Friends once known

In the late 1980's, returning home to Ottawa from a business trip to Edmonton, I suddenly paused, in the rush of people leaving arrivals at the Ottawa International Airport.  Coming towards me was a white-bearded gentleman maybe twenty years older than I. Our eyes met and his lit up with recognition before he was swept forward by the crush pushing towards departures. That was the last time I saw Don Heap, member of parliament for the Toronto riding of Spadina. He was most likely leaving his weekday parliamentary office and heading home to his family in Toronto for the weekend. My life has frequently been touched by people like Don (who went by the first name of "Dan" in public office). I was in his home in Toronto in 1965 when the telephone rang. It was Don phoning from Selma, Alabama where he had gone to join a civil rights march. I was in the house alone and had a difficult time trying to make out what the operator in Alabama was trying to tell me, her accent being so thick.

If you check out Don's Wikipedia entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Heap there is a sentence that reads from the 1960's to 1980's "as many as a dozen young people stay[ed] with the Heap family at one time.^" I was one of those young people, though during the six months I bunked at the Heaps' home, I was the only one not a member of the immediate family. It was a period of transition in my life--from being a lost high school dropout to getting myself geared up to enter university in a few years, thus taking the steps that led from a life of low-paying entry-level casual jobs to a professional deplaning from a week-long business trip to the other side of the country.  

The first time I met the Heaps I was at a peace camp located not far from La Macaza, Quebec where American Bomarc missiles were stationed at the Canadian Forces Base. This would have been in the summer of 1964. At the time the previous government of John Diefenbaker had refused to allow the Americans to arm the missiles with nuclear warheads, but the new government under Lester Pearson (ironically winner of the 1957 Nobel Peace Prize) elected in April 1963 agreed to accept them. I was one of a small group who prevented access to the base for 24 hours in order to draw attention to the issue. Well, we did make the cover of MacLean's Magazine and Pierre Trudeau ordered the dismantling of the base in 1972. (Two highly negative outcomes of the original decision to accept the missiles in the first place: Canada had to cede control of the launch of the missiles to the American military even though the missiles were on a Canadian forces base on Canadian territory and, secondly, Diefenbaker scrapped Canada's outstanding Avro Arrow program arguing it was redundant in light of the acquisition of American missiles. This effectively killed the Canadian aviation industry and to this day the Avro Arrow could have outperformed many of the standard military aircraft available. In other words, we could have avoided all these Eh-101 military helicopter and F-35 military aircraft scandals and political quagmires.) But, who was going to listen to an 18-year-old kid at the time? I was right then and subsequent events have bourn that out.

Back to the story: a cry went up at camp when a beat-up old white panel truck arrived, "The Heaps are here! The Heaps are here!" It seemed like dozens of blond-haired kids spilled out of the truck and scattered throughout the camp, greeting everyone. Don and Alice were received as leaders of the protest group. Back in Toronto I stayed with a group of University of Toronto students in an old house on Huron Avenue. Alice Heap was at the time secretary of the Student Christian Movement, a nation-wide campus-situated social activist organization and many members of my household were active supporters. (Yes, I know some will find it hard to believe, but the original hippy movement began as a religious organization. It organized "peace camps" across the country every summer to that students could live and work together while studying the social issues of the day. Nothing like working in a garment factory in Ville LaSalle while living in Point Charles  to learn to appreciate just what poverty was about. Even better: try it now: the garment factories are all closed.)

Alice Heap (2012). Don is in the background.

 

So, I met Alice frequently and Don occasionally lead communion services (he was/is an ordained Anglican priest.) When for various reasons I could not continue to live in the student house, Alice invited me to use an empty bedroom in their home. I paid room and board and did my share of family chores (Alice ran the home as a cooperative enterprise where everyone had a role and contributions to make. One of mine was to keep the kitchen floor clean. Every second night after everyone was in bed, I washed then waxed the floor.) I was working as a night security guard then: every second night I worked 5:00 pm until 8:00 am walking the campus of Connaught Labs in northern Toronto. Between rounds I wrote. Mostly poetry, filling notebook after notebook, struggling to figure out my place in the scheme of things. By the fall, I joined another student co-op group and started taking night courses. It didn't work out, but it led me to a job at the University of Toronto in the chemistry department where I stayed for two years before I was accepted as a university student in Montreal.

