Paternalistic penny pinching: Examining institutional income support programs for disabled Canadians


Kendal David, Carleton University; Megan Linton, Carleton University

Decades of austerity in Canada means that institutionalized people–those living in group homes, long-term care, or any other residential medical institution–are forced to pay for their own basic living needs. Instead of accessing social assistance programs like ODSP or Disability Assistance to help cover these costs–which they might be eligible for if they lived in the community– institutionalized people instead receive personal need, comfort, or care “allowances.” They range from $91 in PEI to $179 in Ontario and $380 in Manitoba. These social assistance schemes for institutionalized persons are almost entirely unexamined in Canadian poverty research. Across Canada, people labelled with intellectual disabilities continue to be unjustly institutionalized. In Ontario alone, over 30,000 adults labelled with intellectual disabilities live in state residential facilities or are on the waitlist for them. Institutionalization necessitates isolation, lack of autonomy, and constant surveillance, which is a depriving experience for disabled people. The deprivation is only furthered by the abject poverty of these institutional social assistance schemes. Monthly allowances pass through bureaucrats, social workers, business owners, and personal support workers before a disabled person living in a group home, long-term care facility, or some other variation of a residential treatment facility hopefully receives them. For eligible residents, immiserating monthly personal needs allowances are typically the only income support they receive, and paltry payments are supposed to be used to pay for everything beyond basic food and shelter. Provincial governments explain these extremely low rates of support provided by institutional allowances by noting within the policies and their directives that food and shelter costs are paid directly to the institutions and as such, residents’ basic needs are supposedly met by the state. However, none of the provincial allowance rates come anywhere close to meeting official poverty lines, even when you take out their food and shelter components. Further, residents are responsible for using their monthly allowances to cover the costs of phone plans, clothes, wireless internet, over-the-counter pharmaceuticals, recreation activities, hairdressing, menstrual products, and other essential personal needs. This presentation will discuss the inadequacy of institutional social assistance schemes which trap disabled people in poverty. In this presentation, we present data on: what the provincial programs across Canada actually are, the rates of payment of these programs, and the adequacy of payments compared against official poverty thresholds. The recent federal political interest in addressing disability poverty via the Canada Disability Benefit, and the government’s promise to begin unrolling regulations makes this issue especially timely. We conclude the presentation by reflecting on immediate opportunities for all levels of government to address the paternalistic penny pinching of institutional allowance schemes across the country. 

This paper will be presented at the following session: