboxes and your songbooks are already loaded down and running over with such no good songs as that anyhow.
- Woody Guthrie, 1912-1967

INSTITUTION OF RECOVERING MUSICIANS

by Dr.Joey Only

Used to call me Canadian Woody Guthrie,

Used to call me Anarchist Stompin Tom Connors,

used to call me and call me before I became a goner,

used to recognize me from way over yonder and flash photographs and papparazi transponders that lit up with each new song I pondered,

everyone wanted to be the first reporter to catch me after recordin,

but I washed up before I succeeded on the wrong side of border and law and order.

Previously I was Johnny Anti-Cash because I rejected the values modernity has,

they wouldn’t call me Cash or Johnny Paycheque or Dolly Credit Card or Hank Bank Statement when no one ever worked harder at rejecting and objecting to Nashville’s glam obsessions,

they never called me a Daredevil from the Ozark Mountains and lately they aint callin me nothin.

They wrote on my report card that I was hard on myself like cement,

I read it in grade three and asked mom what self esteem meant,

then they reviewed my records but forgot to push play,

so they say this album sounds like nothin,

the truth was they never listened,

before they locked me into the prison of failed musicians,

something somewhere between a rehab center and a psych ward they’ve put us in,

there’s no rock and roll in here,

they sing old old fashioned hymns in this sanctuary of sick musicians,

they won’t even allow gospel because rhythm encourages dancing which is the gateway to heroin,

if you walk the corridors of dissonant chords and play out of tune pianos with your nose and guitars with your arms and nose and organs with your organ and direct the choir of liars while suppressing all desire they might not condemn you to eternal fire,

it’s possible to escape institutionalized rape,

but you will have to scrape by to survive five years of being out of shape,

they’re releasing my albums on 8 track tapes and don’t care that people use Mp3 players and gave up country music to listen to Slayer.

I wanted to be the wordsmith who forges poetry out of iron,

and makes metal music but I wanted to be the next Waylon Jennings,

but the producer took me to the forge and melted me down and molded me into something I am not,

you heard the songs we made but you just forgot about it a lot,

they called me the New Kid and Silly Vanilli and told me to blame my pain on the rain when I wanted to sing home on the range.

They called me Vanilli Ice Cube and marketed me in Cuba at the whim of a producer named Grand Pooh-bah Humbug Doo-Dah,

he claims he looked to the future and saw me sitting on a tonne of money,

liars are really that funny.

I would rather be Lawrence Welk than a one hit wonder,

I would rather be a tornado of thunder and blow down the walls that plundered me of every thought I’d wondered,

I’d rather be an earthquake so that nobody could ever take away my next big break,

so I could make this institution shake until my intuition makes the walls fall so that all the trapped artists in the hold can break free of their mold,

the producer was the warden and you did what you were told,

now we can escape those conservative conservatory to put on concerts and constantly tell our stories.

The problem with losing your mind is you can’t remember where you might have left it,

you’re just a shell who looks like he’s been through hell,

the clock is well after twelve.

I wanted to be the next best thing but didn’t remember how to sing,

my lost mind forgot how to play in 4/4 time,

I forgot how to make words rhyme,

it made songs that resembled slime and reduced me to a life of drug induced crime and beer with a hint of lime.

I willed myself to be the next Willie Nelson but ended up pretending,

it was never and never ending and continually extending,

I had the no hit blues that I drowned with booze until the institution decided to choose me and spit me out,

it chewed on my dreams and screamed at my very being,

cause I wanted to be the next Stompin Johnny-Guthrie-Willie-Waylon and me,

the next Hank Willie Stompin Tom shootin songs out of my sex pistols while raking in handfuls of godamned mammom.

I wanted to be the next Woody and the failure has been killing me,

all that disappointment ended with my pink slip and gave me a name tag that read ‘hello, my name is trouble’,

got any medication for musicians with addictions?

If I get through this I promise I will never sing again,

I’ll join the Army and play in the marching band.

You don’t have to understand my tragic lesson,

I just ask that someone would finally listen.

If no one wants to hear me sing anything then I just ask that you pretend to hear my story before my pre-mature end,

for lack of friends or compassion I’m coming to the last course of action,

either detoxification, extinction, anti-depression or reforestation,

when I rot down and feed everything as my last artistic act in the world,

my dissintegration is the basis of new life to happen…the end of this half man/half mad musician…let me out and I’ll do what I can.

