Again thank you for the question.
I think this speaks to the issue of adequacy or the notion of what a floor or a guaranteed supplement would look like if it's modelled after the seniors benefit of the GIS. I'll embellish my answer to your question. I would think that this income supplement has to be GIS-plus.
The current monthly payment this fall for a single person on GIS is $1,023. I think the Canada disability supplement has to be at least that. It needs to be, like the GIS, indexed quarterly to the cost of living. It needs to be non-taxable as a benefit and it needs to have an earnings exemption associated with it that is far more generous than with the GIS.
When the GIS was first introduced, there was a tremendously high clawback. The assumption in the 1960s and 1970s was that seniors weren't going to work. You retired, you got your pension and that was it. We now know. Over the years, the earnings exemptions attached to OAS and GIS have gone up to acknowledge that people continue to work even if they're eligible for this benefit. It's a very modest earnings exemption.
With this Canada disability benefit, there's an opportunity to set a very generous earnings exemption. Again, not everybody with a disability is going to earn a lot or work, but we need to send a signal that we are not labelling the recipients of this benefit as unemployable or having, by definition, work incapacity. We have to acknowledge that there's a desire and an aspiration by many—particularly younger people with disabilities. There's a generational shift here in aspirations for work. We need to support that.
Again, I think these regulations could be done within six to eight months with the full involvement of the disability community. If you look at the list of what has to be done in regulations under this bill, from (a) down to (q), or however far into the alphabet it goes, a lot of those could be done pretty readily. I'm confident that payments to Canadians could be possible at the end of 2023 or very early in 2024—in the next fiscal year.