Just Me and IT.

 Art's funeral is over and I am with my Mom back in Canada for however long it takes. I'm not holding out any hope for long term residence here based on past attempts... but you never know.

This is Calgary where my brother Mark and sister-in-law Sherrilyn's HUGE family enjoys tobogganing from time to time. It's just a small hill at the school at the end of the road where they live. Because of that I was pretty certain I could participate injury free.

I didn't go over the jump. I didn't hit any of those trees. I didn't crank my back in any uncomfortable direction although I felt every bump as I went over it. I actually came off the hill unscathed...

... until we took a shortcut through a neighbor's back yard. There was a tree in front of the fence door and because I had my hoodie hood up a branch from that tree seemed to jump right out at me and scratched my face! My glasses came off and you know those oooohs and aaaahs people make when old, feeble folks slip on ice or fall down for some other reason in lieu of laughter? Those sounds were made.

But who cares? Look at us! We were having fun! That's my niece Elanor wearing the hat I got her for Christmas last year. Isn't she cute? Their whole family is cute. I had a lot of fun staying with them. Sherrilyn's dad George was over and we played Euchre every night. It's an Ontario thing. 

During the day we played games too. One day Gwennie decided to hide at bed time. Everybody was searching the house for her until I checked the washing machine. There she was, squeaky clean and dizzy. Hah, no, just kidding. It was latched somehow, but it wasn't washing.

I decided to get some steps one day and I walked down the street to the 7-11. I planned to get some chicken wings and some munchies for Euchre later that night. I had just started out when I heard pitter pat pitter pat pitter pat getting louder and louder behind me. It was G-dawg (Gwennie) coming on the walk with me dressed in her red and black plaid onesie PJ's, gloves and boots. Luckily the jammies had a hood so she didn't get too cold. About half way there I asked if she'd told anyone she was coming with. "No," she replied. So I called Mark and told him she was with me and nobody needed to check the washing machine.

I didn't say that but I wish I had. 

Despite the sad circumstances, Art's funeral turned out to be a largely positive experience... although you might not know it from the pics. What are you supposed to do? Smile? Cry? Frown? I wasn't sure but I hadn't planned on looking ANGRY! It just worked out that way I guess. 

I know, I know, the spellings are different. I am happy to remember the names. I'll work on the spellings later. 

Andy is from Victoria. His twin boys (30 years old now) Tyler and Dylan, and his better half Linda did not make the trip with him. Jeff, who lives in Calgary, had to stay home too but it's the most people from my family we've had in a photo in... maybe ever. 

I'm not even gonna take a stab at ages. You can guess.

We had a nice little weekend. We all did some catching up; we at lots of junky food; played with the kids; Andy and I went fishing, and we did a bit of preparation for Mom's future life without her husband of 25 years. Art was a wonderful man and we'll all miss him but he took very good care of my Mom and I am sure she will miss him most. I'm going to stay with her for a while and, as much as I can, ease her grief and transition to Calgary where most of her family now live. If you have ever read this blog you might be wondering why she might put herself in such a precarious position and, suck a bag of dicks but you'd be right. 

Andy had just left and for the first time Mom and I were alone in her and Art's house to start our adventure together. And start auspiciously it did NOT. Well what did you expect from this blog? I went downstairs to go to the bathroom and the toilet was clogged. I got a plunger and plunged until I was getting fountains of water in the shower beside the toilet every time I plunged. Mom flushed all the toilets upstairs and ran the sinks but everything was going straight into the shower. We had to bail poopy water out of the shower and throw it on the front lawn. It was about 1 AM by the time we had determined that we were not going to fix this problem so we waited till morning to make some calls. Long story short, we set up a bucket and a lid in the back shed until the next morning when Shirley the next-door neighbor allowed us to use her basement facilities until ours were fixed. Luckily the plumber came next morning at 7:30 and drilled out the clog. When I say "drilled" I mean there were tree roots coming out. Things are back to normal now but it was a shitty start to operation "Move Mom to Calgary." 

Just about everything we've done so far has been a big ordeal but that was expected. I couldn't find a decent deal for internet or hijack the neighbors' so I added data to my phone plan and am typing this on a hotspot. Hopefully the 100 gigs will meet all of our needs, particularly when I start doing my final M.Ed. course. You would not BELIEVE the hellish internet/phone gymnastics I had to go through to achieve THAT goal. It is an entire blog post itself. I had seen an ad for a position in Trail/Montrose here as an educational assistant and was unable to apply cuz you need to complete your entire Indeed or whatever middleman site it was to apply and even though all the blanks were full they kept telling me my profile was only 80% complete and I could not apply for that reason. So I called the board of education directly and was transferred to Monica with whom I left a message and it wasn't answered. So I sent another email to 4 people in the education system here and got referred to a website call "Make a Future." It didn't work. I called the help line. They filled in everything exactly as I had and it worked for them. My site still had the cancel button clickable but the "finish" button was all greyed out. So anyway, I was then in and I searched for that job and found it. BUT I couldn't apply for it cuz I had signed up as a teacher but the job was inexplicably listed under "support." Well it turns out that you need to go through all the application steps all over again to apply for a "support" job. SOoooo I did it all over again and got a greyed out "finish" button again, called support again, they filled in all the blanks identically and it worked for THEM again. So after only 6 hours of THAT, I had applied for one job.

