How Ottawa’s ‘cruel’ process keeps the majority of Canadians with disability from getting the Disability Tax Credit

Dana Mason is clearly frustrated.

She and her 26-year-old son both have disabilities, and Mason has been trying for months and months to sign the both of them up for the Disability Tax Credit.

The DTC is interesting to them, not because of the tax credit itself. Rather, qualifying for the DTC is a way to tap into a broader system of income supports.

But Mason, like so many other people living with disabilities and finding it hard to cover daily expenses, has not yet succeeded.

The process “doesn’t make sense,” an exasperated Mason said in a zoom call from her home in Calgary. “I think it’s cruel.”

More than a quarter of Canada’s working age population has a disability of some kind — about eight million Canadians — and the numbers are rising as the population ages.

Where the serious and stubborn policy problem lies is in the fact that poverty among people with disabilities is pervasive — despite multiple layers of government programs and supports.

In the middle of this tangled mess is the Disability Tax Credit. It is the bureaucratic key to unlocking at least 13 different income supports — programs such as the Registered Disability Savings Plan, a variety of medical expense and home renovation tax credits, and most importantly, the Canada Disability Benefit targeted at low-income adults.

Research shows that 84 per cent of people living with disabilities do not qualify for the DTC.

A new study by University of Calgary researcher Gillian Petit done for the Canadian Tax Observatory points to numerous “broken links” that either discourage hundreds of thousands of people from applying or reject them when they do.

The federal government is well aware of the shortcomings, and there’s some openness to tweaking the rules — perhaps as soon as next week’s spring economic update.

Changes can’t come soon enough.

Mason almost gave up a couple of times. She had never really heard much about the DTC and its tentacles, but last year she overheard some chatter about the DTC at her arts and crafts club and decided to apply for herself and her son.

The two of them live with a range of intellectual and mental-health disabilities. Neither of them are working and they lean heavily on Mason’s husband to get by.

Mason knew that qualifying would at least help with groceries. But when she saw the 16-page form to fill out, it stopped her in her tracks.

“I just looked at it, and I put it down,” she recalls. “It made my stomach roll.”

The questionnaire forced her to compare in great detail their abilities to those of nondisabled people, and the process overwhelmed her.

“It digs up all sorts of stuff.”

She turned for help to Inclusion Alberta and Inclusion Canada, which provided a professional “navigator” to steer her through the process, bit by bit. That helped, but the problems had only begun.

Their doctor had to fill out the second half of the forms, but the appointment ended with the doctor using derogatory language and saying Mason’s son’s conditions were not severe enough to qualify.

She left in a storm without paying the bill. She still hasn’t quite pulled all the authorities together to act on behalf of her son. And now they’re both in bureaucratic limbo.

The thing is, the DTC was not initially designed to serve as a gateway to other benefits. It was originally meant to help income-earners offset some of the higher costs of day-to-day living — a tax equity measure that Petit’s research shows is most beneficial to those earning between $35,000 and $39,999 a year.

In 2023, the federal government introduced the Canada Disability Benefit and started rolling it out in July 2025 — its first serious foray into targeting high prevalence of poverty among people with disabilities.

But there’s a catch. To qualify, a person with disabilities has to be certified through the DTC system.

That’s hard, as Mason knows. It means proving that they have severe and prolonged impairments in physical or mental functions that prevent the ability to perform basic activities 90 per cent of the time, day after day.

The eligibility criteria are narrow and exclude episodic disabilities and mental health.

The certification process is costly and cumbersome, requiring the stamp of approval of a medical practitioner.

Women, people with mental-health and episodic disabilities, and those with low income are routinely squeezed out.

Fixing these problems is possible and would be helpful, although still not sufficient in confronting poverty.

For starters, the government could expand the eligibility criteria.

It could cover some of the costs of having medical practitioners fill out forms.

It could consider automatically certifying those who are already enrolled in provincial disability assistance or Canada Pension Plan Disability benefits.

Or it could pay to expand the scope of volunteers who help low-income people file their taxes.

None of these adjustments would get at the insufficient level of benefits flowing to low-income people with disabilities. But at least the benefits would flow.