Bad Advice'll Do Ya In Every Time

"They indicated to me they wanted me to pay it back for restitution, but the money's all gone so I filed bankruptcy." David Ellwood Butler

That solves that little problem, then. Declaring bankruptcy can be so useful. Amazing that anyone pays off their debts, considering the option of bankruptcy remains a potential life-saver, as it were.
Sixty-five year-old David Butler now collects a pension. Drawing from a resource funded by taxpayer dollars. In a continuum that he began on the death of his father, who died at a ripe age in 1997, retired from the public service.

He was 92 at the time of death, a retired bookkeeper with an only child, then in ill health and living in a nursing home. And his son had legal power of attorney. When they last saw one another, just before the elder Butler's death at age 92, the son asked his father for a loan. It's not known whether he received the loan, but upon his father's death and for seven years following the elder Butler's demise, his son cashed his father's pension cheques, deposited in a joint CIBC bank account.

The 90 cheques amounted to a total of $114,866.63, spent injudiciously, hedonistically, pleasurably, on strip clubs in Ottawa. He did enjoy those strip clubs. And he was convinced that he was highly popular with the strippers, who appreciated his wit and his poetaster's scribbles waxing eloquent about their physical attributes. That was the good life. His wife of many years' married life had left him and he was free to enjoy himself unencumbered by the disfavour of a mature woman.

It was around the time when his father would have turned the century mark that the Canada Pension office thought to send a letter to CIBC. Discovering that the bank had never been notified that the elder Butler had died. When CIBC froze the account, David Butler contacted the bank to complain that his account had been frozen. And then it took a full two years before the RCMP to enter the picture. Thus ending a somewhat ideal lifestyle for an emotionally immature adult.

Mr. Butler gave his side of the story as a complete innocent who had been wronged, if the authorities suspected him of anything so remotely dastardly as availing himself of taxpayer funds he was not entitled to. Try these reasonable impressions for entitlement on for size:

1. He thought the money was part of a 'trust fund' in his name;
   
2. and when he finally understood he was defrauding the public he had no idea how to 'get out of it'.
3. He offered to pay the money back assuming his father's estate lawyer had informed the pension office of the death.
4. And also: "Given that my mother was also dead and I was an only child, I assumed that the subsequent payments were either child benefits or survivor benefits..."

And he's a survivor. It is sad, however, that he can no longer attend his favourite strip clubs four times a week, known by the sobriquet of "The Observer Poet"; even the vanity plate of his Ford Focus advertised his poetic penchant, reading "TOP". Seated at the clubs on "perverts' row" - the stage edge where dancers disrobe, Mr. Butler wrote his poems dedicated to the dancers and received their praise in return. "The girls loved my poems."

Alas, no longer publicly underwritten, on his far more meager pension Mr. Butler no longer orders champagne, no longer frequents his favourite strip joints other than occasionally, and takes advantage of the time where the free supper is available to him. And of the worldly goods left to him on his father's death, as an only child? The furnished bungalow, stocks, cash and a valuable stamp collection?

"The money's all gone." He'd been the victim of "some bad advice, along the way". Doesn't life truly suck?