27 Access to Dignity: Poverty and Disability

As a recent Scotiabank report noted, in Canada “disability and poverty go hand in hand.”^[1] Poverty and disability can interact in a positive feedback loop, a ‘vicious cycle’ where disability can severely limit work or make employment prospects bleak, resulting in poverty, which makes living with a disability substantially more difficult.  A Maytree report estimates that the (weighted) gap between the poverty line and a single person with a disability is about $7,500 annually.^[2]  Nearly 14% of food bank users nationally report provincial disability support as their main source of income.^[3] A Nanos poll in November 2022 noted that Canadians self-reporting a disability were nearly twice as likely to eat less due to inflated food costs.^[4]  While a very large number of people with disabilities live in poverty, the situation has improved over the past decade.  Encouragingly, the percentage of people with disabilities living in poverty has declined  from just over 20 per cent in 2015 to 8.5 per cent in 2020 (although the biggest drop was in 2020, likely related to temporary pandemic-related income supports).^[5] Yet, this remains nearly double the poverty rate of those without disabilities. Fewer people with disabilities are in the lowest two of nine earning categories measured in Statistics Canadian Income Survey, and more people are in the higher earnings categories.^[6]

Both the average and median incomes of Canadians with disabilities have improved over the past decade relative to Canadians without disabilities, but are still lagging at about 81 and 73 per cent respectively.^[7] However, if you strip away public income supports and focus on employment earnings only, the gulf between the average and median is somewhat wider (85 vs. 67 percent, respectively), which suggests that more people with disabilities are employed in low wage jobs and fewer are in higher income employment categories, compared with Canadians without disabilities.  Statistics Canada’s most disturbing socio-economic finding is that “persons with more severe disabilities (28%) aged 25 to 64 years – prime income earning years – were more likely to be living in poverty (as measured by the Market Basket Measure) than their counterparts without disabilities (10%) or with milder disabilities (14%).”^[8]

Poverty and disability can interact in mortally hazardous ways.  One area where access for Canadians has been eased is in medically-assisted dying.  While there are many reasons to applaud this, for human rights, bodily autonomy, and compassion for those experiencing pain and suffering, there is also a shadow side to this improved access. Consider the story of a quadriplegic Ontario woman living in poverty considering medically assisted dying due to long wait times for support services.  Alex Schadenberg of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition observed that “it was argued that expanding euthanasia to people with disabilities, who are not otherwise dying, provided equality.  But in fact it undermines the equality of people with disabilities who are often living in poverty.”^[9]  When medically assisted dying is easier to access than social and community supports, there must be an adjustment to our collective policies and human service priorities. Indeed, doctors in Canada have reported a number of incidents of people seeking medically-assisted dying because they are living in poverty.^[10]