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The province did raise disability rates for the first time in a decade last September. By the time arithmetic had been done on what proved a sanctimonious shell game of shuffled transportation charges, most disabled people in high-cost urban areas found the real increase was about $11. So, after a decade, the best we could do to improve the lives of our most vulnerable citizens was provide them the equivalent of a hamburger in a city afflicted by Canada’s highest living costs.

This simply isn’t good enough. As Vancouver Sun reporters Lori Culbert and Tracy Sherlock pointed out last weekend in a deeply troubling report on B.C.’s disabled, policy experts, advocacy organizations, social rights groups and the disabled all urge increases in basic disability income. B.C.’s Public Health Association cautions that low income is associated with poor health and premature death. It said the disabled are punished by “impossible financial pressure.” Shelter allowances must reflect the reality of a market so tight that the government felt compelled to both increase the threshold for homeowner grants and to provide interest-free loans to first time home buyers. And the province should end its odious practice of forcing the disabled to apply for federal benefits intended to improve their quality of life so that it can, in effect, appropriate them at the expense of that quality of life.

The legislature’s own select standing committee on finance and government services, following consultations with the public, recommended that current income and disability assistance rates be examined and increases considered to reflect the true cost of living, including the high cost of housing and rent. And it reported hearing emphatically that enforced deduction of federal benefits from provincial disability benefits is unfair and should be reconsidered.

Institutionalizing and perpetuating poverty for disabled British Columbians is a grotesque perversion of what assistance for those excluded from the workforce for reasons beyond their control is intended to achieve — that would be to help them to live a life of reasonable quality, not one of stress, anguish and poverty eked out on subsistence level incomes.