1) The document discusses the challenges faced by people with disabilities in Ontario, including high rates of poverty and unemployment. 2) It notes that a upcoming government report may propose merging disability support payments with welfare, which could substantially lower monthly incomes for those receiving disability support. 3) While the government aims to get more people with disabilities working to reduce dependence on social programs, the document argues this approach risks further exclusion and failure given barriers in the workplace. A broader shift in societal attitudes is needed instead.

1. Last week, The Star’s Carol Goar editorialized about it. Two weeks ago, Globe and Mail
reporter Lisa Priest painted a vivid picture of aging families struggling not only with
their own retirements, but also the lack of affordable and suitable housing and lifestyles
for their children who have intellectual disabilities. “To be born with an intellectual
disability is to be sentenced to a hardscrabble life: 73 per cent of working-age adults
with an intellectual disability who live on their own live in poverty,” Priest wrote.
It's not news that people with disabilities live what Priest calls a “hardscrabble” life;
what's new is the way the province plans to handle it. On top of the threat of freezing
social assistance rates and cutting the promise of an increase in the child benefit, the
Ontario budget also cut assistance for heating bills, medicines, and some rental deposits.
Even with the recent amendment to allow a one per cent increase in the disability
support, those receiving it will still be well below the 2.2 per cent inflation rate.
There's just is too little money to go around, and the latest news is that the report by the
social services review commission due out in June by Frances Lankin and Munir Sheik
will propose the amalgamation of welfare with the disability support payment. That
worries recipients of the disability amount, because it could mean a substantial drop in
their monthly income.
The government has a solution: put those with disabilities to work. Get them making
their own money, so they'll need less of the government's cash flow. What more, they'll
become taxpayers so they can help support those who can't work.
Six days ago, the province's Lieutenant Governor David Onley, himself a person with a
disability, said the country would never recover from economic shambles “until, and
unless, the issue of unemployed people with disabilities is resolved.” Providing
employment support for those on welfare and disability will level the playing field, and
reduce overall poverty, he says.
Sixteen per cent of our population self-identifies as having a disability. That's one in 16
of us. Of those, one in four is unemployed. If the disability is intellectual in nature, three
of four are unemployed. That's far higher than the unemployment in the general
population during the 1930s depression, leading Onley to refer to the plight of people
who have a disability as “a perpetual depression.”
Perpetual depression? If it were just a simple economic question – but it's not. Certainly
we know there's not enough money to go around. Does that mean we send people with
disabilities into the workforce, a workforce we have developed, encouraged, and
nurtured, where they will be bullied, excluded, and ultimately fail?
Certainly not. The shift has to be broader than opening the piggy bank, or walking

2. people with disabilities down the employment aisle. Rather, what's called for is a shift in
our attitude overall. We need plate tectonics for society – a radical, irreversible shift in
how we view the world – in order to create the new possibilities and space to co-create a
future for all Ontarians.
And we need it, yesterday.