Our civil service never set out to break the Disability Support Program but officials will have to fix it anyway.
EDITORIAL STAFF
The Guardian
We have to assume that the people who set up the Disability Support Program set out with the best possible intentions; it’s too bad that it took a human rights ruling to set them looking for the best possible methods.
On the surface, the DSP sounds like an excellent, even revolutionary, approach to dealing with the needs of disabled Islanders. It replaced a patchwork of assistance plans with a concerted effort to meet the needs of P.E.I.’s physically and mentally challenged citizens, and it stopped the degrading and inadequate practice of forcing people who needed help to declare themselves unemployable and turn to social assistance.
The trouble with the DSP has been that too many disabled Islanders have found that this one-size-fits-all system doesn’t fit them well at all.
The problems began when parents of disabled children found that they were to be treated as dependents up to the age of 25 and that families would be held responsible for contributing to their costs of care. It took a vocal opposition of parents and supporters to get the government to acknowledge that adulthood should start at the same age whether a person is disabled or not.
But that setback failed to spark a real re-examination of the DSP.
Now the P.E.I. Human Rights Commission has essentially sent the entire DSP back to the drafting room by ruling that its core questionnaire unfairly favours support for physical disabilities over support for mental disabilities.
The trouble is that once they return to their work, the designers of a disability support structure have an unenviable job. How, frankly, does one assign a dollar value to the impact of a disability? A lecturer could be paralyzed from the neck down and not lose any earning power, while some musicians could end a lifelong career by losing a fingertip. Who is to say how each should be assisted and where to set the limit for that assistance?
One can only feel empathy for the people in charge of administering such a system. They see individuals and their families with aching needs and have to adress those needs within the cold reality of a taxpayer-funded support system. Faced with someone who needs a simple piece of equipment, the disability support worker’s job should be straightforward. Faced with a family who may need lifelong respite help to cope with the care of a child, the case worker has tougher calls to make.
The genius of the DSP was that it gave power to Islanders with disabilities and their caregivers by allowing them to pick the services they offered.
The problem with the DSP was that it attempted to use a simple formula to determine just how much money each claimant could get.
That problem isn’t going to go away. Government will still have to pay for services to the disabled and it will still have deserving people who go away unhappy when the money runs out.
The only way to deal with these heartaches is for disability workers to do what the DSP purported to do in the first place. They have to allocate support while listening to the disabled. And they have to do what the DSP failed to do in this case; they have to keep talking and be willing to change the system when it proves unacceptable.
Leave a Reply