bfcanada The Canada Disability Benefit: An Unjust Reality That Needs Addressing
By Donna J. Jodhan
August 2, 2024
Over the next six years, $6.1 billion will be allocated to create the Canada Disability Benefit (CDB) to provide support to Canadians with disabilities.
While I don’t claim to have all the answers to what constitutes justice, I believe I can recognize glaring injustices when I see them.
Consider, for instance, the conditions facing people with disabilities in Canada. Poverty is alarmingly prevalent among Canadians experiencing disability, with an estimated 10.6 percent of people with disabilities over 16—or almost one million people—having faced poverty in 2021. This rate is twice that of Canadians without disabilities.
For many such individuals, paying next month’s rent is never a guarantee, nor is having enough food this month. ‘Luxuries,’ like a cup of coffee, a night out at the movies, or buying a book, are commonly, and entirely, out of the question.
This is not fiction; it’s a harsh reality for hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens. If you’re not someone with a disability or don’t know anyone who is, pause for a minute to consider what this means.
Politicians often express shock over the plight of our disabled neighbors, but really the situation is not surprising. It’s a logical and entirely predictable outcome of our political economy. The market economy is structured to distribute income exclusively to the ‘factors of production,’ such as labor and capital.
As a consequence, individuals who neither work nor own capital receive no income from the market. To ensure all Canadians have access to a basic livelihood, a welfare state is necessary to transfer income from workers and owners to non-workers.
Since many Canadians experiencing a disability cannot work, through no choice of their own, they cannot choose, under our current economic model, to avoid poverty. The hardship faced by so many Canadians with disabilities is therefore the expected outcome of our mode of economic organization. This isn’t a shocking aberration.
Though the status quo is not surprising, it’s nevertheless deeply unjust. Everyone in our society should have access to the social and material goods required for a flourishing life, regardless of their ability to ‘succeed’ in the market.
Our elected officials fail to adequately recognize this, as consecutive governments of different parties have, for years, largely permitted the plight of disabled citizens to continue.
Despite the bleak historical record, there was a glimmer of hope in April when the Trudeau government released the 2024 federal budget. Among the initiatives, the Liberals announced their intention, after years of promising, to create a new federal program to support Canadians living with disabilities. Over the next six years, $6.1 billion will be allocated to create a Canada Disability Benefit (CDB) to provide support to Canadians with disabilities in the form of monthly checks, supplementing existing provincial programs.
However, the allocated funding will provide a maximum benefit of only $2,400 per year to eligible individuals—a mere $6 a day. Previous analysis conducted by the CSA Public Policy Centre has shown that to address the deepest poverty experienced by disabled Canadians, a benefit of at least $7,200 per year—or $19 per day—is required, corresponding to Canada’s poverty benchmark. Rather than “offering real hope,” experts say the new CDB will likely instead leave many “still well below the poverty line.”
Concerns have also been raised over the CDB’s application process being tied to a professional health assessment. This could potentially cost hundreds of dollars and prevent many from applying. If individuals successfully apply, they won’t receive benefits until at least June 2025, five years after the government initially promised to help in the throne speech of 2020. One man from London, Ontario, currently receiving support from the Ontario Disability Support Program, called it something which will “not do anything to help anybody,” another called it a “slap in the face.”
Since the new benefit will, according to experts, likely be insufficient to address the poverty faced by Canadians with disabilities, the program therefore actively permits serious societal injustice. Coming as the conclusion of a years-long process promising, to some of our society’s most marginalized, that adequate help was on the way, it is particularly cruel.
The Prime Minister, and the relevant ministers involved, ought to be ashamed of themselves. Our elected leaders are showing that as a society we still don’t care about our disabled neighbors, and it’s just tragic.
The government’s attempts at self-defense have been pitiful. Pressed on these points, Crown ministers argue—after first equivocating, in typical Liberal fashion, on how there’s ‘more work to do’—that while the new benefit is inadequate, it can only be expanded once provinces guarantee they won’t claw it back as it’s meant to supplement existing provincial programs.
The claim, implicit in this defense—though not explicitly said—is that ensuring new federal programs adhere to proper principles of federal-provincial jurisdiction is more important, morally speaking, than immediately ending the suffering of disabled Canadians.
Made explicit, few would accept this: ensuring the most disadvantaged in our society don’t suffer is of greater importance than petty jurisdictional squabbles. Consequently, the clear moral onus on the government is to make the CDB large enough to raise recipients out of poverty even if provinces claw back their own programs entirely, and to negotiate with provinces to shift funding responsibilities afterward if necessary.
No doubt, in addition to jurisdictional concerns, the government’s also worried that making the CDB truly effective would be too expensive. But if the Liberals avoided making the benefit adequately sized to keep costs down, they implicitly regard the ability of Canadians with disabilities to live with dignity as not worth, morally speaking, the price it would cost to bring that dignity about.
This, too, is an indefensible position, given the common and plausible intuition that justice requires our national income to be distributed in a manner respecting the dignity of all citizens. By implication, justice plausibly demands the government ensure all are able to live with dignity, whatever that may economically ‘cost.’
At the very least, I hope even readers who disagree with my views of justice will join me in expecting and demanding honesty and clarity from our government.
Instead of being satisfied with equivocations, we ought to demand the Liberals publicly defend the true arguments motivating their decisions. If they truly think either jurisdictional concerns or concerns of cost can justify the continued suffering of Canadians experiencing disability, they should at least have the courage to stand up and make that argument explicitly.
If the government refuses to do right by our disabled neighbors—when doing so is well within its power—then at the very least, I think we are all owed a real explanation as to why.
Image: An empty conference room with an empty meeting table. I thought it did a good job of speaking to the uselessness of advisory committees if they’re not given real power to enact change, like the chairs might as well all be empty otherwise. Alternatively, it can be seen as an invitation to come fill the empty seats!
To learn more about me as an award-winning sight loss coach and advocate, visit http://www.donnajodhan.com.