Math

Yesterday, I had an ice cream in Halifax's Public Garden with my friend J.  He is in his final semester as an Undergraduate, then on to a Master's program and a PhD, before entering University teaching.

I would say that J.'s success is highly likely - he's smart, articulate, pleasant and confident.  I base that assessment on 25 years experience interviewing, representing and advising thousands of candidates for Harvard.

Last time I saw J. he had a rickety and ill-fitting old wheelchair.  This time, he had a spiffy new titanium one.  It fits better, his posture is better, his health is doubtless better.  Nice wheels!  He's a wheelchair rugby athlete, so he goes everywhere by pushing.  The Garden is almost exactly a mile uphill from his apartment.

My wheelchair is the same model, so out of curiosity asked J. what his cost.

$4600.00

Knowing his precarious student finances, (there are no family resources) I asked J. how he was able to afford it.  It's a long and discouraging answer.

"I applied to Easter Seals, but was rejected based on my income.  I work in the library, making student IDs for something slightly better than minimum wage, maximum 15 hours/week term time.   My student health insurance has a $300 limit on durable medical equipment.  In order to get help from the Department of Community Services, I'd need to be on public assistance.  If I was on public assistance, it would be tricky to attend university and my income would be limited to $300.  But I could get an allowance of $800 or so a month and a wheelchair.  So they would end up paying $9600/yr + $4600 or $14,200.  In any case, I'm unwilling to give up my education."

"In the end, two of my buddies starting crowdfunding for me and raised about half.  It turned out Easter Seals didn't spend their entire budget, so they came through with the other half."

Let me be clear on that.  Community Services will help J. get a wheelchair, but only if they also spend an additional $9600 for support.

If you use a wheelchair, you will understand how much it matters to have a comfortable, bespoke place to park your butt 16 hours a day.  It's like having only one suit - it better be Wool, not Wal-Mart. In pursuing any career, it's wise to look your best.  In order to look your best in a wheelchair, you can't be using a $299 model from Lawton's.

The simple act of getting around shouldn't require J. to surrender his ambition.

Here's an analogy:

One of the few drawbacks of single payer medicine is that there are no bills.  In the US, the bill for a new hip is typically about $30,000.  Probably a usable figure for us.  Say 6 of J.'s wheelchairs.

Is a hip the same as a wheelchair?

• Wheelchairs are used by people for whom walking is difficult or impossible due to illness, injury, or disability.                                                                                             -Wikipedia
• The goals of hip replacement surgery include increasing mobility, improving the function of the hip joint, and relieving pain.                                              -National Institutes of Health

It would require serious semantic acrobatics to concoct a difference.

So there we sat eating our ice cream, the hopeful young scholar and I.  While a dozen or so seniors, recovering from hip replacement surgery in the QEII were wheeled around the Garden by loving family members.  The expense of those hips represents 72 wheelchairs.

For aging Nova Scotians joint replacement is a ritual, an entitlement.  In my building, people are always showing off scars.  For an up and coming scholar, getting a decent wheelchair is just another in a long series of hurdles.  Hips vs. wheelchairs is an arbitrary and indefensible distinction, serving only to discriminate against largely disenfranchised Nova Scotians with disabilities.

Ray Ivany:  J. is the human capital you've told us to maximize.  Got any ideas?  I do.  

• Send Community Services back to math class.
• Reward work, don't punish it
• Same for ambition
• Make doctors explain why hips and wheelchairs are different
• When they can't, devise a mobility program  that includes both
• Make universities negotiate realistic health insurance for students

Gus Reed

Daring to be different | The Chronicle Herald

Canadian wheelchair athlete Josh Cassidy, who recently set a world record at the Boston Marathon in the wheelchair division, trains in Toronto on April 25, 2012. Cassidy will be representing Canada at the 2012 Paralympics in London, England. (NATHAN DENETTE / CP)

This op-ed appeared in the Chronicle Herald August 30, 2012

All 20 of the fastest times in the 2012 Boston Marathon belong to wheelchair racers. In fact, Canadian wheeler Joshua Cassidy (1:18:25) had time for a nap while waiting for Kenyan runner Wesley Korir (2:12:40) to finish. A luxurious 54 minutes, to be exact. Gravity? The course does drop 425 feet in 26 miles — a barely noticeable three-tenths of one per cent grade — but that benefits runners and wheelers alike. Meanwhile, the course has some daunting uphill stretches, and dragging an extra 15 pounds of wheelchair up Heartbreak Hill surely offsets any advantage from turning potential energy kinetic.


