Financial support to keep people with disabilities housed falls short of what’s needed: advocates | CBC News

Ron Kitchen, a resident of Barrie, Ont., remembers when disability benefits were enough to get by.

But that changed in recent years after rents started to rise — far outpacing the almost $1,700 that Kitchen, who has borderline personality disorder, gets each month from the Ontario Disability Support Program.

Now, he said, he has no choice but to fast during the day so he can afford food for his two children. He’s also behind on his $2,200 monthly rent, and he can’t find work that will accommodate his disability and help support his family.

“I just personally don’t understand how I’m expected to live,” Kitchen, 37, said, adding he’s worried that the “snowball effect” from putting off bills will eventually make himself and his family homeless.

“It’s really crazy what we’re going through, and … I don’t think the public has any idea.”

Kitchen said despite public perception of social assistance being enough to make do, the financial support he receives from all levels of government — including a hydro rebate and the Canada Child Benefit, in addition to his disability payment — isn’t nearly enough to contend with soaring rents, let alone the rising cost of living.

Kitchen isn’t alone. According to the most recent federal data, about one in five people in Canada aged 15 years and over have at least one disability, with almost 17 per cent of all people living with a disability experiencing poverty. To make matters worse, people with disabilities account for 30 per cent of Canadians living in deep poverty, earning below 75 per cent of Canada’s official poverty line.

Experts say governments are not only providing an inadequate amount of affordable and accessible housing units for people with disabilities, but they’re failing their broader duties of ensuring sufficient support in the community.

“People are receiving rates that are at least a decade behind, if not more,” said Rabia Khedr, national director of advocacy group Disability Without Poverty.

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Across Canada, people on some form of disability benefit generally receive about 40 per cent of the official poverty line calculated for the community in which they live, Khedr said. The lack of annual increases to supports, in line with inflation, and the rise in the cost of living have essentially kept people with disabilities in “a cycle” of poverty that makes it hard to get ahead, she said.

And while the federal Liberal government has passed legislation for a new Canada-wide disability benefit, it still remains to be seen how much people will receive — and whether it will even come into force if another party forms the government, Khedr said.

“If you don’t have the money, you can’t have appropriate shelter, you can’t have clothing, you can’t have food to be productive and be able to keep a job,” she said. “You’re constantly in this struggle. It’s just keeping you down.”

Critics call for boost in assistance

Douglas Kwan, director of advocacy and legal services at the Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario, said people with disabilities accounted for about 60 per cent of the roughly 10,000 tenants the centre served last year. Many of them went to the province’s Landlord and Tenant Board facing eviction due to not being able to afford rent, he said.

And that’s only the case for people with disabilities who were able to find housing to begin with, he said.

“Especially in a tight housing market and in the midst of an affordable housing crisis, property owners simply won’t rent out to people with fixed incomes or with disability,” Kwan said, adding this is considered discrimination under Canadian law.

To alleviate the problem, his said, governments need to commit to boosting social assistance rates across the board, fund and build more transitional, affordable and accessible housing units, and implement rent and vacancy controls.

But Tim Aubry, a co-chair of the Canadian Housing First Network, which helps communities across Canada implement programs aimed at housing people experiencing homelessness, said disability supports, such as income supplements, are only part of the solution.

The rest lies in ensuring that people with disabilities can access additional services, ranging from mental health to assistance entering the workforce.

“One of the biggest feeders of homelessness, without a doubt, is the level of poverty that people with disabilities are living,” said Aubry, a psychology professor at the University of Ottawa.

“Homelessness, it’s really a reflection of the failure of our social policies.”

Governments need to be held to account: lawyer

The federal government announced a 10-year plan in 2017 aimed at “taking steps toward advancing the right to housing,” and in 2019, it officially encoded housing as a human right in Canadian law.

Despite this, Kwan said, it’s not a right that’s enforceable through law, but instead is used as a “way and an approach” to design housing programs.

But Vince Calderhead, a lawyer with Pink Larkin in Halifax who specializes in law reform for low-income Canadians, said people with disabilities should still consider holding governments legally accountable for the gap between “what they’ve promised internationally to do” and “what they’re actually doing.”

He said governments in Canada, both provincial and federal, are failing their obligations under both domestic and global covenants — such as the right to equality under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and United Nations declarations — pointing toward inadequate disability support programs and government failure in making them easy to access where people with disabilities live.

“Too often those obligations aren’t being respected when it comes to persons with disabilities, and governments have felt that they could get away with it because, essentially, we live in a largely ableist society,” Calderhead said.

“It’s time to hold governments to account.”

He pointed to a 2021 ruling by the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal, a case he helped litigate, that found the province was systemically discriminating against people with disabilities. Last month, an independent human rights board made a decision outlining a five-year resolution process.

“Advocates and people with disabilities are beginning to hold government accountable, and … those efforts have to be redoubled,” Calderhead said.