That's just me and IT. 

Anyhoo, I gotta watch Wheel of Fortune with Mom and maybe yell out some answers on Jeopardy. We have already started packing but the first thing we tried to do was take a couple beds apart to make more room to pile and pack but the garage door was locked so we couldn't get a wrench we needed to even do THAT. But that has since been remedied and we started packing today.

So we're off to a flying start. More to come...

Everything is NOT Amazing

 Look, I've said it here before but I'll say it again: aside from any of what we call "under-the-table" transactions, the government of Canada, like the government of the US, knows about every dollar that passes through our hands. Our governments are businesses and THAT is what they make their business. They really WANT to know about the other money because they believe that too is any of their business... which it isn't. They have slowly but surely made inroads into all commerce in the country to cut our "under-the-table" transactions and make people who engage in them feel more and more criminal, but to this day it remains none of their fucking business if I want to sell you my car. However, in most cases they've managed to stick their noses into our private business. We now need 1. a bill of sale, 2. an application for transfer that must be included in the vehicle registration, 3. a vehicle permit, 4. proof of ID (not just ID). To be safe you also might want to include in the transaction an "as-is" report; a safety recent inspection; vehicle history; maintenance records; warranty documentation; and a record of every time you drove it and where you went. WHO DOES THIS??? Are we supposed to live our lives like the anally retentive busybodies at the government expect us to? No, we are REQUIRED to live our lives this way! 

As you might have guessed it's my recent tax issues that have inspired this entry. To begin with, read this article and it will give you a bit of an idea of how put upon we already are every year at tax time. They KNOW what we make and don't need us to do our taxes. Folks it's unnecessary, it's unnecessary, it's unnecessary! Return-free filing is long overdue in our countries and you can blather on about how some people's taxes are more complicated than others but the biggest reason the government has made an art out of making taxes complicated is so that we will do them. Can you think of any more diabolical subservience hoop jumping to maintain citizen control? I can't. Our taxes every year are just penance to our masters.  We still call them "government" but just think about that. I won't rehash how broken our electoral process is, you all know most of it, so you know we don't legitimately elect our leaders. Why we even still use terms of respect they don't deserve to refer to them like "governers" is probably just habit. Governors are meant to be elected. Trudeau's approval rating is about 33%. Governors are meant to be respected and elected through our respect for them. I don't know how closely approval and respect track but I can't imagine a third of Canadians actually respect that dumbass not to mention the hundreds and hundreds of other people in government who look like they govern us or the holders of the majority of Canadian funds who REALLY govern us.

You may ask the obvious question: why??? but I've posted about that too. H&R Block alone is worth over 7 billion. They spend a lot of that money lobbying our government to NOT use return-free filing that is successful and well loved in all those wonderlands we frequently read about who are not (yet) totally beholden to their currency and the people who control the largest amounts of it. Germany, Japan and the UK are mentioned as places where return-free taxation has proven to be successful. Intuit and TurboTax are also powerful lobbyists according to the article. 

The writer of the article, Marty Smith, offers a solution: just don't file for several years. He says the IRS will file for you. The CRA (Canada revenue agency) is evidently less prompt. In my recent stint overseas I went 9 years without filing and the CRA did not do the job for me. I went to H&R Block because knowing the depths of its depravity, I can't spend too much time on my yearly taxation supplication to the masters of money because adhering to the tenets of this national brainwashing revolts me. "If you don't file your taxes, you are not a good Canadian." Get thee behind me you impudent flunkey! Let me give you an illustration of the indifferent public servants who handle our taxes in Canada and the methodology they employ.

I filed sometime in late March or early April. Because the taxes for 9 separate years included benefits like sales tax, child and carbon tax rebates the money started getting deposited into my account a little at a time. I was out of the country so you might think I don't deserve any of these and you'd be right - for the child rebates. People who are temporarily overseas (like me because Canada has no good jobs for me) still have expenses they pay in Canada like bank fees, storage fees, property fees etc. I was paying money so the GST/HST which are attached to everything we buy in Canada (almost) were attached. There is a minimum rebate and I qualified for it. As for the carbon rebate, I emitted ZERO carbon in Canada so I should get that too. Anyway, H&R Block told me, to my surprise, that I qualify for that money for all nine years. I thought there was a 5 year limit but the person who did my taxes told me that was no longer true. 

I didn't receive the full amount calculated by my tax return preparer when suddenly on May 23 I received an audit letter stating that they needed some info about my residence since returning to Canada and proof of that info. They also said in the letter that they would be "withholding retroactive payments" until I did so. There was a number with that letter and I called stating that I could not provide driver's license, utility bill, or any of the other proof of my residence asked for. I also asked if they wanted my residence info for the time I was away from Canada. To my relief the lady said no. Just send the info of where I've lived since Feb '23 when I came back. So I did and I texted it to her. She said (untruthfully) that she could not receive the info thru text. I tried to send it on the website but like all Canadian gov't websites it was shit and purposely so. I couldn't send it and explained the loop I got stuck in when I tried. She said, "Then fax it to me." So I faxed the info. Done, right?

