Reducing immediate and long-term costs by supporting independent living for people with disabilities in inclusive communities

Report to Select Standing Committee on Finances and Government Services

Submitted to the Standing Committee on June 26, 2019

Inclusion BC provided a submission to the BC Government’s Select Standing Committee on Finance. We filed our report on June 27, 2019, with our key recommendations:

• Support for Children & Youth
• Re-Imagining Community Inclusion: Seamless life transition
• Develop flexible housing options
• Recruitment & Retention
• Persons with Disability (PWD) Benefit Rate

Support for Children & Youth

Recommendations

• Eliminate waitlists for children and youth with a funding increase of $30 million per year for the Supported Child Development Program.
• Save the At Home Program by increasing funding by at least 79% to match actual costs incurred by families supporting their children.

Re-Imagining Community Inclusion: Seamless life transition

Recommendations

• Providing support to people backlogged from the 2019 waitlists by providing a 10% increase to CLBC’s global budget for 2020.
• Providing timely support to people requesting community living services by budgeting a 6% increase to CLBC’s global budget for 2021 and 2022.
• Funding the development of a more comprehensive tool to assess the needs of adults with intellectual disabilities.

Develop flexible housing options

Recommendations

• Support CLBC clients who are waiting to move into their own homes by providing $1 million of funding per year for portable rental supplements from BC Housing.
• Support the move to independent living for 800-1000 people each year by increasing CLBC’s supported living budget by $20 million per year for the next 3 years

Recruitment & Retention

Recommendations

• Support employment in the community living service sector by investing an additional $10 million in funding to develop an equitable recruitment and retention strategy.

Persons with Disability (PWD) Benefit Rate

Recommendations

• Bring people with disabilities out of poverty by immediately increasing the Persons with Disabilities (PWD) benefit rates to $1500 a month effective April 1, 2020, with a plan to increase rates to $1800 by April 1, 2022.

Read our complete report to the Standing Committee on Finance.