Why Kitchener Centre MP Morrice will vote against the federal budget

Kitchener Centre MP Mike Morrice has worked hard to advocate for Canadians with disabilities.

As one of only two members of the Green Party in the federal parliament, Morrice worked across party lines to put together the Canada Disability Benefit Act, which passed unanimously last year.

The plan was to lift 1.5 million disabled Canadians out of poverty.

But leave it to the Liberal government to say they’re doing something great, yet actually doing nothing of the sort.

We understood this from the federal budget, which came out last week.

There will be a payment, but only starting in the summer of 2025, only for a little over one-third of people with disabilities who live in poverty, and only $200 a month, meaning even those who receive it will still be far below the poverty line.

Morrice is very unhappy.

“With this budget, their cards are on the table,” he said recently in the House of Commons. “This government set the expectation that this benefit was meant to lift people out of poverty.”

Yet when it came time to step up for people with disabilities, those vulnerable people were “let down,” Morrice charged.

He’s right.

A single person on a disability pension in Ontario receives $1,308 a month. Not even enough for rent.

Even with an additional $200 a month from the federal government, that person now receives $1,508 a month, which still keeps them in grinding poverty.

And the restrictions placed on even this paltry sum speaks volumes about the level of cynicism to which Trudeau’s Liberals have descended.

In order to get the benefit, you must receive a federal disability tax credit, and to get that you have to get a doctor, who is willing and knowledgeable, to fill out a lot of paperwork.

Considering that many of us don’t have access to any kind of doctor except in an urgent care clinic or emergency room, this is a huge barrier for people. Only 585,000 of 1.5 million Canadians who are disabled and living in poverty receive the federal benefit, Morrice said.

Add to that the cruel joke that the benefit will only start to be paid out in July 2025 — about three months before the next federal election.

And it isn’t looking likely that the Liberals are going to win that election, to put it mildly. So in the end they will have done as little as possible to solve the problem.

As one disabled person told Morrice, “that’s an outright slap in the face.”

We know it doesn’t have to be this way.

We saw the Liberal government get money out to people very quickly at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, when society was shutting down. They can make it happen, if they want to.

We also know that the amount of money doesn’t have to be a burden.

For every disabled low-income person in Canada to get that $200 a month would cost less than $4 billion a year. Morrice said the government can find that without going into further debt or adding to the taxes of ordinary Canadians, simply by taxing excess profits in the oil and gas sector at 15 per cent.

The government already spends $18 billion in subsidies to oil and gas companies as it is, he said.

But with this Liberal government, “they’re looking to tick boxes rather than addressing the issues folks are facing,” he said.

And so, even though this federal budget is the one that puts money into a program Morrice helped to build, he will vote against it, along with the Conservatives and Bloc Québécois.

And then he will start advocating again. Morrice is asking people with disabilities and their allies to send a message to their MPs.

“More public pressure is required,” he said.

This government lost its principles a long time ago, around the same time that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau decided to ditch his promise of voting reform. The party had committed in its platform that the 2015 federal election would be the last one with first-past-thepost rules for determining the winner. Two elections later, we’re still on that old, unfair system.

Maybe public pressure is the only thing left that the Liberals will respond to.

‘‘ With this budget, their cards are on the table. This government set the expectation that this benefit was meant to lift people out of poverty.

MIKE MORRICE GREEN PARTY MP