The Ontario government has promised that cheques will start going out in November to the 19,000 people who were left impoverished by backlogs in the Ontario Disability Support Plan (ODSP). In May, the Ontario Ombudsman released a scathing report called Losing the Waiting Game (in PDF) that accused the ministry of leaving thousands of disabled people without enough money to pay their bills because of the "asinine application" of rules. It was taking the ministry an average of eight months to process applicants for disability support payments but according to a rule implemented in 1998, the government would pay only four months of retroactive benefits. This meant that people who were entitled to benefits were not receiving them due to the backlog. The four month rule was suspended the day the Ombudsman's report was released. For more information on the ODSP payments, see the CBC story: "Ontario's disabled to get $25M".