Hi there. My name is Traci Walters, and I'm national director of Independent Living Canada. With me is Amy Grumberg, who is our policy research consultant. She also helps me with my memory, as I have great memory problems.
Basically, I'm just going to summarize what we were trying to say in our paper. People with disabilities live in extreme poverty in this country. If you can imagine living without a disability in poverty, can you imagine living with a disability and needing supports, or transportation, or any type of assistive device you need to participate in society? As Marion probably knows, many of the people on the street are people with disabilities themselves.
Over the years I think a lot of people from many sectors have been saying to you that we need an anti-poverty strategy, a very comprehensive one. This needs to have a specific disability lens on it as well. The quickest way you could actually help alleviate some poverty for people with disabilities that could be done immediately is make the disability tax credit refundable. Many people in this country with disabilities live on less than $10,000 a year. The tax credit could be worth about $1,600 to people who don't have taxable incomes. You can do so much for so many people by immediately making that a refundable tax credit.
I also know there has been a framework already agreed upon by the provinces, territories, and the federal government. It's already there. This is “In Unison“, and it was created in 1988. It's a wonderful framework for how to provide disability supports in Canada and how to work as a united approach in this country. We simply need leadership, and we need leadership from the federal government to make this happen.
Secondly, I need to talk a bit about the capacity of disability organizations, or the lack of it right now. There's the Office for Disability Issues, which provides funding for the disability organizations to provide support to people—and we're talking about 4.2 million Canadians with disabilities—and none of us have seen an increase in twenty years. That's a long time to be living without a cost of living adjustment so we can at least continue to do what the government can't, and that's supporting people to participate and contribute to society.
Many people with disabilities want to work. They need the supports to do that. They can be paying taxes. They can be fairly self-sufficient. The money from the Office for Disability Issues enables organizations like ours that are run by and for people with disabilities and employ people with disabilities as well. Each year we provide supports to over 300,000 people. It's just not our issue alone, Independent Living Canada, it's all the disability organizations under the Office for Disability Issues. I'm sure governments and politicians have gotten increases over the past twenty years, but we have not. We continue to face more and more people becoming disabled. There are seniors living longer, and other people with disabilities, so it's really critical that we have the capacity. We are not a special interest group; we are a public interest group. All of you, if you live long enough, will face a disability at some point.
We call on this government to invest, because that investment, which really isn't a lot of money, enables many people to contribute to the economy, the social and fiscal economies. For example, we had $1.5 million invested at one point and we generated $35 million into the economy, and that didn't even count the people with disabilities who were now paying taxes.
I would like to thank you folks for allowing me to come here today. This is not a partisan issue; we've received plenty of support over the years from different parties. It's time that we all work together and do something, and it won't take much, to make a huge difference in this country.
Thank you very much.