—————————————————————————————–

Geoff Berner unveiled his new record to his home city just last night in Vancouver’s Wise Hall.  In many ways his show he put on that night was standard and vintage Geoff Berner with Wayne Adams and Diona Davies.  Perhaps the only noticeable difference for their set was how Wayne climbed in behind a full drum kit for a change departing from his normal way of playing rhythm.  The fact that there was nothing incredibly different about their set didn’t seem to bother anyone in the sold out hall, this was exactly what they’d come to expect of Geoff, it was what they wanted and he gave it to them with reckless abandon.

That’s the case with his new album called VICTORY PARTY, it is a departure from standard Geoff Berner in that it’s production quality is that much higher than anything he has done so far.  The music is basically the same, classic klezmer steeped in minor harmonic scales, but on this record Geoff has added a few new tricks.  For example, in the song Victory Party which opens the album there are a few power chord strokes on an electric guitar that just adds that extra something at that point of the song.  The third song in the album actually has some electronica type sounds for the drums while the music remained standard klezmer.  The additions on the record are small, well placed and though they represent a risk taken musically they do not go so far that they leave the listener scratching their heads.  He departed from his standard sound just enough that a fan can be satisfied that Geoff Berner is still exploring the limits of his music…while it continues to give the fans exactly what they want more of, the wit and sound that is uniquely Geoff Berner’s.

Victory Party is an amazing record.  Geoff commented to me that he spent more on this album than he had any other so far and that showed.  The studio production is top end, every aspect of the sound on this record is spot on!  Harmonic is the only way I can describe its quality.  There is a gospel record Elvis put out in the 60′s that I now compare other records to for production quality, there was something on that Elvis record about how every single note played was perfected.  Every tingle of a cymbal sounds just awesome, it’s special to have a record that can emulate that sonic perfection and Victory Party is very close to it.

The songs are as brilliant and witty as ever, the humor is bold as usual and I can’t find a reason why I won’t be playing this record on my radio show for the next six months every single week.

Standing at the Wise Hall and looking around the crowd I remarked to friends of mine and Geoff’s that this guy really has the city of Vancouver wrapped around his wrist.  He can do whatever he wants at this point, there is nothing to stop him.  Very few roots musicians can sell out a hall as large as the Wise Hall consistently.  Geoff is able to do that every time these days, and doing it while putting on a show that isn’t that much different than many of the shows I have seen him put on there.  There’s something about his demeanor and stage presence that people just don’t get sick of easily.  He manages to play the fool as good as anyone has ever done, while there is no fool inside the head of Geoff Berner.

If there was one thing I can comment on it’s Geoff’s trio.  Hearing his sound on the new album I think Geoff is ready to bring a few new people into the band for a fuller sound.  It’s understandable why Geoff would hesitate to do this, certainly it is difficult to be an egalitarian band leader who pays his musicians handsomely when there are six of them.  However seeing Wayne behind the drum kit gave me visions in my head of how much I would like to be playing the bass with a band like theirs, the accordion covered up the lack of bass sonically but I still can’t help but think it’s the only thing this band needs.  It would fill the sound up and make dancing that much easier to have a stand-up bass or a five string electric that can hit those low notes for the droning sections of Geoff’s show.

But nobody in the Wise Hall seemed to care that much about the sonic hole in the bands sound, they were willing to get up and dance without that low end in the noise.

The show was opened by Joanna Chapman Smith who held the audience in the palm of her hand for fifteen straight minutes.  It wasn’t until she asked the audience to participate in a song by snapping their fingers that she lost them a little bit, giving them permission to make noise seemed to give them permission to talk as well.  I am a big fan of Joanna’s songs and her album Contraries.  Geoff likes to go second at his shows so that allowed Orkestrar Slivovitza to close the show with all their horn-y-ness.  The last time Geoff released a record it was my band that closed the show, which I didn’t find out until two hours before showtime that I was expected to close the night…which worried me at the time as I had a fill in bass player.  Geoff likes to go second so that he can get on with the partying sooner than later, there is no doubt that they had bottles of whiskey backstage which they dove straight into when coming off the stage.

