| Who bankrolls polygamist way of life? Social assistance rules encourage sect's men to keep multiple wives | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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By Daphne Bramham Vancouver Sun | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Most families struggle just to make ends meet, so it's hard to imagine how people like Winston Blackmore, Jim Oler and the other men in Bountiful with multiple wives and dozens of children manage.
But these polygamists do manage -- with a little help from taxpayers. Blackmore, the former bishop of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and leader of a new breakaway faction, has 26 wives and close to 100 children living in several different homes in Bountiful and around Creston. Oler, who replaced Blackmore as bishop, has at least five wives and close to 20 children. The fundamentalists believe a man must have three wives to be invited into God's celestial kingdom and as many children as possible. Women are encouraged to have a child every 15 months and Bountiful women agree that most mothers have eight children or more. These fundamentalists have no connection to the mainstream Mormon church, which banned polygamy in 1890. Just how much help the polygamists get from taxpayers in the form of child tax benefits, GST credits and social assistance is impossible to find out because of government privacy laws. But last week at the polygamy summit in Creston, Marlene Palmer -- Blackmore's sister and his accountant -- tried to dispel what she called the myth that the community soaks up buckets of taxpayers' money. She even carped that the taxman isn't fair to polygamists because men are only allowed to claim a deduction for one wife each on their income tax forms. Quoting an unnamed spokesman in the provincial human resources ministry, Palmer said, "We are classified as a commune and so we don't even qualify for social assistance." If that's true, nobody in the Creston/Cranbrook ministry office has talked to Victoria lately. When asked about communes having special status, the ministry's communications director Richard Chambers said emphatically, "No, that is not true." Social assistance or welfare is based solely on family income and assets. It doesn't matter how you live or whom you live with. However, some of the women in larger families don't share the same home as their husband and that would mean they don't have to claim his income. Palmer said last week she doesn't know of a single Bountiful family receiving social assistance. Whether that's true is impossible to verify. There are women who work. Teachers' aides at the two schools in Bountiful earn about $30,000 a year. The three midwives earn considerably more than that and a few women work at Creston's Extra Foods store or babysit for their sister-wives. But for those who need help, there is always the government. Using the province's income assistance estimator (www.iaestimator.gov.bc.ca), you can get some some idea of how much a woman might get . . . if she applied. Using a conservative estimate of five children under 19 (the average mother has eight children), minimal housing and utilities costs of $585 a month, a mother with no income and no assets would be eligible for just under $898 a month or $10,771 a year. That's a meagre amount for any family of six. But mothers also qualify for the child tax benefit. Palmer suggested that polygamous families don't get as much child tax benefit as families with only two parents because their incomes are too high. But Revenue Canada doesn't really care about marital status or living arrangements either. It calculates the child tax benefit and GST credit to children's primary caregivers based on both parents' incomes only if they live together in the same home and are fully involved with the care and nurturing of the child. So even if all the women do readily admit to the government who their husbands are and what they earn, some would still be able to claim the benefit as a single parent, since they don't live with their spouses. I ran a couple of scenarios on a Bountiful family using Revenue Canada's child tax benefit calculator (www.cra-arc.gc.ca). The family comprises three wives with five children each and a father who earns $50,000 a year, which is a midpoint between the regional and provincial median incomes. For a mother of five with no income of her own, the maximum she could get is $13,738 a year. Coupled with the maximum social assistance, that would bring her annual income to $24,509 a year. The family of six wouldn't live extravagantly on that, but few Bountiful women live alone with their children. Most live with some of their sister-wives -- with or without -- their shared husband. As the chart below details, depending on how a woman defines herself in relationship to her "husband," a three-wife, 15-child family could get anywhere from $15,396 a year to just under $58,373 a year in child benefits and GST credits. If none of the mothers worked or lived with the father, the maximum this make-believe family could get is $84,676 a year when you add in the social assistance benefits. This is not to suggest that these children and their mothers should be excluded from getting the same social supports as others. But it makes you wonder whether these men would be so eager to have children if they really had to support them all. And you can't help but wonder whether whoever wrote the rules ever envisaged families so large that all the wives and children couldn't fit under a single roof. BOUNTIFUL'S BOUNTY: Governments won't say how much money flows into Bountiful. But using some conservative estimates and government website calculators, here are some examples of what some of Bountiful's mothers are entitled to.
dbramham@png.canwest.com | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Vancouver Sun Originally published Friday, April 29, 2005 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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