You Voted For Change And Elected McGinty

How proud you must be? But you are strangely silent when it comes to your heros at Queens Park screws autistic kids and the impoverished. You are a pathetic and heartless bunch. You forget it was the federal liberals that reduced transfer payments to the provinces, in order to pay for their ineptness in fiscal matters, that started the problems with social assistance at the provincial level and still you support these incompotents at the federal & provincial level. Shame!

Widow stripped of death benefit, welfare
March 15, 2007
Rita Daly
Staff Reporter

When Cheryl Patterson's ex-husband died last year, the funeral director graciously explained her two children were entitled to monthly survivor benefits from their late father's Canada Pension Plan payments.

He helped her send the paperwork to Ottawa and in January, six months later, she received $2,800 in retroactive payments in her bank account on behalf of Nathan, 15, and Jenica, 13.

Now Patterson, 43, who lives on $800 a month, working part-time and receiving welfare, is being told to hand most of the money over to the provincial government.

Ontario Works says she owes them $2,120.37.

"I feel so disgusted and humiliated. It's so unfair. It's not really for me, it's for me to use for the kids," she said yesterday from her home in Orillia.

She has also been cut off from any further welfare payments. "Zero dollars for February, zero dollars for March," said Patterson, who is appealing the province's decision.

Legislation governing the Ontario Works program states CPP survivor benefits – in this case $400.92 monthly for the two children – are considered part of the family's income.

As a result, a letter sent by the County of Simcoe social services department last month demanded Patterson repay any welfare money she had received since her ex-husband, Paul Patterson, died unexpectedly at age 49 last June.

Yesterday NDP Leader Howard Hampton slammed the Liberal government for what he called another "clawback" from impoverished families.

More

Prying out dollars for disabled