Disability appeals system irks advocate
REGINA — Allison Schmidt grimaces and calls them “pretty little words.”
She means words like transparency and consistency in decision-making — cited by the federal government when it moved several years ago to a new system for handling the appeals of Canadians whose applications for Canada Pension Plan disability benefits have been turned down.
Now, she says there’s a massive backlog before appeals brought by some of Canada’s most vulnerable citizens — with serious injuries or medical conditions that prevent them from working — can be processed.
Behind this, says Schmidt, who runs a disability claims advocacy clinic in Regina, was the federal government’s 2012 omnibus budget bill, which replaced between 250 and 300 part-time adjudicators with 70 full-time government appointees, about half of whom work on disability appeals. Schmidt estimates only half had prior experience with such appeals, further slowing things.
Their work starts after civil service staff of Employment and Social Development Canada (successor to Human Resources Development Canada) do the first two levels of “reconsideration” of applications.
Spokespeople for ESDC could not be reached late Wednesday afternoon, but the ministry’s website says the new Social Security Tribunal that began operations in the spring of 2013 “provides efficient, effective and independent appeal processes for Employment Insurance (EI), the Canada Pension Plan (CPP), and Old Age Security (OAS) decisions”.
The website also claims the new system “simplifies and streamlines the appeal processes by offering a sin- gle point of contact for submitting an appeal.”
Schmidt says it seems significant that about half of appeals filed under the old system were upheld. Now, about 60 per cent are rejected at the first stage of appeal and another 60 per cent are rejected at the next stage.
When the new tribunals formally began their work this spring, they had about 9,000 appeals before them, about 7,000 inherited from the old system, and another 2,000 or so that arose in the intervening year, Schmidt said. The government “should not have been surprised” by this number, she added.
Because of the complexity of assembling files and scheduling appeal dates, “they only heard 178 appeals since they started,” she said, adding that her “beef” is not with the federal employees trying to manage the appeals, but with a system put in place despite the objections of outsiders and experts in the field.
“A disgrace is what it is,” she said.
Because of delays, she’s heard of people having to borrow money or go into bankruptcy; others have gone without treatment and some “despair” at not being able to handle their problems, Schmidt said.
She figures it also affects the health care system because doctors are frustrated with the demand for paperwork for these appeals.
“The playing field is completely tilted toward the government,” she said.