Oh no! I had just begun. The deadline was July 9th for submission of the info. On July 5 I received a letter stating that since I had not submitted the requested info I would have my account adjusted. This could require repayment of money that had already been sent to me. So I started sending emails to every online site I could find that might help. The first was the CRA website, which, as I mentioned before, is shit. They ignored my explanation that I had indeed sent the info requested and that the remainder of what my H&R Block return was calculated to be (2-3000 bucks) had still not been deposited into my account. There was another place - the office of the minister of revenue or some shyte like that to which people were prompted to send other complaints if the CRA was ghosting them. So I sent my explanation there. ANOTHER month went by so I wrote to the office of the ombudsman. I received some FISHY correspondence from a lady there named Ms. Johanne Poisson. She wouldn't give her last name at first, then wouldn't answer calls and dodged messages I left. Finally she sent a message through some user-unfriendly Canada Post private internet communication system. Eventually she too said that if I'd contacted the office of the minister of revenue there was nothing she could do to help. 

Today I had a two-hour phone call with some people at Revenue Canada named Crista, Amy, and some Indian name I did not hear respectively. I gave the usual information to confirm I was who I said I was to all three separately. Crista had the same dox I have. All the letters are on my file. So she saw my confusion but said she'd have to refer me to someone in "benefits." That was the better part of an hour. I got Amy in benefits who also had all the documents on her screen and who ALSO could not figure out what the hell had happened. She brought up what I had feared from the beginning, that I would be told that I don't get benefits like GST/HST etc. while overseas. But the letter had said, "retroactive payments." What would they be if there were no benefits? And she actually looked through and saw that I had been given some GST/HST and CCR (carbon rebate) for some of the years between 2013 and 2023. So there MUST have been payments available to me. In the end she told me that maybe the confusion arose because I had not told Revenue Canada where I was during all that time.

Let's recap. I left the country and Immigration knew. That's the government. I only told them because I had to. Since returning home I had told H&R Block and all of the various agencies where I had been. I didn't give them addresses for the overseas places but who cares? I also didn't feel like they needed me to give them my addresses in Canada because THEY ALREADY KNEW THOSE TOO. They were on my T4's. That's NOT immigration, that's CRA. Those are the papers you include in your taxes that have your pay, name and the place your worked on them. But all three people I talked to today and all the people I've been communicating with are trying to pretend like it's a big thing to find out where I'm living in Canada. If they can't wait till tax time, they can ask immigration. That's the government too.

Anyway, the Indian gal went through the usual ID crap then started telling me that I need to go to a website and fill out this and that form to let CRA know where I'm living. She also said that it was MY responsibility to do that when I was overseas. She said that I was not eligible for the benefits I received while overseas and... the news I had expected... I would probably have to pay back some of the money I had already received. 

So then she continues saying here's how we want you to fill out more forms giving us information that is none of our business and that will cost you money you've already been given...

I told her that maybe they ought to look into making this THEIR responsibility, not mine, and that maybe I don't really want to help them steal money back from me to add to the money that they were already withholding from me to extort information. Or something to that effect. Then I hung up since the phone call was almost into the third hour. 

To recap, again, I am constantly going overseas to work. I have never before provided Revenue Canada with information on where I'm living or any of that. Didn't know I had to. Don't think I SHOULD have to. Particularly since THEY KNOW. Just as well as they know all the money I'm making. Even when I'm outside of Canada. They have pension arrangements with the countries where I've taught. I pay taxes in the countries where I've taught. Return-free taxes btw. They don't need any more information from me. I probably can't give them any information about me that they don't already know anyway. Maybe the whole point of asking is to make me think that's not the case. 

So that's where things stand. I still don't know why H&R Block told me I was entitled to those benefits while I was overseas if I actually wasn't. I also don't know why the CRA actually PAID me some of those benefits if I wasn't entitled to them. Why the ghosting? Why the misinformation? Why tell me I was overdue before I was overdue? Why tell me they hadn't received information that they HAD and later admitted they HAD received? Why the colossal incompetence? And finally, why would I want to be governed by liars, cheaters, and idiots like these? Why would ANYbody?

I'm back home in Canada to get this settled and to live with my Mom while we figure out what she will do, where she will live, and how we will make that all happen now that my stepdad Art has passed on. He was a great guy and he was a wonderful husband to my Mom. So it's gotta be tough for her to figure out what she's going to do without him. But we'll get 'er done. 

The distraction of this tax clusterfuck is particularly unwelcome at this time. However, I am in the last week of my penultimate course in the M.Ed. Who knows? Maybe I'll be able to find decent employment in my own country finally and avoid tax shenanigans such as the above. But probably not. I've got some prospects already but most of them are overseas. 

Further updates as event warrant.