But this is apples and oranges, angels and pins. One shouldn’t be confused by the artificiality of divisions into thinking there is a single winner of the Boston Marathon, and then some women and then some wheelchairs. They’re all committed athletes, running the same race differently.

People with disabilities have a special perspective on difference — we are, in many ways, defined by it. Many of us embrace our differences as extraordinary gifts.

Some would say Stephen Hawking won a Nobel Prize in spite of his condition. People with more imagination might wonder if it’s because of his condition. Conventional thinkers see him as suffering from Lou Gehrig’s disease. (Lou, by the way, was not a bad ball player.) I’d say Stephen Hawking is a pretty spectacular physicist and that there’s a decent chance his achievement is connected to his physical characteristics. At the very least, his circumstance provides an unusual perspective on the universe. His work habits, his personality and maybe even the way his brain is wired are hard to separate from his success.

Without variety, we are doomed as a species. Some think people with disabilities are defective. They forget that nature’s experiments made it possible for chimps to walk upright and for plants to have sex. In fact, people with disabilities live at the leading edge of biological, cultural and technological evolution. As exemplars of diversity — living experiments — people with disabilities represent possibility, not failure.

When the rest of us can’t cope with the heat of global warming, someone with an unusual genetic makeup may be as cool as a cucumber. When the next avian flu arrives, a difference in blood chemistry may confer immunity. Genetic differences are humanity’s insurance policy — not a sideshow, but the main evolutionary event. People whose disability arises from non-biological causes (like accidents and injury) are often the first to use new technologies and inspire us to think of useful applications. And people with disabilities challenge our cultural assumptions every day.

We are a creative bunch, navigating the obstacles carelessly strewn across our physical and psychic environment. Imagine living in a world designed for aliens. Steps, books, iTunes, fibulas and sinks work for most of you. That’s great. But it’s more than a little entertaining figuring out how to make stuff work for the few of us. Artists paint with their feet, Aaron Fotheringham does flips in his wheelchair, Oscar Pistorius gets to the Olympics, Helen Keller got to Radcliffe and beyond. Life is a problem set and people with disabilities get an abundance of bonus questions.

Problem solving fortified with perseverance can unlock many puzzles. What would Sisyphus be without his rock? A disability is a lifelong exercise in persistence and patience and a lesson in how to plan for every eventuality. When one approach doesn't work, try another, and another. As Camus observed in his essay on Sisyphus, “The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart.”

Do watch the Paralympics, remembering that the athletes are pioneers of the next chapter in the human story, and then follow along as best you are able.

Warren Reed is a human-rights advocate who lives in Halifax.

A Canadian Disability Endowment

This should not be taken as authoritative tax advice.  Please consult a professional.

Fitzgerald: The rich are different than you and me.
Hemingway: Yes, they have more money.

Being disabled in Canada really sucks.  Accessibility is a very distant dream. Governments have excuses but no standards. The medical profession wants to cure you but not improve the quality of your life.  Charter rights are a vague promise.  By educational attainment, employment and income measures disabled folk lag  well behind.

But there is exciting news.  Canadians who meet the guidelines for a disability tax credit (itself a very generous program) are also eligible to have a Registered Disability Savings Plan, which can be funded through contributions, matching grants and outright government gifts.

The terms are extremely generous.  By saving as little as $500 each year (there is no real minimum), matching grants and gifts will total an additional $2500 or more.  With the power of compound interest, a modest 5% annual return produces $100,000 in 20 years.

To get full forgiveness of the government contributions, you need to wait 10 years after their last contribution before withdrawing.

