The Canada Disability Benefit Act and Women with Disabilities: Pursuing Disability Equality and Reducing Administrative Violence

Abstract

At both the policy development stage and the point of implementing administrative processes, more attention must be paid to the hidden challenges faced by disabled women of lower income in securing and using income support benefits. Many of these gendered barriers figure within the administrative processes subsumed in the design and delivery of disability income support programs, and in governmental regimes connected (directly and indirectly) to them.

As the Canada Disability Benefit Act progressed through the House of Commons, it was modified to include a guarantee that the application process be “without barriers, as defined in section 2 of the Accessible Canada Act”. The Canada Disability Benefit Act therefore presents an excellent opportunity to examine the ways in which statutory administrative regimes designed to further disability equality rights may result in barriers leading to administrative violence how to avoid that consequence. By drawing on the theoretical frameworks of bureaucratic disentitlement, administrative violence and disability equality, this article examines the lived realities of women with disabilities in order to suggest ways that income support systems can be more responsively and ethically designed. Administrative justice requires that users of income support programs obtain substantive equality-based service at first instance. This should be the experience of all users and would also avoid the time, energy and emotional investment of further appeals and/or judicial review. Moreover, both disability equality and administrative justice call for heightened attention to the lived experiences of disabled women with intersecting backgrounds in order to create equality-based and effective systems of disability income support.