By Ron Anicich
The life of a disability benefit recipient is a life of legislated poverty.
We are forced to survive on $1300 a month. It all goes to pay our exorbitant rents and utilities and maybe food. Maybe medical expenses. Maybe transportation. Definitely nothing else. Frankly, many of us can rarely afford to leave our homes. It makes organizing for disability justice a real challenge because many people in our community can’t even afford the transit fare to get to meetings, events or actions.
In Ontario, seventy percent of Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) recipients are living in unaffordable private market rentals. Even accommodation that the government has the audacity to call “affordable” is completely out of our reach. And despite this, 30 percent of tenants in Ontario are social assistance recipients. It is beyond challenging to pay for a $2500 average market rental when your shelter allowance is $556 a month.
The fact is, in this province and across this country social assistance recipients are overrepresented in poverty. We are overrepresented as food bank clients. The situation is so bad that in 2022 many of the 13,000 Canadians who chose to end their lives by Medical Assistance In Dying (MAID) were poor or homeless or veterans or people with disabilities. A National Post poll last year told us that nearly a third of Canadians thought that MAID should be prescribed for poverty and homelessness. We know that food banks and programs like MAID are now being used as a replacement for adequate social assistance.
So three years ago, when the government proposed a Canada Disability Benefit that would lift one and a half million Canadians with disabilities out of poverty, we became very hopeful that we would see significant change in our lives. When the bill to create the benefit was passed unanimously in parliament with the support of all parties, we began to see a light at the end of our tunnel.
Sadly, the benefit that Chrystia Freeland announced in her recent federal budget speech left Canadians with disabilities with absolutely no doubt that the promises made by the government would not be fulfilled. The Canada Disability Benefit will not lift a single person with disabilities out of poverty. Not a single one of us.
And even if the amounts were adequate, there is still a serious problem with the eligibility criteria. The government has chosen to use the disability tax credit to determine eligibility. They say this is the fastest way to deliver the benefit but if you ask me, it is the fastest way to fail to meet the objectives of the benefit. Almost no social assistance recipients have applied for the tax credit because it favours people who have income from employment, which most ODSP recipients – ninety percent, in fact – do not have.
So again, like with the new federal pharmacare and dental care programs, the Canada Disability Benefit simply will not reach many of the people who need it the most.
It is really a question of priorities. The Canada Disability Benefit was allocated $6 billion over four years. Despite the fact that the benefit was announced a year before the conflict in the Ukraine began, the federal government has already provided over $8 billion dollars in military assistance to the Zelenskyy regime. On top of that, the latest federal budget included over $8 billion in new military spending.
The reality is that our government would rather spend our tax dollars on killing people overseas than keeping people in Canada alive. And don’t get me started on the corporate welfare system which guarantees foreign corporations countless billions of our tax dollars while excluding people in Canada who continue to live more and more difficult lives.
It is almost as if we can’t trust politicians who give standing ovations to a Nazi.
But a better world is possible. We can make our world better by coming together and speaking out. By letting the powers that be know that we are still out here fighting, and we aren’t going anywhere.
But mostly, we need to stop voting for people and parties that do not represent our interests. And this is true at every level of government. One thing that I am most sure of is that a government that is not responsive to the needs of its people simply cannot and should not survive.
It might take a lot of effort, and it might take a change in the way we all think about government, but we will continue to fight for the things that improve our lives. Disability advocates will continue to demand change, and we will continue our fight until people with disabilities no longer have to live in the extreme poverty that they do today.
And we will win.
[Ron Anicich is an ODSP recipient and a member of the ODSP Action Coalition]
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