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There are two key reasons for its underwhelming impact: unnecessarily restrictive eligibility criteria, and the wildly insufficient size of the benefit.

In order to qualify for the benefit, potential recipients must have a Disability Tax Credit certificate, which is notoriously difficult to acquire, requiring extensive and costly paperwork from medical practitioners. The CRA applies rigid, and often arbitrary criteria, to establish eligibility — especially with respect to mental health conditions and chronic illness.

Not surprisingly, successful applicants tend to come from upper income households — those that have the resources to navigate the tax system and who aren’t living in poverty. 

Many Canadians with disabilities have already qualified for other government disability programs such as provincial social assistance or housing subsidies, just not this certificate.

As it stands, only 16.2 per cent of people with disabilities aged 18 to 64 will have the paperwork they need to apply for the Canada Disability Benefit — and even fewer of those applicants will be people with severe or very severe disabilities living in deep poverty.

So, if the proposed program remains unchanged, with the same income cut-offs, the benefit will only reach 205,000 people of the 3.6 million people with disabilities in this age group.

And of this group, only 52,800 have incomes below Canada’s official poverty line, a fraction of the nearly 1 million working-age adults with disabilities living in poverty.

Clearly, making eligibility contingent on having a Disability Tax Credit certificate is a grossly inadequate starting point. Let’s include multiple government certifications of disability.

It’s imperative to broaden the reach if it’s ever going to deliver on the promise of poverty relief. For example, if we targeted people with disabilities receiving social assistance and Canada Pension Plan disability benefits, we’d reach four times as many people on day one.

The other critical flaw in the Canada Disability Benefit’s design is the woefully low benefit of only $2,400 per year. At this amount, only 10,000 people will be lifted out of poverty when it starts next July.

Just increasing the benefit without broadening the eligibility, however, does practically nothing. If you boosted the benefit to $8,000 per year you only lift 36,000 people out of poverty.

To really start to make a dent in the damagingly high levels of poverty among people with disabilities, it’s also necessary to expand the pool of potential beneficiaries.

If eligibility included not only those with a Disability Tax Benefit certificate but also those receiving other government disability benefits, such as Canada Pension Plan disability and social assistance disability recipients, then more than a million people could be reached on day one. And by increasing the benefit to $8,000 you lift a quarter of a million people out of poverty.

The introduction of the Canada Disability Benefit is a milestone for people with disabilities, but this barebones version doesn’t begin to address the devastating poverty and economic struggle that define people’s lives. The disability community is rightly disappointed about the sizable gaps in this program and the level of assistance on offer.

There are strategies for increasing the impact of the Canada Disability Benefit by making it much easier to access immediately and increasing the value of the benefit. And there’s still time to get it right out of the gate — to make sure we deliver a benefit that people with disabilities rightly expect and deserve.