‘Not enough to be a game changer’: Perspectives of disabled people on the Canada Disability Benefit (CDB) – a suspected policy failure
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Government of Canada recently passed the Canada Disability Benefit Act, introducing a benefit that has the potential to impact the financial security of disabled people in Canada. Many disabled Canadians live in deep and relentless poverty, thus hearing that policy changes were underway to remedy this structural problem was warmly welcomed by the disability community. In keeping with the Act, the federal government initiated a consultation process on the regulations establishing the Canada Disability Benefit (CDB). This study, adopting a thematic analysis and viewed through a Critical Disability Studies lens, asks: What are the perspectives of disabled people on the design and administration of the newly announced CDB? We analyze data gathered via interviews, focus groups, and written statements from a sample of disabled people across the country. We identified three key themes: the CDB’s fundamental inadequacy as a poverty alleviation tool, the application of narrow eligibility criteria that promote exclusion, and a faulty consultation process that failed to raise awareness about the CDB from a groundswell of disabled Canadians. We argue that the CDB introduced constitutes a policy failure across all the most salient metrics of evaluation. We argue that substantial revisions to both the design and implementation of the CDB are required to ensure it meets its intended objectives as set out in the Canada Disability Benefit Act.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".