Bill C-22, while vague, sets its sights on poverty reduction and financial security for persons with disabilities by establishing a Canada Disability Benefit that will be delivered as a refundable tax credit along the lines of the Guaranteed Income Supplement and the Canada Child Benefit. This article reviews the evolution of tax credits in North America from income exemptions to non-refundable tax credits to the rise of refundable tax credits in the modern tax system. It offers lessons from existing refundable credits and corresponding discussions around a guaranteed basic income to inform the design of a Canada Disability Benefit that would contribute significantly to income security for persons with disabilities.

This article discusses contributory social insurance for disability—a government program in which employment taxes produce a fund for pensions to workers who experience disability before retirement age. Although widely viewed as a successful policy innovation, disability insurance presents problems. For example, it produces tensions with a tenet of disability rights: that disability arises from the interaction of impairments with the physical and attitudinal environment, necessitating accommodations, not pensions and separation from the workforce. Moreover, social insurance privileges people whose disabilities occur after they amass work histories, providing a higher level of benefits based on earnings rather than meagre amounts allotted to people whose conditions, under current levels of accommodation, keep them at the fringes of employment. This article defends social insurance while acknowledging the inequalities it produces. It considers disability income policy reforms, including the Canada Disability Benefit, and suggests improvements in social insurance inspired by the Canada Disability Benefit.

This article argues that the Canada Disability Benefit should be delivered through the income tax system and designed based on the Canada Child Benefit. The income tax system has evolved for over one hundred years to reflect the give-and-take, or fiscal contract, reached by Canadians to raise revenues to fund social spending programs and deliver benefits to low-income Canadians in accordance with some fundamental principles and values. Being part of the income tax system can enhance the fiscal sustainability of and public support for the new program. Because the Canada Disability Benefit is available only to working-age individuals and is income-tested, its technical design is inherently intertwined with the income tax system. Placing it in the tax system helps technical design and subsequent modifications. Finally, the Canada Revenue Agency is better suited to administering the program in a fair and efficient manner.

This article, written shortly after the framework legislation for the Canada Disability Benefit was introduced, discusses the key benefit design elements and options facing policymakers. We contrast these elements with the directional parameters set in the legislation. In the intervening months, the Government of Canada released an estimate of the annual costs of the new benefit and eventually drafted regulations that detail the actual design of the benefit in the Summer of 2024. These developments are outside the scope of this article, but the analysis in this article provides a foundation for other researchers and stakeholders to interpret and critique the costs and regulations that have now been released. This article describes several alternate policy choices that could have been made and situates the proposed Canada Disability Benefit amongst the other key federal and provincial programs for persons with disabilities.

New public policies stir old expectations and stimulate new expectations among people. For the planned Canada Disability Benefit (CDB), what is possible? What type of policy is at stake for women with disabilities? The CDB symbolizes an official acceptance by the federal government of a national public responsibility to address known risks of low income and poverty among hundreds of thousands of persons with disabilities. In policy content terms, the CDB is redistributive and regulatory. As redistribution, it promises to be a large-scale allocation of public revenues to a broad category of individuals disproportionately living in poverty in Canada. As regulative policy, it will involve the making of rules about applications, eligibility, administration, appeals, compliance, and enforcement, among other matters.

The Québec government started implementing a new Basic Income Program (BIP) on 1 January 2023. As a last-resort financial assistance program, the BIP intends to support people who have “severely limited capacity for employment” and have been participating in the province’s Social Solidarity Program for at least five and a half years. The BIP has been touted as a program that will lift more than eighty-four thousand individuals out of poverty, providing them with a partially individualized benefit and allowing them to work with limited clawbacks, study, and live fuller lives of quality.2 While some disability advocacy organizations are critical of specific aspects of the BIP, the BIP can nevertheless provide some lessons to the federal government on what to do and what not to do when creating the Canada Disability Benefit (CDB). Through presenting the historical background and justifications for introducing the BIP as well as an extensive examination of the policy choices made, this paper brings to light what these lessons are, especially those pertinent to women with disabilities and other marginalized populations.

Volume 61, Number 2

AS PUBLIC HEALTH CONCERNS REGARDING the COVID-19 pandemic have ebbed, the media and politicians portrayed this change as a “return to normal.” Indeed, the pandemic years are seen as a state of exception from the normal condition. However, Saptarishi Bandopadhyay’s monograph, All Is Well: Catastrophe and the Making of the Normal State (“All Is Well”), questions the idea that disasters are exceptional events, and examines how this narrative can strengthen the power of the state.

Certain class action practices have always fit uncomfortably within the traditional model of civil litigation, not least the payment of honoraria (“additional payments”) to representative plaintiffs. This subject has received little attention in Canada and elsewhere. However, recent decisions in Ontario and the United States have put a spotlight on this practice. These decisions raise crucial questions about the purpose of such payments and the purposes of class actions generally. This article considers the doctrinal and theoretical basis for additional payments, and whether they should be permitted at all. It then proposes a structure for the awarding of additional payments, based on the representative plaintiff’s time and expenses together with a trauma-informed approach. This article brings conceptual clarity to an overlooked area of class actions and provides practical guidance to judges and lawyers on whether and when additional payments should be made.

Over the past decade, corporate developers have increasingly sought to conclude Impact and Benefit Agreements (“IBAs”) with Indigenous groups when undertaking resource projects on traditional lands. Despite this development, significant concerns have been raised about the nature and scope of Indigenous consent, as well as the substantive deficiencies within IBAs. However, less has been written about how legal principles derived from contract law would apply to IBAs in the event of a dispute before an arbitrator or a judge. This article therefore considers the ways in which specific contractual principles can be reconceptualized for IBA disputes. First, it examines the relationship between IBAs, self-determination, and contract law itself. Second, it explores how such agreements depart from traditional commercial contracting: IBAs exist in the shadow of constitutional dynamics and legal pluralism, while balancing a range of sociocultural purposes that cannot be reduced to commercial norms. Third, the article analyzes how principles relating to contractual interpretation and good faith can be applied to give effect to the careful equilibrium at the heart of an IBA. Ultimately, the article concludes that IBAs are, in effect, sui generis contracts that differ in fundamental ways from ordinary forms of contracting. Consequently, adjudicators must adopt a tailored approach to contract law principles that incorporates Indigenous perspectives and that remains sensitive to the dynamics of IBAs.