what i'm going to say is that this doesn't appear at this point to have any effect on me at all.

it does seem as though this is more political than fiscal, and they're playing to their base rather than trying to cut costs. conservatives don't actually balance budgets, remember, and if they slash funding to a specific thing, it is generally with a political motive rather than with a fiscal one. what they do is play on prejudices and fears in order to maintain a control on power; the focus on welfare fraud is essentially a stale, if well-utilized and still well-received, strawman & canard to distract from their own actual corruption.

so, i don't expect this to get better until we can get rid of them. but, this specific update doesn't appear as though it is going to make things worse for me.

while increasing the earnings limit is not going to incentivize me to work, i don't have any particular opposition to the policy, either.

one of the things people have been worried about is that they're going to cut pharmaceutical access. if you ignore the obvious public health risks involved in taking medication away from the poorest people in society, that would actually be inconsistent with this kind of right-libertarian incentive system sort of thing they're adopting - which virtually all economists today will tell you has more to do with faith-based thinking (and, the religion is calvinism) than it has to do with economics. but, it would be more consistent of them to expand drug coverage to low wage workers, to remove the disincentive to work that comes with getting free drugs on welfare and having to pay for them when employed. this is an issue that multiple reports have pointed out, and i would support that - albeit in the interest of expanding drug coverage, rather than in the interest of removing a disincentive to work.

and, while i admit i have had difficulty getting a proper diagnosis, i am confident that i am creative enough to find a way around any newer or more restrictive definitions, even if it requires me to create an event in order to justify it. they keep telling me i'm not episodic. it's a catch-22; i can be episodic, if they insist.

just remember: this is political, not fiscal. always has been. always will be.

https://news.ontario.ca/mcys/en/2018/11/reforming-social-assistance.html