Lori Watkins is deciding between eating or heating this winter. The 53-year-old grandmother can’t afford to do both.
She’s struggling to care for her special-needs granddaughter, Alison, who lives with her. Alison was born with craniosynastosis, a condition causing the bones in the skull fuse to together prematurely. She also has attention deficit disorder and is developmentally delayed.
While the government covers the costs of medication and travel to the pediatrician, Watkins’ monthly $506 social assistance check is barely enough to put food on the table. Fresh fruit and vegetables are a treat, saved for Alison only.
“I’ll go hungry before she will — and I have,” she says.
She could have handed Alison over to the government, and Community Services would have paid a foster family to take over. But Watkins says that was never an option.
“I’m not having a stranger raising her.”
Carvell Gray and his wife Joyce, who are caring for their granddaughter Jesselyn, say they’re slowly going broke. The Digby couple, both 69 and retired, have almost run through their RRSPs.
Gray says he doesn’t want to apply for welfare. He wouldn’t qualify anyway, because he owns his own home.
“What I want is grandparental assistance.”
Lucas Wide, Community Services spokesman, says there’s nothing available like that.
“What’s available now is what’s available to any person who is looking after children within a family like that,” he says.
“We do our best to keep (children) in families.”
Wide says other family members can also take in children, and can apply for income assistance “just like any other … person would apply who is on a fixed income.”
There are about 900 Nova Scotia children living with at least one grandparent.
Harold Theriault, MLA for Digby-Annapolis Valley, says if the province helped grandparents, fewer children would be in provincial care because more grandparents could afford to take them in.
Last spring he proposed the Guardianship Act, a bill to grant support for low-income grandparents. It never got off the ground. He plans to re-introduce it in this fall’s legislature sitting.
