Kimberly Rogers Inquest Alerts

A season of Tory zero tolerance on compassion

by Jim Coyle
The Toronto Star
Saturday, December 21, 2002

And so this is Christmas.

Granted, it's now a holiday far different than once it was, predominantly secular, overwhelmingly commercial, scant observance paid to the actual event being celebrated.

But surely enough remains of the spiritual essence of the season to make the reaction this week of the Ontario government to the recommendations from the Kimberly Rogers inquest in Sudbury a callousness beyond even its usual standards.

Rogers was 40, eight months pregnant and halfway through a six-month sentence for welfare fraud — under virtual house arrest in her Sudbury apartment during a record heat wave in August 2001 — when she was found dead with a lethal amount of anti-depressants in her system. She had been convicted of collecting welfare benefits at the same time she received student loans while attending a local community college.

This week, a coroner's jury concluded that the lifetime ban on social-assistance imposed on Rogers was a contributing factor in the woman's death and recommended that the ``devastating and detrimental" policy — a cornerstone of the Common Sense Revolution — be scrapped.

Almost immediately, Community Services Minister Brenda Elliott said there was little likelihood of that happening.

It is a close-minded mulishness that would be remarkable in any season; one that is utterly astonishing coming, with scarcely a moment's reflection, at a time of year that purportedly celebrates goodwill, compassion, redemption and forgiveness.

As almost its first act, the Conservative government of former premier Mike Harris cut social-assistance rates by 21.6 per cent in 1995. In the more than seven years since, the increase in cost of living notwithstanding, they have never been raised (though recommendations have been helpfully provided on the economies to be had in buying dented tuna in bulk).

While the government won cosmetic improvement on its welfare statistics, study after study has since shown an increasingly wide and entrenched gap between rich and poor in Ontario, and increasing use by those in need — predominantly single mothers and children — of food banks, shelters and other supports.

Studies also show that those removed from welfare rolls have not escaped poverty, continuing to depend on similar supplements to low-paying jobs.

The cruel joke in the Rogers case is that the woman died while serving the penalty for a crime that was actually an effort to escape the cycle of poverty — obtaining enough welfare money to survive while also receiving enough student-loan money to get an education.

The minister was unimpressed.

``When fraud cheats the system, it cheats not only the people who are paying for the system, ordinary, hard-working families, it also cheats the ones who need the support," Elliott sniffed.

``It's a crime. It can't be tolerated."

If welfare fraud is a crime, it also seems one that has won scrutiny, investigation and penalty in proportions vastly different to others perpetrated by those who are gainfully employed, own property, pay taxes.

Tax evasion, computer fraud, inflated insurance claims, theft of office supplies from employers, undeclared duty at border crossings — offences that account for billions of dollars a year in lost revenue, all of which eventually comes home to roost with those legendary ``ordinary, hard-working families" — all seem to be governed by sanctions something short of the conservative's ideal of ``zero tolerance."

Rarely in our society, in fact, do lifetime sanctions apply. Not even for impaired drivers responsible for tragic carnage.

If such a ban seems excessively punitive, given the potential consequences of cutting adrift those in need, it seems more egregious still for having been imposed on a woman who was convicted for an offence involving what amounted to small change.

By comparison, cabinet ministers who have recently made improper expense claims for similar amounts have merely offered up an unconvincing Oops and — because they had the wherewithal — paid public money back.

We are faced, moreover, with the spectacle of a government reserving its heaviest, most unforgiving hand for the most marginalized and desperate people.

Most criminologists say there are a handful of preconditions necessary for commission of crime. Opportunity. Skills or means. The likelihood of avoiding apprehension. But most of all need, or perceived need.

Surely, the hunger, threat of eviction, humiliation and despair that the province's social-assistance policies have done more to increase than alleviate, would go a long way to stoking that sense of need.

One of life's truths seems to be that with most gifts or talents the adage use it or lose it applies. The more we exercise, the keener we are for activity. The more we use our brains, the more sustained is our enthusiasm for further learning. Just so is it with generosity. The more we help others, the easier we find it to give more, the more reluctant we are to shrug and say no.

In all areas, what we don't use atrophies. And the province's heart and sense of decency has, as the jury noted, shrunk to several sizes too small.

It is astonishing to think, upon listening to Brenda Elliott, that it's been well over a century since Dickens had a man named Ebenezer make cranky Christmas musings about prisons and workhouses in relation to the poor.

``If they would rather die," said Scrooge, ``they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."

Merry Christmas. Even to you Madam Minister.

And God bless us every one.

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source URL: Toronto Star