In terms of studies, what I can say is there are about 6.2 million Canadians with disabilities across the country. There are about four million working-age persons with disabilities in Canada—that's between 18 and 64. There were about 917,000 working-age persons with disabilities living in poverty in Canada in 2017. We can provide the statistics that we have on those.
In terms of whether or not they would all be eligible for this benefit, that would be determined by the eligibility criteria that would be set out in the regulations. This is a really challenging population to get at, as we talked about already. Defining disability and how you look at it is a critical piece of this.
In terms of what we know about people living in poverty, we know that with the severity of disability the risk of living in poverty and the risk of living in deep poverty goes up tremendously. We will want to take that into consideration in designing a benefit to best target this population. We know that people with disabilities who are living in poverty have various sources of income, not just social assistance. They have federal income supports. They have support from private insurance. We know there's about 10% of the population of people with disabilities with no source of income. I think it's really critical for us to to be able to understand that population, and how best to target this benefit to make sure it's getting at that population of persons with disabilities.
As I mentioned before, I'm happy to share with the committee the diagnostic information we have on persons with disabilities.