During those years the Heaps were very much a part of my social landscape. Gatherings at the Heap's were common. Don and I never spoke much, as I recall, but he was there at the party my girlfriend threw for me a day before I left for Montreal and an entirely new life. Even though I was established in Montreal, I still visited the Heap household from time to time over the years and followed Don's career in politics, first as a municipal counsellor  in Toronto and then as a Member of Parliament. In 1973 one night (2:00 am) I saw their eldest daughter riding a bicycle through the streets of Montreal. I phoned her and learned she was working in a factory in order to study the issues of the working poor. Google "Danny Heap" (professor at the University of Toronto) and "David Heap" (professor at University of Western Ontario) if you want to find out about two of Don and Alice's sons and the international stirs they have caused over the years.

Today Don suffers from Alzheimer's and lives in a nursing home. Alice died this past March. As for their home, they gave it away so it could be used to house refugees. I miss having people like Don and Alice in my life.

A Christmas Carol

This is the last work I wrote for a church choir--a local all-male group. Though the conductor was enthusiastic, too many of the members had problems with a Christmas carol that included references to homeless children, prostitutes, abused run-aways, those dying in alley-ways, and lost rich men and so it was never performed. Too bad because I thought it had a lot more to do with the Christmas message than fat elves dressed in red, dancing snowmen, and a celebration of excessive-consumption.

Children Sleeping Under Bridges

A Christmas Carol by Ronald J Brown

 

 Children sleeping under bridges

dark December rain

Woman begging at the curbside

coughing deep in pain.

Hopeless, fearing, desperate, daring

headlights shining through the darkness:

They hear a baby cry.

Baby in the chaffing straw

crying just for them;

Wrapped in rags, he knows their pain

crying just for them.

 

Young girl standing under streetlight

waiting for a ride.

Suffocating in a fever,

never had much pride.

Bruised, abandoned, no one caring;

she cries her father's name:

And hears a baby cry.

Baby in the darkest night

crying just for her;

Baby takes her pain and calls her

calling only her.

Old man, cardboard house collapsing,

this his only home;
Gasps and struggles, snow encrusted,
dying all alone.
Searching, needing, defeated, groping
curses his life and all he's known:
He hears a baby cry.
Baby in a cold dark cave
crying just for him;
Brought into this world to die
crying just for him.

Rich man inside glass and steel,

sees the scene below.
There are barriers, layers, shadows
he has never known.
Emptiness is his only guidance;
he lives inside a void:
Yet hears a baby cry.
Baby calling out his name
through all time and space;
reaching for him, reaching for us,
calling you and me.

 

Taxing Times: Part Two

My biggest failing as a tax preparer was that some clients interpreted my responses to them as my being rude. For example, one gentleman was very angry because I would not include his mortgage payments as a deduction. (Clarity: mortgage payments have never been a deductable personal expense in Canada; perhaps he was confused by the Americans who allow mortgage interest as a deduction). Result: a bitter complaint to my boss about how rude and uncooperative I was. I ran into many such cases during my six years of income tax return preparation.

Child care expenses sometimes caused some conflicts. It has been the case in Canadian tax laws for as long as I can remember that there are two kinds of private child care providers: those who provide receipts and those who don't. The idea is that if someone is going to claim child care as an expense, someone else is going to have to declare it as income. It all has to balance out. To support this position, the government insists that child care receipts contain either the name of a professional company or the social insurance number of a private individual providing this service. I don't make the rules, but, judging by the reactions of some clients, you'd think I was some sort of arbitrary tyrant. More than a half dozen clients expressed outrage when I told them that social insurance numbers of their providers are required; some insisting that they have been making the claim for years and no one every asked for this information before. It really didn't matter what my personal views were (my job was to prepare accurate returns in any case), but my software would not process the claim without a valid social insurance number. Result: a flurry of complaints to my boss about how rude and uncooperative I was.

