Ombud: Pay disabled $6M
Four month appeal window for process that takes eight months
May 31, 2006. 01:44 PM
CANADIAN PRESS

Ontario’s ombudsman called on the province today to pay millions of dollars
to disabled people who have been denied support payments because of
government delays and the “morally repugnant” enforcement of its own rules.

“The gig’s up. It’s time to return the money to these people,” Andre Marin
said as he released a scathing report, called “Losing the Waiting Game,”
which examines delays in processing applications at the province’s
Disability Support Program.

The main problem Marin found was rigid enforcement of a regulation imposing
a four-month limit on retroactive benefits for disabled people, even though
it can take eight to 10 months to process an application for support
payments.

“What was set as an internal performance standard became a rule that you
took to hammer complainants, to hammer the citizens with disabilities who
were looking to get full compensation,” he said.

“It became an asinine application of the rule.”

The report describes the support program as a “bureaucratic nightmare” that
leaves thousands of disabled people struggling to pay bills without the
$953 a month in support payments to which they were clearly entitled.

“Thousands of Ontario’s most vulnerable citizens have become losers in a
cruelly insensitive and intensely bureaucratic game,” Marin said.

“Ontario’s disabled have lost out on financial benefits to the tune of at
least $6 million, and likely substantially more.”

Marin said the $6 million would be for about 4,600 people who were denied
benefits from April 2004 to December 2005, but he wants the province to
return benefits to as many as 13,000 people going back as far as 1997.

“I will tell you that ($6 million) is an ultra-conservative figure. It
could be double. It could be triple,” he said. “It’s a bit of a mess to
figure out.”

The report said some applications from disabled people had fallen into a
“black hole,” forcing them to face a financial penalty through no fault of
their own.

The program “systematically restricts payments to individuals as a result
of its own delays,” and many disabled people are too intimidated to
complain, Marin said.

“I cannot ignore the egregious impact on those who have already lost
significantly because of the effect of this regulation and the ministry’s
endemic delays in processing applications,” Marin writes in the report.

“I believe the only way to make this situation right is for those who have
lost the waiting game to receive the benefits they would have otherwise
been entitled to if not for the ministry’s delay.”

Marin said the idea of changing the four-month limit on retroactive
benefits was initially met with bureaucratic resistance, but the government
has now agreed to change that regulation.

The province has not, however, agreed to follow Marin’s recommendation to
pay restitution to disabled people caught in the bureaucratic trap.

“This is not compensation,” he said. “This is money that doesn’t belong to
the government. It shouldn’t have had it in the first place.”

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