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The closest thing to a job for Tim McCooeye is taking out the trash at an Ottawa shawarma shop.

The pay isn’t great — $2 and a shawarma on days when he takes out two or three garbage bags; $3 on the days when he works “overtime.”

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The money is a top-up to the $612 a month the mentally ill, drug-addicted and hearing-impaired 52-year-old homeless man gets from his disability pension. Anything else he makes comes from begging, usually using humorous homemade signs. When that fails — or when the police take away his signs and ticket him for panhandling — he’ll steal instead.

The money, in McCooeye’s words, is spent on “crack and food and coffee and cigarettes.”

On Wednesday, McCooeye was in an unfamiliar spot in an Ottawa court, sitting in the witness chair instead of the prisoner box, explaining to a judge that he is too poor to pay the $100 victim surcharge made mandatory by the federal Conservative government last October.