How should the new Canada Disability Benefit interact with existing disability supports?

The Canada Disability Benefit is an opportunity to guarantee that people with disabilities can live a life with dignity and have an adequate standard of living.

For the new Canada Disability Benefit (CDB) to meet its goal of financially supporting and reducing poverty of people with disabilities, it will need to supplement existing supports rather than causing them to be clawed back.

This policy brief analyzes how the new CDB should interact with provincial/territorial social assistance programs and the federal Canada Pension Plan disability benefit (CPP-D).

It contains three recommendations:

1. Provinces and territories should treat the Canada Disability Benefit as a fully exempt unearned income source in their social assistance regulations so existing benefits are not reduced;
2. The federal government should make sure the CDB and CPP-D supplement each other without clawbacks; and
3. Eligibility for one disability support program should mean automatic eligibility for the others (i.e., create no undue burden on recipients).