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We find out what self-advocates are doing and share it with others so we can all be stronger. We find out what is important to self-advocates and make sure they have a provincial voice. The AACT Council (our board) meets monthly on the second Monday of the month from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m.
Here is what we have done in recent years.
2025 Activities
Alberta Disability Assistance Program (ADAP)
On
February 4, the Alberta Government proposed an alternative program to
AISH that would let people with disabilities keep more of the money they
earned from jobs. Only about 20% of people with intellectual disabilities on AISH have any work
income. The information on how much money people will get from
ADAP compared with AISH has just been released this August. No one knows where the jobs will come from. The government plans to move everyone on AISH to ADAP. People will need to apply to get back on AISH. The government
claimed that the program was based on input from people with
disabilities, but we have not found any, only disability service
provider agencies in employment and government bodies. Consultations with people who have
disabilities consist of a long survey at
https://your.alberta.ca/adap/surveys/public based on a discussion guide at https://www.alberta.ca/system/files/transforming-disability-income-assistance-discussion-guide-small-print.pdf and two telephone town halls that have not yet been set up. You can also send an email with your input and feedback to adapengagement@gov.ab.ca. AACT and
other disability advocacy groups have provided input to the Premier's
Council with our concerns and ideas.We will send an email submission and take several other actions as a group. We urge others to complete the survey so that the government does not think we are all OK with their plans.
Canada Disability Benefit to be Clawed Back from AISH
The Alberta Government will claw back the $200 Canada Disability Benefit (CDB) from the AISH of anyone who receives the CDB. It is the only province or territory that will do this. As well, it is forcing everyone on AISH to apply to get the CDB. Individuals must report to AISH the steps they have taken to do so by September 5 or else $200 will be clawed back from their AISH payment starting the end of October. In order to apply for the CDB, you must first get the Disability Tax Credit. Only about 15% of people with disabilities have this. Many people with disabilities need to apply for the Disability Tax Credit. To do this, they must have filed their 2024 income tax return, even if they have no income, fill out a short form and have a medical professional complete a longer form about the impact of the person's disabilities. Doctors charge to complete these forms. The individual must pay the cost up front. If the Canadian government approves the Disability Tax Credit for the person, it is simple to apply for the Canada Disability Benefit, which must then be reported as income to AISH and be clawed back from AISH. In August, AACT wrote letters to all MLAs and MPs asking them to take action to prevent the clawbacks. AACT is also part of a group of organizations putting on webinars in plain language to help people with disabilities and their allies understand what they need to do. Here is a link to the webinar: https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/
Rent Increases for People on AISH in Low-Income Housing
In July, the Alberta Government announced that they are raising the amount people in low-cost community housing pay for rent by $220. Up to now, AISH recipient's had $735 of their $1901 AISH not counted so that instead of paying 30% of their income in rent it was closer to 17%. They will now count the entire AISH amount in determining rent as of October 1. Rent is expected to cost these individuals $570/month. The amount of low-cost community housing available is limited. So, many people with disabilities already pay much more, often more than double, leaving little for food, utilities, transportation, medications and other supplies.
Save Disability Advocacy Group Funding
In early January, without warning, the 3 regional self-advocacy groups who are funded by the Alberta Ministry of Seniors, Community & Social Services were told that their signed funding contracts were cancelled a year early. The affected groups are the Disability Action Hall (Calgary-based), the Self Advocacy Federation (Edmonton-based) and the South Region Self-Advocacy Network or SRSAN (supporting people from the east border with Saskatchewan to the west border with British Columbia in southern Alberta. The SRSAN contract is with the Southern Alberta Individualized Planning Association or SAIPA.
