Income Assistance Caseloads Up - Yet Again
The latest welfare statistics are more bad news for the Campbell government, and for those who hope for mercy in the March 3rd budget. Relative to December 2008, the caseload in December 2009 increased by 45.4% for those categorized as "expected to work", and by 15.6% for all recipients of assistance. That's not the half of it since relative to December 2006 the "expected to work" caseload was was up 118%, and the total caseload was up 27%. This is bad news for the 130,341 income assistance "cases" and bad news for the provincial budget.
As
shown by the graph, the welfare caseload has been increasing at a shocking rate since September 2008.When the 2009 September budget update was tabled in the legislature, the budget for income assistance was $1.56 billion, up from $1.38 billion from 2008-2009 but only up 7% from the budget tabled in February 2009. The September budget update said that $160 million would be added to the budget for income assistance each of the two subsequent fiscal years. On March 3rd we'll how those notional entries compare with the 2010-2011 budget and the projection through to 2012-2013.
The "Material Assumptions - Expense" table in the September update indicated that the government assumed a temporary assistance average annual caseload of 56,382 for 2009-2010, increasing to 58,503 in 2010-2011. It also assumed a disability caseload of 72,344 for 2009-2010, increasing to 76,448 in 2010-2011. The actual annual average caseload for 2009 (calendar year, not fiscal year) was 52,311 for temporary assistance and 70,823 for disability assistance; those numbers will be slightly higher for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2010. The absolute caseload assumptions in the budget appear lower than the actual caseloads, but the implicit growth rate between this and next year of 3.7% for temporary assistance may be wishful thinking. On the other hand, the implicit assumption for the rate of growth for disability assistance, 5.7%, is very close to recent experience.
In his story in The Tyee about cutbacks to the income assistance appeal process, Andrew MacLeod may have hit on why the government feels confident that disability caseloads won't takeoff. MacLeod noted that while the annual report on the appeal process was released in December, it escaped notice in the media. Income assistance caseload statistics are reported monthly, but unlike monthly estimates of employment and unemployment from Statistics Canada, these reliable administrative data are usually ignored by the media. The Vancouver Province did what will probably be an award winning series on poverty, but even that paper rarely, if ever, reports changes in the welfare caseload. Those figures measure part of the human price of the economic downturn.
January 27, 2010
HST Demonstrates Near Uselessness of FOI
”Your request requires a large volume of records to be searched. An extension of the time limit beyond the target date of January 21, 2010 will allow the Ministry to provide your with a complete response to your request. Therefore, the target response date is now March 4, 2010. We will respond sooner if possible.”January 21, 2010 response to FOI 292-30/FIN-2009-00229
I wish I had kept records on how many times I’ve been told that the legal time limit for responding to a freedom of information request was extended due to the number of records that needed to be searched (Section 10 of the Act). Far from being the exception, it is one of many routine answers before the final answer comes in the form of a complete denial of access or pages of suppressed paragraphs.
I can’t help but laugh at the ”controversy” over the former Commissioner going over to the government side as the Deputy Attorney General. I respect the opinion of Bill Tieleman, Mike Smyth and others, but they are ignoring the irrelevance of the Office of the Freedom of Information and Privacy Commissioner. In my experience, both former Commissioner David Loukidelis and his staff were devoted to the concept of access to information, but the record of decisions from Loukidelis and his predecessor are strong on protection of privacy and weak on access to information. Much of that is blamed on the "Dr. Doe case" - or College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia v. British Columbia (Information and Privacy Commissioner), which essentially gave the government a blank cheque to deny access to any information.
The test for the new Deputy Attorney General will be whether he influences the Campbell government to amend the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act in accordance with his recommendations as Commissioner. In particular, can the Deputy Attorney General persuade government to fix problems that flow from the Dr. Doe case , which gives government power to deny access to virtually anything.
My January 21st request was simple, it asked for “any documents that mention how the estimate was determined of $6.515 billion for BC HST revenue before rebates as shown in Table 3 in the September budget documents.“ The request also asked for: “Any documents that discuss the relation or reconciliation between the estimates for BC HST on BC families.“
In the most generous terms, I could draft the eventual government response to my request: 1) the $6.5 billion return in the first year from HST is 7/5 times the GST return provided by the federal government after adjusting for differences in the tax base, 2) there are no records to account for the astounding difference ($3.2 billion) between this estimate and what was claimed as the impact of typical families. Rather than providing that simple and revealing answer, the usual FOI process will result in months of delay and a final answer that the documents are protected by one reason or another according to exclusions in the Act.
No change in who occupies the seat of the Commissioner will mean anything; changes require a change in the attitude of government. Not likely!