Geoff Berner leaves to Europe on Tuesday of this week with Wayne Adams and a fill in fiddle player as Diona is teaching students, once again he will go and show Europe why he is one of the best artistic and musical minds that British Columbia has to offer the world.  The Wise Hall show was a victory party for his Victory Party album, Geoff is only going in one direction which is ever forward.

So I said, ‘you will all see. I’m gonna grow up and become a musician or an actor or something…and everyone in the country will adore me, but not you…you will all feel shame because of the way you treated me. And when you have cancer and will lose your house because you can’t make your mortgage payment during chemotherapy you will be ruined…and I will have millions of dollars and I’ll hear about how miserable your lives all are…and I will laugh and laugh and laugh as they give me trophies. At my acceptance speech I’ll say ‘to all you trolls who spat at me in school, I just want to rub it in my face that I’m awesome now and you have a fat wife and rotten kids who hate you and do whatever you want!”

Yeah, I dream about those days.

But it got so much easier when I finally succumbed to the international social pressure to have a facebook. I said that I would never get a facebook. But then people told me that they wouldn’t talk to me anymore until I got one…and why shouldn’t I have a facebook, I am a musician with fans all across the country! I played a thousand shows around Canada and I am proud of what my music has done for me.

So I never made a million bucks, but I made $3000 once at a New Years Eve gig at Vancouver’s Cambie Pub. I never had a Juno award let alone the Oscar I feel I should have got for my documentary, but I did get nominated for a CBC Radio Award for MOST CANADIAN SONG! Eh, eh! Plus I was on the Earshot Radio Charts for weeks at the top, that’s charting for all campus radio across Canada…which isn’t exactly 594 plays a week on Classic Country but it’s better than having a jack hammer hit you in the nutsack!

I did all this, I was so proud of myself…and then I decided to track down all the people from public school and to finally show off to them. I would prove to them once and for all what my mettle was made of…I have done everything I wanted to, except just not as big and bad ass! I was gonna show of to all those pricks who who picked on me and laughed at me. I would laugh at their boring lives and ugly wives and stupid lookin kids they are saddled with while I get to run and do pretty much whatever I want. I thought this would be great…now I can rub it in their faces that I grew up to be cool and they hate their jobs.

So then I dug up all the names of people from school and systematically friend requested them all to be my friends…some of them accepted. But most of them said, huh, figures that no big label ever signed you and you are just playing in bars and dives…maybe you should take a dive behind bars!’

“Once a loser, always a loser..enjoy your try hard music career!”

They just didn’t see it the way I did. I guess I was no Justin Beiber when I was 16…not that I would like to sing songs as cheap and cheesy as he does…still…he’s 16 and he’s got the whole word in his hands..and I’m 32 and still begging for someone to sign me to their label so I can facebook all those people who hated me in school and show them once and for all…See guys, I’m cool..you really just misunderstood shat I am all about.

I’ll just keep biding my time till then, till the day comes where I can finally be cool with the kids from school! This is part of my trauma, it’s one of the things I have to undo from my youth…one of my great failures in life, until I can prove to my kindergarten peers that they should hit the LIKE button on my bands page I’ll never put the past behind me. I’ll never get over things like how even my teachers thought I as asshole. I almost wish facebook was never created now, it was easier to skip the school reunions…and for the ones I did go to I was able to get a fake wife (cause I was single back then)…I just paid a pornstar to hang off my arms. But now I don’t even have to hire a limo to go to my reunion and pretend that I made it rich…because online I can lie. That’s what I am reduced to…so now those kids from school went on to my facebook and read about how I made my millions when I invented facebook and google earth. I thought I finally had them once and for all!

That’s when the first bully from back then and wrote me and said, ‘ha, now you’re a computer geek…what a fuckin loser you became…So glad I kicked your ass back then!’

That’s when I realized I’ll never be good enough and began to research homegrown terrorist cells I could infiltrate. I’ll do anything, learn Arabic even…then I’ll have my revenge when I hijack a plane and fly it straight into my next high school reunion.’

