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After being abandoned through the pandemic, disabled people living in long-term care facilities and group homes are once again invisible to the Liberals in Ottawa’s new draft regulations.
BY KENDAL DAVID and MEGAN LINTON | September 27, 2024
The new Canada Disability Benefit is slated to roll out in July 2025. Once promising to lift hundreds of thousands of disabled Canadians out of poverty, the draft regulations reveal a limited program which advocates argue excludes many of the most marginalized and impoverished disabled people.
After being abandoned through the COVID-19 pandemic, disabled people living in residential institutions like long-term care facilities, group homes, and continuing care facilities are once again invisible in the newly written draft regulations for the Canada Disability Benefit (CDB).
In particular, the draft regulations, released in June, make no reference to the more than 100,000 disabled Canadians living in residential institutions across the country. These facilities often subject disabled residents to abject living conditions: mass-produced meals lacking in nutrition, rationing of care, frequent infectious outbreaks, and disproportionate rates of death. On top of these grave indignities, many institutionalized disabled people are forced to survive on just $5 a day.
Residential institutions continue to provide a core supply of housing for people with disabilities across Canada. In Ontario alone, about 63,000 disabled people who receive provincial social assistance payments from the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) live in institutions, according to data up to March 2019. The 14,800 people living in long-term care or group homes receive measly personal needs allowances of $149 per month from ODSP. The remaining 48,000 living in boarding homes get support from ODSP to pay their housing provider for room and board—often paid directly to landlords—and a $71 allowance to cover all other expenses.
Given the depth of poverty for institutionalized disabled people, they stand to gain a lot from receiving the otherwise inconsequential $200 a month benefit. An extra $200 can make a meaningful impact to blunt the sharp edge of isolation and the daily mundanity of institutional life by facilitating access to the internet, a personal phone line, taxi fare or bus passes, fresh fruits and vegetables, a gym membership, or a meal out with friends.
Institutionalized folks are among the poorest disabled people in Canada, and could be significantly better off with the new Benefit—if only they can access it. Currently, the regulations propose using the Disability Tax Credit (DTC) as the eligibility criteria to access the new benefit. The DTC application process is complex and burdensome, and—amongst other problems—presumes people have access to a family doctor, which over 2.5 million people in Ontario do not. The federal government has committed to fund a navigation support program to help disabled people file their taxes, and get their DTC application packages together. But it’s unclear whether the federal government either knows or cares that institutionalized people exist, and should be prioritized as a target population for these efforts. They’re not mentioned anywhere in the proposed CDB regulations, even as a target population for tax filing support.
The proposed regulations rationalize that using the DTC eligibility criteria allows the federal government to implement the CDB quickly. While the roll-out of the CDB is indeed urgent, it needs to be functional enough that the most impoverished people can access it in the first place. People living on allowances of $5 a day stand to benefit from the CDB, but they’re also among some of the least likely to bother filing taxes and jumping through the hoops of DTC’s complex—and potentially expensive—application.
It’s unsurprising that the CDB regulations ignore institutionalized disabled people given that the federal government hasn’t bothered to collect data about them since 1991. Unlike their neighbours in market or subsidized housing, disabled people in these institutional settings are excluded from the Canadian Survey on Disability. As the primary federal data source on disability, the federal government is using it to inform the design of regulations, their cost-benefit analysis, and impact modelling.
This lack of data presents an enormous challenge in the CDB's design, and will continue to be a thorn in the side of the federal government for years to come as it tries to evaluate its impact, and prove the CDB’s value to voters. But it’s not too late for the feds to take action, and to address these gaps.
If designed properly, the CDB could make meaningful impacts in the lives of the most marginalized Canadians. For it to work, and to ensure that institutionalized Canadians would receive the new CDB, the benefit eligibility criteria must include provincial social assistance recipients and those who get Canada Pension Plan-Disability. And for the benefit to actually count, the federal government needs to modernize and re-implement the institutional component of the Canadian Survey on Disability so the true impacts for all disabled people can be really understood.
Kendal David is a PhD candidate in social work at Carleton University. She’s currently studying institutionalized poverty in Ontario using policy and discourse analysis, and interviews with institutionalized folks in Ottawa.
Megan Linton is the policy lead at the Disability Justice Network of Ontario, creator of the audio documentary project Invisible Institutions, and a PhD Candidate at Carleton University.