I learned to hate preparing returns for restaurant and bar servers. It never ceased to amaze how few of them actually made any tips and those who did made miniscule amounts. That didn't jive with my personal experience as a patron of such places—and I don't think I am the only person in North America to actually leave a tip for my server. But, it certainly appeared that way according to the stories that such employees told me at tax time. One young lady had worked for a short time as a dancer in an Ottawa strip joint and told me with a straight face that she earned only minimum wage and no tips whatsoever.  I couldn't help but think that not only must she been a terrible dancer, but she must have hideous and terrifying scars revealed when she takes off her clothes. In any case, I would tell my tip-less victims of the Quebec tax situation: the Quebec government decides how much such employees earned in tips  based on a percentage of their paid wages and the classification of the establishment. The rates ranged between 100% and 400% of their stated earnings. And I was facing people who insisted that they could not possibly have earned more than 10% of their hourly wage in tips. I could not accuse a client of lying and I was required to accept whatever they told me in such situations at face value, but I did feel obliged to give them a warning. The government could examine credit card and cash register receipts to get a more accurate assessment of someone's tips. When audited they'd be sure to try to lay the blame on me as the tax preparer, so I did try to get the message across that it was on them, not me. Results: many calls to my boss to complain about how rude and uncooperative I was.

Rent receipts! I could write a chapter in a book about the problems I encountered with rent receipts, but let's stick to one situation I ran into fairly frequently: parents issuing rent receipts to their teenage children. It can be a grey area, but, as with child care, if someone is making the deduction, then someone else has to declare the income. I'd usually run into this with teenage boys making their first tax return. They'd give me a piece of paper saying that their mother told them to give me this.  I'd see it was a receipt for rent and ask if their mother was planning to declare it as income. I'd usually get a stumbling muttered reply, mixed with surprise and an admission that no, she wasn't. I would then tell them that they couldn't claim it. They were usually too shy and confused to argue. But, I ran into one very ugly case. Older tax preparers had been playing fast and loose with tax rules for years because they were paid on a commission basis—the higher the refund the more they'd be paid. By the time I entered the scene, commissions were a thing of the past, so there was no more incentive to stretch a point in order to make a few more dollars. However, older tax preparers found change difficult to accept.

I was working alone in the office during the summer when faced with an angry set of parents accompanied by their thirteen year old daughter. The government had just rejected the daughter's submission of rent receipts on the grounds that the parents had not declared the resulting income and, besides, parents cannot charge a 13-year-old rent. The girl was handicapped and had a small disability income, which was the basis of the refund that the government now wanted returned to them. The mother was particularly incensed, accusing me of being some sort of monster for trying to take money from a handicapped thirteen-year-old (a number of clients could not distinguish between me, a tax preparer  and go-between, and the government, who set the rules and collected the money). I tried to explain that the daughter should not have been given the refund in the first place and that the government simply wanted back the money that she was not entitled to. My argument had no effect. The original return had been prepared by someone with many more years experience than I and so I must be wrong (even though I had nothing to do with the government's ruling and was simply trying to explain it to them).  The struggle went on for weeks until my boss asked me to write a summary of the case and the tax laws behind it. She then presented my write-up to another senior tax preparer who told her that my analysis was correct and that the original tax preparer and the parents were wrong. The parents had often complained loudly during this exercise that I was rude and uncooperative.

 I had an soft spot for single moms. (One was even relaxed enough with me to pop out a breast and feed her baby while we worked on her return.) Despite many people's perceptions, most of the ones I encountered were struggling in very difficult circumstances to protect and to raise their children as best they could. How or why they were in the situation they were in was irrelevant: they were living in a reality of here and now, not in the fantasies of some self-righteous and moralizing person who never had to make a difficult decision in their life. The problem, though, that some presented me with, was the involvement of a spouse—common law or otherwise. The thing is, under tax law, one is allowed to claim one dependent with a deduction equivalent to the personal deduction (the amount the government determines that you are allowed to earn tax free before any other deductions are considered. It is currently set at about $11,000.) Normally, the "dependent" is one's spouse—and anything that they earn is deducted from the spousal deduction. So, a spouse earning more than $11,000 is neutral as far as your own taxable income is concerned.