Timed like a retirement plan, the money could be withdrawn starting at age 60 and ending at 83.  With modest 5% growth, total payments will exceed $311,000.  Not bad for a $15,000 investment!.  The rules are complex and include an option for accelerated end-of-life payout.  The grants and bonds generate taxable distributions, but distributions are excluded from calculating many means-tested government benefits.  Read the information sheet from Canada Revenue to understand the details for your situation.

RDSP distributions do not count as income for the purposes of the Guaranteed Income Supplement.  The GIS is itself not taxable.  

So a person with zero income at age 65 gets an Old Age Security payment of $15,208.92 nontaxable OAS+GIS.  Our hypothetical saver would then get $7,000 to $21,000 from their RDSP, depending on the year, making for a maximum tax liability in Nova Scotia of just $2700 on a total income of as much as $36000.  This is easily covered by the $7239 disability tax credit, making zero tax.  In Nova Scotia, $30,000 tax-free is roughly the same as $37,000 taxable income.

What's this about?  Wealth.  The median Canadian family unit has about $69,000 in financial assets.  The RDSP potentially puts disabled folks on an equal footing with their fellow citizens.   Call me an optimist, but if word gets out, merchants will be installing ramps to attract your business, banks will see you as a preferred customer, restaurants will have Braille menus, extended care facilities will pay attention to their clients.

Most importantly, disabled folks will be assets, not liabilities.

We call on advocacy groups, educational institutions at all levels and financial institutions to encourage full use of RDSPs from the earliest opportunity.  Hemingway had it right.

Gus Reed

PDF version

W.H.O. Report on disability

Readers will be interested to read the World Health Organization's just released report on disability which


"provides the best available evidence about what works to overcome barriers to health care, rehabilitation, education, employment, and support services, and to create the environments which will enable people with disabilities to flourish"


Here is the eloquent introduction by Stephen Hawking:

Disability need not be an obstacle to success. I have had motor neurone disease for practically all my adult life. Yet it has not prevented me from having a prominent career in astrophysics and a happy family life.

Reading the World report on disability, I find much of relevance to my own experience. I have benefited from access to first class medical care. I rely on a team of personal assistants who make it possible for me to live and work in comfort and dignity. My house and my workplace have been made accessible for me. Computer experts have supported me with an assisted communication system and a speech synthesizer which allow me to compose lectures and papers, and to communicate with different audiences. But I realize that I am very lucky, in many ways. My success in theoretical physics has ensured that I am supported to live a worthwhile life. It is very clear that the majority of people with disabilities in the world have an extremely difficult time with everyday survival, let alone productive employment and personal fulfillment.

I welcome this first World report on disability. This report makes a major contribution to our understanding of disability and its impact on individuals and society. It highlights the different barriers that people with disabilities face – attitudinal, physical, and financial. Addressing these barriers is within our reach.

In fact we have a moral duty to remove the barriers to participation, and to invest sufficient funding and expertise to unlock the vast potential of people with disabilities. Governments throughout the world can no longer overlook the hundreds of millions of people with disabilities who are denied access to health, rehabilitation, support, education and employment, and never get the chance to shine.

The report makes recommendations for action at the local, national and international levels. It will thus be an invaluable tool for policy-makers, researchers, practitioners, advocates and volunteers involved in disability. It is my hope that, beginning with the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and now with the publication of the World report on disability, this century will mark a turning point for inclusion of people with disabilities in the lives of their societies.

Professor Stephen W Hawking

Language Matters

Weakening the Americans with Disabilties Act

Our neighbours to the south have a long list of failures when it comes to equitable treatment of their citizens. One bright spot has been the Americans with Disabilities Act, which has gone a long way towards fully integrating disabled folk into society. Recent court decisions have eaten away..........

...........at the intent of the ADA, and a bill to restore the original meaning of the act is making its way through Congress. Canadians may find it interesting to listen to a short (4 minutes) National Public Radio piece here.

Although Canadians with disabilities are protected in some sense by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, there is a wide gap between the concept of equity and the reality of disability in this country.

Background on ADA restoration is available in a 2 page letter