SAID recipients calling to keep their pensions

James MacLachlan has myotonic dystrophy and worked at SARCAN for 20 years, paying all his taxes and — with the help of savings from his late mother — paying for his care too.

But MacLachlan got older and can’t work anymore and his savings have run out as well. So, to pay for his care, he and his sister decided to put in an application for him to the Saskatchewan Assured Income Disability (SAID) program.

His sister, Barb Sambasivam, said he has lived in the care home he’s in for nine years, they know him there and he feels safe there.

The application went in and they were told MacLachlan is eligible for about $1,200 a month, but the government will take back any benefits MacLachlan is already getting, like the Canada Pension Plan. So at the end of the day, MacLachlan got about $102 a month from SAID, which got reduced to about $83 when CPP went up in the new year.

“I didn’t understand at first. I couldn’t see where she was coming up with this $102,” Sambasivam said about the conversation with her brother’s case worker. “She had to explain it to me a couple times because I just was not believing what she was saying,”

MacLachlan’s care costs $1,850 a month which Sambasivam said is on the low end for the kind of care he needs. She said when she checked, some can be as much as $2,500 or $4,000 a month.

“It’s totally out of reach for him with these benefits,” said Sambasivam.

Sambasivam and her brother fought that decision. They appealed the decision to claw back his pension benefits and won, but then the ministry’s appeals board overturned that decision, saying it was consistent with SAID policy and only the Minister of Social Services could exempt his income — which has not been done.

That made Sambasivam really angry.

“Why do they make a panel of people who are supposedly citizens from the community, and they say, ‘Yeah, he’s in a bad state. We shouldn’t be moving him out of his house he’s been there for nine years (with the) same caregivers that have been taking care of him?’ ” said Sambasivam.

When asked, MacLachlan said it did feel like he was being punished for working.

MacLachlan is still in his care home, but Sambasivam said the only reason is because his landlord is allowing him to pay what he can.

Sambasivam wants the government to stop clawing back benefits from SAID payments, benefits she said all people who’ve worked are entitled to.

“Disabled people deserve a quality of life. They deserve dignity. And I really care about my brother and I care about all the disabled people in our province that are struggling with these challenges,” said Sambasivam.

Sambasivam and MacLachlan were at the Legislative Building on Monday at the invitation of the NDP. Meara Conway, the NDP’s social service critic, spoke with the two and championed their case.

“Far from caring enough to improve the quality of life for people with disability, this government has presided over cut after cut after cut to the SAID program,” said Conway.

The SAID program hasn’t seen an increase in the basic amount in seven years, which Conway said represents a practical decrease of 20 per cent in benefits.

“The government is literally taking food out of the mouths of people living with disabilities amid an affordability crisis,” said Conway.

When it comes to the province requiring that clients apply for CPP early, Conway pointed to a Court of Appeal case in Manitoba that found such a practice is unconstitutional. The Manitoba government appealed it to the Supreme Court but the country’s highest court wouldn’t hear the case.

“It’s clear that this is a particularly cruel and heartless aspect of the SAID policies, to require people to dip into their CPP early and then to claw that full amount back and leave them with less in their elderly ages, in their senior years,” said Conway.

The NDP is calling on government to increase SAID rates and to stop clawing back benefits from payments.

One of the people at Monday’s news conference with the NDP was a member of the original committee which created the SAID program. He said it was developed as an income replacement program to allow people with disabilities to function as a full person in society.

“This is really a very bad scenario we are in now where, on top of the cuts and so on, we seem to have lost the overall direction that SAID was meant to do in the first place,” said Dave Nelson of the Canadian Mental Health Association.

The Moose Jaw & District Food Bank said about five per cent of that city’s population use its services, while 30 per cent of its clients are on or are trying to access SAID benefits.

“It’s a frustrating program to deal with and the majority of my clients are speaking about struggling to understand the program and feel frustrated that the workers that they’re working with aren’t helpful. They can’t get them on the phone, they can’t get them to respond to emails and when they do, it’s often a really negative situation,” explained Cheantelle Fisher with the food bank.

Fisher said of her 25 clients, all are dealing with the SAID program, all of them are struggling to survive, and four are under eviction notices or have been evicted.

“The government and the Ministry of Social Services needs to remember that community-based organizations like the food bank are not designed to take care of people long term. We are not here to prop up the ministry in the failings of their government,” said Fisher.

The government response

Social Services Minister Lori Carr believes SAID does provide enough for people’s needs and called it, with all the other assistance programs the ministry provides, programs of last resort.

“As we go through the programs, it’s something that we determined is enough for their basic needs,” said Carr.

While many in community-based organizations see SAID as an income replacement program for people who can’t work, Carr believes it’s an assistance program, just of a different nature.

“The people on this program do have enduring disabilities but some of them do have the capability of working depending on that disability,” said Carr, giving the example of someone who could work at home on a computer.

Carr also pointed out multiple times that Saskatchewan’s benefits are third-highest among the provinces.

When confronted about the program requiring applicants to take their CPP early and then the money being taken out of their benefits, Carr said income assistance programs are paid for by the taxpayer, and the government has to be accountable for that.

“If you have an opportunity to earn income, one of those being your Canada Pension benefits, then it’s something that you need to apply for before you apply for income assistance benefits because you do have that opportunity to get that money,” said Carr.

Carr said she didn’t know about the Manitoba case which called such practices unconstitutional, so she couldn’t comment on it.

When it comes to possibly increasing SAID’s basic benefit, Carr said there’s a possibility of a federal disability program, so the province will see what that looks like when it rolls out and then will decide if anything needs to be done with the SAID program.

When asked whether the province should be giving more help to clients in the meantime, Carr said “as we work with them individually, we are helping them out.”

Carr couldn’t comment on MacLachlan’s case, saying she didn’t know the details and it wouldn’t be appropriate to talk about them publicly anyway. When asked whether she would use her discretion to exempt his pension from his benefit calculation, Carr just said she believed it was important to be consistent in the programs the ministry delivers.