Next stage of the Canada Disability Benefit journey should be a sprint, not a marathon 

The Canada Disability Benefit Act is now law, and this is progress worth celebrating. As one stage of the journey ends, another begins.

This next stage should be a sprint, not a marathon.

In the decades leading up to the Canada Disability Benefit, the disability sector rightly argued that people living with disabilities urgently needed more financial support from our governments to meet their basic needs. People living with disabilities must contend with higher costs of living and multiple barriers to employment. Social assistance is woefully inadequate and has been for a generation. People with disabilities live in poverty at disproportionate rates, in no small part because as a society we have failed to honour their right to an adequate standard of living.

Yet, the current implementation plan targets the end of 2024, at the earliest. Why should we wait a year and a half (or more) to get the Canada Disability Benefit up and running?

We should be aiming to get the regulations settled and money allocated in the 2024 federal budget, which we can expect by early spring.

Our federal government has demonstrated that it can work at speed. For example, at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, it responded swiftly and effectively with the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) and other types of financial supports to ensure that people could forego wages to stay at home. The pandemic caught nearly everyone by surprise, and the government had very little time to plan its immediate response. Despite this, by and large, CERB worked. People had a fighting chance to pay for rent and groceries while staying home to avoid spreading illness. The federal government made a decision to act urgently and put resources behind it.

In contrast, the state of poverty for people with disabilities is well established, and we’ve been working towards the Canada Disability Benefit for a long time. The government and the disability sector have put ample thought, consideration, and discussion into what it might look like. What we need now is similar to the pandemic response: urgent political will and the resources to support it.

In passing the Canada Disability Benefit Act, the federal government committed to a co-creation process to design the regulations that will guide how the benefit works. This is good and necessary. Now, the government, people with disabilities, and the disability sector need to get the process going, quickly. They need to figure out questions of eligibility criteria, benefit amount and distribution, and how it will interact with other disability programs, among other things. These are complicated questions that must be addressed thoughtfully for the benefit to have the greatest impact on people’s lives. But these are not questions that should take a year and a half to tackle.

This is not to say that speed should compromise co-creation. Both are necessary. The problem has been defined and a policy tool has already been chosen. The government has said that it will not use the same old “consultation” methods that have not worked in the past. At this point, the co-creation process can use what we already know about effective rights-based participation processes. Given the long roots that many grassroots groups and organizations have in disability communities, we believe this can be done swiftly and thoughtfully.

This is an opportunity for all parties to demonstrate how co-creation will enhance the work, rather than delay it or make it too onerous to continue in the future. It is also a compelling reminder of why cultivating relationships between governments and people should be an ongoing effort. The Canada Disability Benefit Act is the result of long conversations between the government and the disability sector. They are in a good position to enter this next phase in short order; they are not starting from scratch.

We see no good reason to keep the intended recipients of this new benefit hanging on any longer. Accelerating the process is just and doable.