 Now, in the situation where there is no spouse, the dependent can be anyone else in your immediate family (the law is quite specific about the ages and relationships allowed). In most cases this is a child—and usually a child with no income. For a single parent, then, this is a considerable tax saving. The $11,000 deduction usually translates into a refund of about $2,000.  So, when faced with a young couple and child who would tell me with a straight face that they were "just friends"—even when the child was referring to the male as "Daddy"—I would have to question fairly closely and give them a subtle warning about the government cross-checking their addresses, which is something is does fairly often. I hated that part because I was treading on very sensitive ground. The question really boiled down to the sexual relationship between the couple—and I did not want to know. It meant so much money to them that they probably thought the "white lie" was worth it; while my job was to protect them from possible prosecution.

I was much happier when the mother and child were alone so that I didn't have to ask anything more personal than "Are you living with anyone?" For the most part I was happy that the mother received a healthy cheque to buy her child some warm clothing or purchase some other form of relief from the daily indignities of poverty. I was not happy when a mother would remark to her friend, "Good, now I can buy that I-pod." (I made it a habit, when doing returns for couples, to always hand any refund cheques to the woman. If they asked why, my standard answer was: "A woman knows what her family needs; a man just knows what he wants." Sometimes the male would get angry—and there'd be another call to my boss about how rude and uncooperative I was. Almost every women smiled knowingly at my remark.)

 One busy night a man arrived with his 16-year-old daughter, newborn on her lap. I prepared the girl's return while the father beamed happily. Her refund was only a token $150 sales tax credit for her and the baby. After all, she was not, and never had been, employed, and so there was nothing to base any other tax credits or deductions on. An hour or so after they left the father phoned to complain that I had cheated them out of a couple of thousand dollars. He said he had checked around and found out that there was an automatic tax refund for women with children and every woman he knew had received it. What kind of con game was I trying to pull? I tried to politely explain that there was no "automatic tax refund" and, in any case, his daughter had no income to base any refunds on. Sigh! Another complaint about how rude and uncooperative I was.

 And yes, I got more than my share of complaints about how someone's friend, in precisely the same income tax situation, had received a refund of a couple of thousand dollars from some other tax preparer, yet I had given her only a hundred or so. There is no answer for that one because it would violate client confidentiality to check out someone else's return to confirm or deny the claim. I could review the client's return and confirm that it had been prepared correctly and I could suggest they take it to some other tax preparer for review, but such situations usually meant another note about how rude and uncooperative I was in my boss's notebook.

 I had more than one client inform me indignantly that "the client is always right." In most cases, nothing could be further from the truth. The reason they were paying me to prepare their returns, instead of doing them themselves, was that I knew what needed to be done,  and what was acceptable and what wasn't. Seems a bit counterproductive to argue with the guy you are paying about whether or not you can deduct the cost of off-the-shelf medications. If you could, I would be the first to point it out as I always tried to give my clients the largest refund allowable under the law. After all, it was their money to begin with and they were entitled to every dime I could get for them. That was also part of my job description. But, telling people that they could not deduct $10 for a bottle of aspirin, even though they really needed it and their doctor said it was a good idea, was grounds for a call about how rude and uncooperative I was.

 But, what do you do when the client is insisting that you are dead? Seriously. That really happened to me. A senior tax preparer I had admired died suddenly the season before. A couple stared at me after they sat down in my cubicle and told me that they had heard I was dead. I denied it, but they persisted, "No. We heard it. People said that the old guy died." I told them that there was more than one old guy and that they were thinking of someone else. No, it was you, they insisted. Well, I'm pretty sure that I didn't die. They stayed to prepare their returns, but did not seem convinced. I really don't know, but, I would not be surprised to learn that another call about how rude and uncooperative I was made that evening.