By Lenny Devereux
The Canada Disability Benefit (CDB) is now fully operational, and the results are in: a maximum of $200 per month and over half of disabled people in Canada are excluded. Touted by Minister of Diversity, Inclusion and Persons with Disabilities Kamal Khera as a “generational national program,” the CDB fails to meet the federal government’s promise to lift disabled people out of poverty.
With the introduction of Carney’s upcoming war budget and a commitment to raise military spending to 5 percent of the country’s GDP – an eye-watering $150 billion – the most marginalized people in Canada are expected to foot the bill through ever-increasing austerity. This isn’t a policy failure; for a system that does not care to end poverty, it’s a policy success.
Provincial disability program payments are poverty wages. Taking the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) as an example, the maximum one can expect for their shelter allowance is $497, and the maximum “basic needs” allowance is $672 for a total of $1,169. The average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Toronto last year was $2,160. Even in Thunder Bay, the city with the lowest documented rental costs, a one-bedroom rents for $1,420. The CDB’s pittance of an extra $200 per month will not enable a single person dependent on ODSP to pay their rent. For those pursuing rent-geared-to-income housing as a way out, waitlists of 11 to 15 years turn housing stability into a utopian fantasy.
There are 1.5 million disabled people living in deep poverty in Canada, according to Disability Without Poverty. Statistics Canada reports that in the last four years, deep poverty has risen over 45 percent. When disabled, working age people face poverty at 1.8 times the rate of their non-disabled peers, the idea of a Canada Disability Benefit was well-positioned to address this glaring gap. However, the federal government’s inscrutable eligibility requirements stop two-thirds of them from receiving the benefit.
The betrayal was two-fold: in addition to being financially insufficient, it adds to the already existing labyrinth of bureaucracy that disabled people have to navigate in order to survive. Many ODSP recipients begin their long march to government aid waiting on Ontario Works (OW), a program designed to support able-bodied people while they search for employment, and which provides only $700 per month. One of OW’s requirements is that recipients must log all their attempts at becoming gainfully employed. Of course, many disabled people remain completely unable to work, let alone enough to earn a livable wage. If you are disabled and looking to apply to ODSP, this detour through Ontario Works is completely inappropriate and a cruel waste of time.
Compounding the bureaucratic nightmare, according to Ron Anicich of the ODSP Action Coalition, is the fact that “46 percent of people applying to ODSP are denied – that’s a lot of people with disabilities living on $700 a month.”
What happens when a disabled person’s case is denied? Anicich continues: “Some go to the Social Benefits Tribunal (SBT). More than 90 percent of the cases get overturned, and those people end up on ODSP anyway. They force people to go through a tribunal system that is backlogged and underfunded.”
The SBT takes on average three months to gather data from the disabled person and OW offices, have all parties meet before an arbiter, and make a decision. All the while, the disabled applicant is in limbo, left with the impossible tasks of stretching $700 a month to cover all their needs. The systems and programs that claim to help marginalized communities are instead enacting great and systemic financial abuse.
Finally, to be eligible for the CDB, one must first be deemed eligible for the Disability Tax Credit (DTC), one that few disabled people in Canada pursue because they do not meet the income threshold to benefit from the tax credit. In the lead-up to the CDB bill’s readings, disability advocates saw this flaw and begged the federal government not to tie the benefit to the DTC, but their pleas were ignored.
Advocates sought “proxy eligibility” through existing provincial disability programs instead, hoping to lower the administrative burden on an already marginalized and disempowered population. Purposefully adding more red tape to disability income disbursement demonstrates Carney’s aim to pillage social security to fund a war budget.
Does reading all of that make you tired? Imagine trying to navigate that with an intellectual disability, or chronic fatigue, or a disabling workplace injury that leaves you unable to sit upright for long periods of time, or an auditory processing disorder that prevents you from understanding what your caseworker is telling you on the phone, or any number of disabling conditions that prevent you from selling your labour power (at an extra-exploitative discount) to a boss.
Yet this is the reality of disability poverty: even if a livable wage existed behind the red tape, those most in need of it are systemically excluded from accessing it. The claims that Canada is home to a robust social safety net and a strong welfare state dissolve into thin air.
The “Canada Strong” budget document claims that one of our “Canadian advantages” is our “resilience” including “a strong social safety net and stable institutions.” Where is this strong social safety net? Where are the stable institutions for the most marginalized among us? Buried on page 20 of the budget is the only mention of disability or disabled peoples in the entire document: a small text bubble claiming that 465,000 Canadians “rely on” the CDB as a “vital social program” that the Carney government is protecting (and which is dwarfed next to the 7.5 million of the Old Age Security Program and Canada Child Benefit’s 6 million). How can it be said that anyone “relies on” a payment that wouldn’t even pay the groceries?
On the other hand, how many Canadians are lifted out of poverty by a military funded to the tune of $150 billion?
It sounds like the set-up to a bad joke, but this is where Carney’s austerity is taking us. The coffers of the Canadian public have always been plundered by capitalists in government to fund war and enrich themselves, leaving pennies for social programs. The 2025-26 federal budget is only the latest proposal outlining this theft: $150 billion for militarism, $110 billion for corporate subsidies, and a $200 pittance tossed to disabled workers to pacify dissent.
But it does not have to be this way.
Disabled workers cannot afford to wait. Nor can the working class afford to be bystanders while the capitalist government declares war on its most vulnerable. The fight for a livable income is not a plea for reform but a front in the class war. The CDB debacle proves yet again that capitalism cannot and will not provide a dignified life. The same hands that cut disability support also slash wages and pensions, connecting the fight of disabled workers to that of the labour movement. We must therefore fight for “a guaranteed livable income for all.”
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