But I already know what they’ll say…that Joey was such a loser…he couldn’t even fly his plane properly. It’s great that he died but too bad he had to take out so many children….’ cause I got the date mixed up and instead of hitting my high school reunion I will likely have crashed right into the childrens FUN FAIR NIGHT! The only thing I can do to rationalize my way out of that is knowing that those kids are probably all mean to one kid the way they were all mean to me! That’s why I kids are worth it to destroy! I will save them the fifty years of agony as they relive their childhoods, their painful awful childhoods!!

I don’t nessecarily buy into the idea that people look bad in the morning when they wake up.  I often feel that my significant other is amazingly attractive in the morning as when I see her with her morning hair, sleepy eyes and groggy demeanor it is a special thing thing.  I am the only person who sees her in those awakening moments, I see the real her with no make-up and nothing been done to create the image of the person she wants to be seen as.  I see the real Leah Martin, the natural person she is and I like that!

Unfortunately I work night shifts a lot and I am often coming home after a long night and I shake her awake so that she can get up to work her day shift.

Coming home in the morning I ride the Skytrain through Vancouver to the eastside where my house is, I switch trains at the Commercial/Broadway station and in that short walk I see one to two thousand people in a matter of two minutes.  People have often told me how they thought Vancouver was a city full of good looking people and sometimes I have agreed…however I have been really paying attention in the mornings when I am commuting and lately I been having a hard time finding a good looking person in those crowds.

They all look so awful in the morning…but as I said earlier this isn’t just a case of me being a person who thinks people look bad in the morning…and these people have already taken the time to put their faces on.  They are all so funny looking to me, their proportions seem skewered such as big noses and nasty bags under their eyes.  I’ve started to see if I can find a good looking person and in those crowds I rarely see a single one.  These people wouldn’t look good no matter what time of day it is.

This brings some questions to the forefront when I consider the fact that there are many good looking people in this city.

Where are the good looking people, why aren’t they going to work at 8AM?

Do the good looking people who do go to work at 8AM all drive vehicles?

Are the working classes uglier than the ruling class? If so why are they uglier, is it a financial reason (people who make more money can afford to make themselves better looking)? Do good looking people work at all?

If they do work what time of day do the good looking people go in?

If they are uglier is it because shitty jobs make people look like shit?

It would appear that people who work those mundane jobs year after year gradually turn into some sort of working class monsters.  They start their working life with so much potential but slowly mutate and morph into this beaten down creature.  Day after day they awake and go through the soul sucking motions of the working class until the person they were is lost forever, the boredom of their lives manifests itself physically.

The meaninglessness of their daily drudgery becomes something they wear on their faces…their asses become disproportionate after years of sitting on it at their desks.  Their noses become disproportionate after years of shoving it up their managers asses.  Their eyes develop sagging bags below them from staring at computers while never seeming to catch enough sleep at night while their children nag at their brains.  They get fatter from years of eating low cost and low value meals at the nearest fast food joint to their workplaces, they never have time nor the money to invest in a quality meal.  They are so busy in their lives that they have no time to look at the head of hair they sport so that they can realize just how terrible their sense of style is.  They wear clothes that do not compliment their ugliness, clothes that were cool this one week when they were in high school but they haven’t bothered to find out that week has long since ended and their fashion is out of date. They resort to alcoholism to deal with the horror of their drudgery, they crawl to work hung over and beaten down every day.

When I see a good looking person at Commercial and Broadway Skytrain station they stick out like a sore thumb…I am surprised to see them…they are an endangered species in Vancouver’s working class and I fear for them that if they continue to ride the train at 8AM their youthful exhuberance will be lost forever.  What if the ugliness is contagious?  Maybe there is an ‘ugly-bug’ that people are passing on to each other, the sheer number of ugly people all traveling together at that time threatens to spread so that anyone exposed to them day after day will slowly catch the ‘ugly’ and become a monster just like the others.

The more I think about these things the more I start to consider what should be done.  Personally, it’s making me think that I would be better off driving to and from work…even as gas prices sky rocket to historical highs.  Or should I go a step further and cease to work at all.  The city of Vancouver ought to develop a civic strategy to deal with early morning ugliness…however I would probably find that any city I commute in every morning at 8AM would have perhaps even uglier citizens.  If this is the case when will we develop a national strategy to combat ugliness?

