AODA Alliance
Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance Update
United for a Barrier-Free Ontario for All People with Disabilities
Website: www.aodaalliance.org
Email: aodafeedback@gmail.com
Twitter: @aodaalliance
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Globe and Mail Editorial Commendably Blasts Trudeau Government for Severely Underfunding the Promised Canada Disability Benefit but Offers Solutions that are no Better
August 1, 2024
SUMMARY
The July 26, 2024 Globe and Mail included an editorial that commendably blasts the Trudeau Government for budgeting a paltry $200 per month maximum for the promised Canada Disability Benefit and for limiting it to too few of those people with disabilities who are languishing in chronic poverty in Canada. You can read that editorial below.
We agree with faults with the Canada Disability Benefit that the Globe editorial identified. We add that these problems were all hiding in plain sight when Bill C-22 was being debated in Parliament in 2022 and 2023. They were pointed out by several disability organizations, such as the AODA Alliance, that appeared at the hearings in the House of Commons and later in the Senate on this bill. These organizations called for the bill to be strengthened before it was passed.
The danger that the Canada Disability Benefit would be too small was made even more obvious when the Trudeau Government admitted at the Parliamentary hearings that it had never even calculated the costs of the Canada Disability Benefit before it brought Bill C-22 forward for debate. As if that were not enough, the Trudeau Government was unwilling to amend the bill to require that the Canada Disability Benefit be large enough to actually lift people with disabilities out of poverty – the goal for this bill that the Government itself declared.
We offer some cautions about this editorial. First, it offers two solutions, neither of which would help people with disabilities. First, the Globe editorial questions whether the Federal Government should have even introduced the Canada Disability Benefit, given its budget challenges. We strongly disagree. It would have been worse if the Trudeau Government did nothing to combat rampant poverty among people with disabilities. It would have been far better if the Government had instead lived up to its own promises about the Canada Disability Benefit by properly funding it.
Second, the Globe suggests that it would have been better if the Federal Government had instead simply transferred the funds to the provinces to contribute to provincial/territorial disability social assistance. However, doing that would risk the provinces diverting those funds elsewhere or using this to excuse any failures to ensure that provincial social assistance kept up with cost of living increases.
Third, it leaves an impression that the Trudeau Government bears the entire blame for this mess. However, some part of the blame goes to the opposition parties in Canada’s minority House of Commons that failed to successfully get enough amendments to strengthen the Canada Disability Benefit. The opposition parties also failed to effectively win amendments to the Budget to put enough money into this new much-needed social assistance program.
How You Can Help
Write or call your MP and the leaders of all the federal political parties. Press them to commit to strengthen the Canada Disability Benefit, including an expansion of who is eligible for it, and to ensure that it actually does lift all impoverished people with disabilities out of poverty. They all voted for the Canada Disability Benefit. They all recognized the need for it to lift people with disabilities out of poverty. Let’s get them to publicly say what they are now prepared to do to fix this mess.
Let us know what you try. Write us at aodafeedback@gmail.com
Learn more about the battle to strengthen the Canada Disability Benefit by visiting the AODA Alliance website’s Bill C-22 page.
MORE DETAILS
The Globe and Mail July 26, 2024
Originally posted at https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/editorials/article-when-liberal-promises-meet-fiscal-reality/#:~:text=Heading%20into%20budget%20season%20this,new%20benefit%20for%20disabled%20Canadians.
Editorial
When Liberal promises meet fiscal reality
Heading into budget season this year, the federal Liberal government was caught between two promises: keeping the deficit in line with its projections, and launching a much anticipated new benefit for disabled Canadians.
The Liberals had long sold the Canada Disability Benefit, first announced in 2020, as a measure designed to close the yawning gap between what people with disabilities receive in provincial assistance and the income they need to rise above the poverty level.
But now that the benefit is finally here and facing wilting criticism, it’s clear that it was compromised from the start by the Liberals’ budget woes, and likely never should have happened – at least in its current form.
Before the budget was tabled in April, expectations for the new federal benefit were high. The Liberals, with the help of the NDP, had pushed the Canada Disability Benefit Act through Parliament the previous summer, and had promised to reveal the details in the April budget.
The Parliamentary Budget Officer costed out three scenarios in November, 2023, based on the stated goal of closing the gap between social assistance and the official poverty threshold; it concluded that the annual maximum payment, before clawbacks based on personal income, needed to be between $14,356 and $22,701.
Disability advocates said the maximum annual amount needed to get recipients over the poverty line was in the neighbourhood of $24,000.
Those expectations, and the hope they elicited in people with disabilities, were upended when the budget came out in April. The annual maximum amount of the Canada Disability Benefit set by the Liberals was a relative pittance: $2,400.
Ottawa planned to spend $4.9-billion between then and 2029 on the benefit, according to the April budget – a disappointing amount for disabled people that reflected the realities of the government’s constrained finances.
Not only that, the government limited eligibility to people who qualify for the federal Disability Tax Credit, a measure that lowers the amount of federal taxes paid by people with long-term impairments.
Critics pointed out that the DTC is difficult to apply for, requiring an assessment by a qualified medical practitioner, and that it is only available to people who file their taxes, something that low-income people don’t always do.
Ottawa’s new benefit is going to be available to 600,000 people, even though there are 1.6-million people in Canada with severe or very severe disabilities, according to the government’s own data.
As if all that wasn’t disappointing enough, it has since emerged that Ottawa hasn’t reached agreements with every province and territory to prevent them from clawing back recipients’ social assistance – a provincial jurisdiction – for every federal dollar they receive under the new benefit.
That means the program will have zero net benefit for recipients in eight provinces and one territory, unless and until agreements are reached.
It’s a terrible disappointment for people with disabilities.
The provinces and territories are responsible for social assistance, but those supports are “largely insufficient to meet the economic demands that many persons with disabilities face in their day-to-day lives,” as Ottawa has noted.
The PBO says that existing provincial and territorial programs for people with disabilities fall short of the official poverty threshold by 40 per cent on average.
What is also known is that 50 per cent of people with severe disabilities are unemployed, according to Statistics Canada. For those with severe disabilities, the figure is 75 per cent. They need help.
But the reality of the need to stick to its deficit projections has collided head-on with the Trudeau government’s endless appetite for creating new social programs designed to turn around their electoral fortunes.
The result is a benefit that is unfit for its stated purpose, because Ottawa’s finances are stretched so tight that it simply doesn’t have the money to do a proper job of it.
A better use of those limited funds would have been to send them to the provinces as a top-up to existing benefits.
Governments should spend money in ways that help Canadians, not on half-baked branding exercises that leave some of the country’s most vulnerable people barely better off.