What would be the most efficient way to find out if how many Ontarians in affordable and social housing were overcharged rent by their housing services providers?
And why should the public care?
Well, the public should care because as of December 2023, in Barrie and Innisfil alone, the Ontario Disability Support Program ("ODSP") had 5,337 ODSP cases and 6,989 ODSP beneficiaries. Furthermore, there were an additional 22,900 beneficiaries in receipt of either the Old Age Security (“OAS”) benefit, and/or the Guaranteed Income Supplement (“GIS”) benefit, and/or the Canada Pension Plan (“CPP”) disability benefit, and/or regular CPP in an amount of $2,000 or less per month. And across the County of Simcoe, there are approximately 4,100 social housing units, which consist of approximately 2,800 RGI units, which are managed by 24 housing services providers. Source. And in Ontario, there are 133,549 publicly-owned social and affordable housing units and this doesn’t include any privately-owned social and affordable housing units.
So tenants who were overcharged in rent are now paying back their income supplement provider(s) each month by having a portion of their disability benefit—or other income supplement benefit—reduced in order to pay back their debt (by the way, I do think debts should be repaid). For me, for example, a family of one adult and one dependant, my overpayment each month is $59.05 and although this might not seem like very much, when your entire monthly benefit is just under $1,000.00, every dollar counts. We don’t have any extra dollars to spare so if housing services providers overcharged tenants in receipt of an income supplement, this money is literally the difference between eating and not eating for a few days. So if housing services providers need to return this money, they should be the ones returning it instead.
So how should this be dealt with on a population-wide scale?
This question has been at the top of my mind for months because the Barrie Municipal Non-Profit Housing Corporation (“BMNPHC”), also known as ‘Barrie Housing’ isn’t the only housing services provider that’s overcharging its Rent-Geared-to-Income (“RGI”) tenants in receipt of an income supplement benefit...
According to paragraph 21 of Barrie Housing’s Statement of Claim for its defamation action against me, the additional income supplements I received in 2020 resulted in “income supplement providers” paying my rent directly, which resulted in me being overcharged rent by at least $2,628.53. According to my calculations, I'm owed significantly more than this as well. And yes, I've asked many other RGI tenants if they were told about being overcharged, and I haven't found any who were even told they've been overcharged, let alone reimbursed any money for being overcharged.
And if you take a look at my ODSP ledger below, which shows the complete list of rent payments made by ODSP directly to Barrie Housing, you’ll see that these direct payments started-up again in March 2020 and continue being made directly to Barrie Housing to this day.
You might be wondering, could Barrie Housing have reimbursed ODSP directly without letting me know that either? According to ODSP, Barrie Housing did not reimburse ODSP with any money at all:
This explains why Barrie Housing and the County of Simcoe (who funds Barrie Housing) refuses to provide me with a financial breakdown, which are the audit / review documents from my housing account file.
Despite what the above letter says from Barrie Housing's lawyer, if Barrie Housing doesn't have the audit / review documents anymore, then Barrie Housing can reproduce them.
Contract with the CCSS and the O.P.P
My dad is 72 and retired now but he spent his career as a police officer working for the Ontario Provincial Police (“O.P.P”) and back when I was a teenager (I’m nearly 36 now), my dad spent two years as a detective investigating fraudulent doctors. About a week ago, I asked him how it was possible for the O.P.P to have jurisdiction with that because when I reported Barrie Housing’s fraud to the O.P.P, they told me they couldn’t get involved unless the Barrie Police asked them to, and when I reported this to the Barrie Police, they told me they cannot get involved in civil matters.
My dad said that the O.P.P had a contract with the Ministry of Health and that’s how the O.P.P was able to get involved. According to my dad, the Ministry of Health sent out letters by mail to patients in Ontario, and these letters included a pricing scheme explaining how patients should have been billed and if patients found any discrepancies, they were told to report these discrepancies. My dad said that’s when tons of people started reporting fraud.
I think the best way to handle this potentially province-wide, country-wide and North American-wide fraud scheme is by having a contract with the Ontario Ministry of Children, Community and Social Services (“CCSS”), whom administers the ODSP benefit, between the O.P.P. And if other income supplement providers automatically started paying rent directly to housing services providers as well, such as Employment and Social Development Canada (“ESDC”), whom administers CPP, CPP Disability, the OAS and the GIS, then those income supplement providers also need to be in the contract too. It's not realistic to think I'm the only RGI tenant who started getting their rent paid directly to their housing services provider. I'm just not that special.
Family Support Workers Required
There will be some income supplement beneficiaries with developmental conditions or other disabilities who won’t be able to determine if their rent was calculated properly without assistance. Section 58 of the Housing Services Act, 2011 (“HSA”) states:
58 (1) A service manager, or a person or organization authorized to do so by the service manager, may designate persons as family support workers to assist any member of a household that is eligible for rent-geared-to-income assistance in taking whatever action is necessary to pursue financial support from persons with a legal obligation to provide it. 2011, c. 6, Sched. 1, s. 58 (1).
Family Support Workers need to be made available to RGI tenants who require assistance in determining how their affordable and social housing rental rates were calculated so they can figure out if they’ve been defrauded in the same way Ontario patients were defrauded by doctors some 20 years ago. These tenants also require assistance from family support workers in retrieving their overcharged rent monies because no one should have to ask their housing services provider four times for their money back over the course of nine months and threaten to tell national news outlets just to get the bare minimum they’re entitled to. After all, these people have disabilities and these income supplements allow them to survive.
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