PROVINCE FORSAKING THE DISABLED
R obbing Tiny Tim to reduce Ebenezer Scrooge’s costs is neither admirable nor effective policy. The time has come for the provincial government to stop using disabled people as a convenient cash cow upon whose back it balances budgets it cites as evidence of its fiscal prowess.
Disability benefits in a province that’s fiscally the envy of every other province — that fulsome praise is our own finance minister’s — are disgracefully low. They haven’t kept pace with increases in the cost of living index, although our elected politicians have generously indexed their own remuneration. They lag far behind provinces with similarly robust economies. Alberta provides $1,588 a month in basic disability benefits, compared to B.C.’s $983.
For the disabled in oversubscribed housing markets like Metro Vancouver and Greater Victoria, shelter allowances are far from meeting needs. The province did raise disability rates for the first time in a decade last September. Most disabled people in high-cost urban areas found the real increase was about $11 — the price of a hamburger.
This simply isn’t good enough. As Vancouver Sun reporters Lori Culbert and Tracy Sherlock pointed out last weekend in a troubling report on B.C.’s disabled, policy experts, advocacy organizations, social rights groups and the disabled all urge increases in basic disability income. B.C.’s Public Health Association cautions that low income is associated with poor health and premature death. It said the disabled are punished by “impossible financial pressure.”
Shelter allowances must reflect the reality of the market. And the province should end its odious practice of forcing the disabled to apply for federal benefits intended to improve their quality of life so that it can, in effect, appropriate them at the expense of that quality of life.
The legislature’s own select standing committee on finance and government services, following consultations with the public, recommended that increases to current income and disability assistance rates be considered to reflect the true cost of living. And it reported hearing emphatically that enforced deduction of federal benefits from provincial disability benefits is unfair and should be reconsidered.
Institutionalizing and perpetuating poverty for disabled British Columbians is a grotesque perversion of what assistance for those excluded from the workforce for reasons beyond their control is intended to achieve — that would be to help them to live a life of reasonable quality, not one of stress, anguish and poverty eked out on subsistence level incomes.