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

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.