Thank you very much to you and the committee for having me here today, and good day to all the guests.
I've come to talk a little bit about our disability income programs in Canada. First of all, I'll say that I have 28 years of experience working in government as a benefit designer and a policy analyst. I've spent the last 12 years outside of government working for various organizations, mostly in the area of community-based research and policy analysis.
I want to start by saying that Canada, in its different ways, shapes, and forms, spends $33 billion in disability benefits for approximately two million Canadians.
It's very Canadian of us, I think, that we have 10 different disability income systems. I'll just briefly name them: workers' compensation; auto insurance, going to accident victims with persons with disabilities; our veterans programs for our veterans with disabilities; the Canada Pension Plan disability component; the employment insurance sickness component; the disability tax credit; the registered disability savings plan; social assistance, which has programs that differ in each province; private disability income; and 10th, the disability component of the working income tax benefit. Those programs spend $33 billion.
There are two important items that you should know about those. Only two of those programs provide ongoing full-time benefits to the age of 65, the CPP disability program and social assistance. The other programs provide time-limited benefits. You should also know that six of those disability income systems only provide benefits based on someone's already having worked; for example, workers' compensation, veterans programs, CPPD, EI, etc.
The important point in taking this inventory of these programs is that they all have different purposes. In many ways I would characterize them as 10 cats in a bag. They have different philosophies; they came in at different times.
I was especially interested in Mark Wafer's comments about the ways we used to think of people with disabilities. Many of the programs that came in to serve people with disabilities are programs that came in at a time when we did not think people with disabilities ought to work. We thought we would pay them income security to stay at home.
We no longer think this. We are very lucky to be in a society in which we all think that people with disabilities should have the opportunity to work. The same is true among people who themselves have disabilities, and governments also believe this.
Why then do we have this array of programs that interact in many ways to thwart the efforts of people with disabilities to work? The social assistance program I'm most familiar with is Ontario's. I know that for approximately 30,000 of the recipients—about 10% of the people on the program—their households have people who report earnings, yet in many ways the programs work to confiscate that income, and, therefore, thwart efforts for people to work. When they do work, they have their incomes taken away from them.
It's important to know that the footprint of the social assistance component is growing across Canada, in terms of the money it's spending, because we are seeing cuts of various sorts in the other programs. The consequence of that is that more people with disabilities are faced with social assistance being the only choice for meeting their needs.
The work that I've done, especially in community-based research, has shown that people, especially those who also live in subsidized housing, which they can afford, and are therefore often closest to an employer's workplace, for every single dollar that they earn, they will, in fact, lose at least half of the income they received from their employer, and then also receive a 30% increase in their rent. It would be difficult for any of us, I think, to be faced with the idea of losing up to 80% of every dollar that we earn simply because a program needs to claw it back in order to be affordable to the public. I think this is very short-sighted.
In terms of the work we heard about from the woman from the Federation of Students, from Meticulon, and from Mark Wafer for Tim Hortons, we are trying to get people with disabilities back into the labour force and make sure that they can earn enough, along with their income security programs.
It's very important to note that when we have this vast array of programs, all with different philosophies, all which in many cases claw back benefits, what we see is a great reluctance on the part of people with disabilities to actually move into work because they are going to have their benefits otherwise confiscated through these programs. It's important for you to know that social assistance, as a program, deducts all these other forms of income. If someone gets workers' compensation, it they get a veteran's allowance, if they get CPP disability, EI sickness, then those programs are actually deducted off their social assistance at 100%, and at the same time, then, earnings are deducted at 50%.
We have to figure out a way for the very poorest of people with disabilities to be able to have programs work together in a seamless way so that we have a system where people can move into work and be able to meet their own needs.
Thanks very much.