12 years later and still nothing has been done to address the special diet allowance approval issue.

 By Kendall Worth

12 years since 2012/2013 and now we are into a provincial election. In 2012/2013  a high percentage of Nova Scotian Income Assistance recipients experienced cut backs in their Special Diet Allowances.  

I invite you to to see this article here published in the . This article, from Halifax Media Coop on October 31st 2014, pin-points when the massive cuts to special diet allowances started happening. In this article,  I give the general scoop  on various systematic problems and bureaucratic nonsense happening within the Department of Community Services at the same time as Income Assistance recipients were experiencing these cutbacks. 

Nothing was done to address what was, and is still, happening with Special Diet Allowances. To this day, nothing has ever been changed in what,  in 2012/2013, was Section 6.3.3 of the Employment Support and Income Assistance Policy Manual. Now, you will find the Special Diet Chart in Section 8.3.3 of the ESIA policy Manual.  

 I provide an example, here,  of the kind of thing Income Assistance Recipients have to resort to, because they are not able to eat the special diets that they are prescribed.

 

 

For more on what was happening in 2012 and 2013, which has never, to this day, been resolved see http://halifax.mediacoop.ca/story/hoping-miracle/33737.html  I myself was affected by what was happening within Community Services at the time. However unlike others who lost their special diet allowances I personally went to the extreme to fight what I lost. As this article here shows I took my fight all the way to the supreme court and lost. And this article here shows I took my battle as far as  I could go.

However as you can tell if you click on  this link even during the Employment Support and Income Assitance Transformation which was started by the previous Liberal government when they got elected in 2013,  and who stayed in power till 2021. For more on the ESIA Transformation see here. Also People who are part of the community I advocate for through my BLOG had very high expectation for people who lost their special diet allowances in 2012/2013, for those allowances to get restored through the ESIA Transformation, especially after the restoring of these allowances got denied through the ESIA appeal hearings when they appealed the original decisions made by their Income Assistance Caseworkers and after my own case got thrown out of Supreme Court.    

This whole issue around the Bureaucratic nonsense and systemic problems associated with  approval for Special Diet Allowances never did get addressed. Some in my community, have recently been saying that this could have happened when  as explained in this BLOG post here   the income assistance rates were tied to inflation. Some suggest that the same could have happened to Special Diet Allowances. However,  everyone agrees that not only do the special diet allowance need to increase but the system of getting approved for special allowances needs to change.  

For more on building the case of why the system of approval through your caseworker, for a special diet allowance, needs to change, I invite you to see this post where I interview a dietitian on the Special Diet Allowances and she had a lot to say about why the rules around special diet allowance approval needs to change.  

Something else I advocate for through my blog,  is solutions for Social Isolation. In my interview with the dietitian, Jen Brady, she also makes points about how having more money to spend on food can help decrease feelings of Social Isolation. However when you look at special diet allowance chart which you will find in Section 8.3.3 on Pages 138, 139 and 140 of the ESIA policy manual, you will see that the whole system of special diets is not set up to make an Income Assistance Caseworker see the need for a Special Diet allowance that way.  

Anyway I put a lot of thought into wanting to report on this special diet issue again,  because to this day I still hear about people on Income Assistance who are members of my community getting denied special diet allowances,  even after having appropriate notes from their doctors. Increasing the Special Allowance to inflation is only one piece of the puzzle of what needs to happen with Special Diets. What else needs to happen is the current chart in Section 8.3.3  needs to be Re-Created so an Income Assistance and their Doctors can have more leeway to discuss the dietary needs of the client.

In addition to raising the special diet allowances to inflation, more money needs to be added to the special diet allowance amounts to accommodate the Income Assistance Recipients dietary needs. 

 So lets make this an election issue now that we are in a Provincial Elation.