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Disability and poverty go hand in hand

Harry Wolbert, disability activist

Many Canadians assume people with disabilities are well provided for. Few understand that disability and poverty are synonymous. Disability can lead to poverty and poverty can lead to disability.

By HARRY WOLBERT, For the Winnipeg Sun

In less than a year, Manitobans, and possibly Canadians, will again head to the polls.

There are certain issues that are bound to surface again. They are poverty, housing and the closure of institutions for people with disabilities.

Disability poverty is an unacknowledged reality. Advocates and disability organizations have been calling for social policy reforms that would eradicate poverty.

One of the proposed reforms is for the introduction of a Basic Income Plan for Canadians with severe disabilities. The foundation of this plan is a new federal Basic Income program that would replace provincial and territorial social assistance for most working age people with severe disabilities. The disability community is also asking Ottawa to covert the existing non-refundable disability tax credit into a refundable disability tax credit.

Canada is also in the midst of a housing crisis. The number of homeless in Canada is estimated to be between 150,000 and 300,000. An additional 1.5 million Canadian households are in “core housing need.” They spend more than one third of their income on rent, putting them at significant risk of losing their housing.

Approximately 3.3 million Canadian households live in what is substandard housing. It is a crisis affecting communities right across this country. For example, in the Greater Toronto Area, the wait-list for social housing is about 71,000 households.

Toronto is not alone. Approximately 1,000 of Iqualuit’s 6,500 residents lack adequate shelter of their own.

Canada’s housing crisis is impacting some of our most vulnerable citizens. Almost one in seven users of emergency shelters across this country are children and in the Greater Vancouver Area, the number of senior citizens who were homeless almost tripled between 2002 and 2005.

We owe our senior citizens and our children better than this. It is time for a federal housing strategy. Canada is the only G-8 country that does not have a national housing plan.

If the federal government has money for football stadiums and fighter jets, then there should be money in the budget for a National Housing Strategy. Finally, disability advocates call upon the three Prairie provinces to close down all of their institutions for persons with a developmental disability.

I believe all people with disabilities deserve to take their rightful place in the community. Institutionalization is not inclusion. The right to live in the community is a social justice issue. And under the UN Convention, Canadians with disabilities can no longer be required to live in institutions.

Manitoba’s Liberal Party recently “branded” itself as the party of social justice and fiscal responsibility. Will the Liberal Party now support us in our struggle to close down the Manitoba Developmental Centre located in Portage la Prairie? It angers me that certain politicians and the political parties they represent have shown far more concern for convicted terrorist Omar Khadr than for Canadians with disabilities.

Khadr will eventually be getting out of prison. But for many people with intellectual disabilities, institutionalization has become a life sentence. This is wrong.

— Harry Wolbert is a disability rights activist.

Used with permission

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