I have a feeling that this very important issue will be left out of the political debate in the upcoming election…to all the political parties who are too politically correct to talk about the cancer of obesity and ugliness in our society I cry out SHAME on them.  These ugly people stick out like an international sore thumb, it discredits our country and makes it hard for us to be taken seriously in foreign affairs.  We must do something to stop the growth of ugliness before our country devolves into international obscurity while we become the laughing stock of the world.  Already the entire planet is laughing at the United States for their high levels of obesity, how long will it be until we are just like the Americans?

We will have to open up hospitals for the ugly if something is not soon done.  Cosmetic surgery must be included in our healthcare programs, plastic faces ought to be paid for by health insurance.  Breast implants ought to be free on demand, nose jobs for anyone in need, and facelifts on demand.  We must also attack the root problem of this ugliness epidemic which is working, we would be better off to spend our time finding ways to look better than we would be to work for the man…this of course does not apply to people whose jobs entail making people look better such as hairdressers, plastic surgeons and clothing designers (they all ought to be given raises).

This will be the platform of a new political party I intend to create…THE BETTER LOOKING PEOPLES PARTY!!  Vote now for a better looking country, vote JOEY ONLY for Prime Minister!  I obviously have to tools to help you all become sexier people!!

Ontario has just approved 40 new green energy projects and has found a way to pay for it, by attacking the poor.

Energy Minister Brad Duguid said Thursday new contracts have been signed with 35 solar projects, four wind projects and one water projects.  The Feed-in Tariff (FIT) program has been controversial – with some Ontarians worried about its impact on their communities or bills.

At the same time the government has made another slash on the budget for welfare recipients at a time where Ontario hasn’t fully emerged from an economic slowdown.  The cut that is being made is to the Special Diet Allowance which allows for people with a doctors note to gain an extra $250 a month intended for the grocery bill.

People are unemployed and that’s not going to change any time soon, it takes a certain kind of callousness to not recognize this and to have little empathy for those caught in that situation.  Across the province, welfare numbers climbed in January with 462,146 adults and children depending on social assistance, compared to 454,935 just a month earlier. In the early 90′s Ontario had nearly a million people receiving social assistance, then in 1995 cut welfare payments by 21.6%.  The government is already saving money if one considers the numbers in a historical context.

The Ontario Government is making everyone who receives this supplement to re-apply citing massive proportions of FRAUD to be the reason behind this move.  They cite this as the reason that there’s been a 1200% increase since 2006 on the number of people on the allowance.  Figure that an average single person on welfare receives $572 a month to pay rent, feed themselves and use public transit to get themselves to a job application; it’s not enough money to live on when one considers the incredible price of living in Toronto.

The government cites one case where a doctor reported 99% of his patients who applied for the Diet Allowance as having celiac disease even though 1% of the population suffers from it.  They call this fraud but the reality of Ontario’s poor is that $572/month is not enough money to feed themselves, it is in no way fraudulant to apply for a special diet allowance…living on a budget like this people would waste away without frauding the government.  There is no such thing as fraud when one is facing the prospect of starving to death in one of the richest countries in the world.

The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty started a campaign just a few years ago to get as many people on the Special Diet Allowance as they could.  They found doctors who were willing to sign people up and on mass sent the applications for thousands of people in to Ontario Works, when the government complains of huge increases in the number of people ‘abusing’ the system it’s a direct acknowledgement of OCAP’s good work.  It was just a few weeks ago that Mayor Rob Ford’s brother told OCAP members to ‘get a job’ when they stormed city council to protest massive cuts to the city’s shelters.

All in all, moves toward a building a greener province is a good thing and will have a lot of liberal people in Toronto satisfied that the government is taking steps to move away from the status quo of capitalist economics, they will consider their government to be more with the times and progressive…many of these green/liberal people have an inherent dislike for the poor which may not be noticeable on the surface, but expect to hear very little outcry about the cuts to welfare.  The government can help pay for it’s green energy projects by taking yet more out of the pockets of the provinces poor and those who have hopped on the eco-trend will overlook yet another example of the poor getting the shit end of the stick.

The logic of this system does not make sense on a humane level.  They cut taxes to corporations, businesses and the rich thereby putting more money into the pockets of the wealthy at the same time cutting services to those in dire straights.  Ontario may be a greener province, but it is still a mean province.