These groups have been supporting people with intellectual disability to have a voice in their communities for a very long time: the Self-Advocacy Federation since 2006, SRSAN since 2001 and the Disability Action Hall since 1998. They have been told that their funding was stopped because they do not provide direct services. However, nothing has changed in the way they operate and, before this month, the funders recognized them as part of the direct service system. The 3 contracts together cost Albertans less than $424,000. These funding cuts come at a time when MLAs just gave themselves a raise of 2.2% (around $2,640) each (totalling more than $231,600) and increased their living allowance by 14% to $2200 a month. To be fair, the last MLA raise was in 2013 and they had 2 5% pay cuts between then and now. The province reported an $8 billion surplus this year.
What is the "direct, front-line service" that these self-advocacy groups provide? The core service is to help people with disabilities understand their legal and human rights, know who can help them and the steps to take, and support them to have a voice in the decisions that affect them. That includes speaking up about what works as well as what does not. These groups create a safe space where people with disabilities feel able to share their experiences and concerns. They learn not to feel stupid for finding letters and talks from government, agencies and community leaders hard to understand. Group members work together to make the words easier or give the unspoken background. Group facilitators find out what issues are important to group members and then support them to connect with other community groups working on the same issues (e.g., poverty, housing, transportation, food insecurity, employment, adaptive recreation). The facilitators work with community groups to develop more inclusive ways of working so people with intellectual disabilities can have their voices heard. A safe space encourages people to share experiences of abuse that they may not have labelled as abuse. Members receive emotional support and encouragement, and are helped out of bad services and into better ones. These supports reduce the strain on the more expensive mental health system. The result of these advocacy support services is greater knowledge, greater self-confidence, greater independence and greater involvement in community--which fit the aims of the program that funds the groups.
How you can help - You can send a letter to Minister Jason Nixon, the Disability Advocate, the Premier's Council on the Status of Persons with Disabilities, the Premier and your MLA sharing why you think it is important to support the continuation of these services. We have made it easy for you with a letter template that you can change to make it your own. Go to
https://win.newmode.net/keepyourwordhonourthecontractswithdisabilityadvocacygroups. Tell the government to keep their word and honour their contracts with self-advocacy groups.
Education Town Hall
We had a great but small event with 14 people. We will post a summary of what was said here, as soon as we can. We hoped to record the meeting to help make the summary but the Record button did not respond. So Damien Traverse worked with us to fill in the gaps. Click on the Word document (.docx) or PDF(.pdf) version, whichever you prefer.
2024 Activities
IDPD 2024 - Not every disability activist in Alberta lives in a city big enough to host its own IDPD celebration. But we all need to be able to celebrate breaking down
barriers and being proud. On December 3rd, 2024 from 3 - 5 p.m., AACT co-hosted a Virtual IDPD celebration with the Alberta Ability
Network, Disability Action Hall, Self Advocacy Federation and other
groups. We had short talks from
- Jacob McGregor, Chair of the Premier's Council on the Status of Perons with Disabilities
- Lindsay Poll from the Michel First Nation (Treaty 6)
- Colleen Peters, disability activist, poet and visual artist, with Peter Merry on trumpet
- Hilary Chapple, queer woman advocate with lived experience of homelessness
- Michael Wing, disability and mental health advocate sharing life hacks and his Anti-Ablist social media
- Kat Hedges, from Barrier-Free Alberta on using art in advocacy events
Those who attended the event told us what makes them proud. We turned it into this group art piece.
Staff Burnout
- We put
together resources and videos to help staff manage stress and partnered with the Alberta Disability Workers Association
(ADWA) to put our resources and videos on their website
where staff will see them.
2023 Activities
Planning - We have started to plan for a Change-Makers Summit as part of our planning for the future. We would like the Summit to be in-person, but that costs a lot of money. So, fundraising is part of our planning. We have also written letters to the Minister of Seniors, Community and Social Services and others, and meet a few times each year with the Disability Advocate.
Staff Burnout - We are also concerned about staff stress and burnout. We put together resources to help staff manage stress. We also made videos to encourage staff when they are down and think their work is not important to us. We reached out to the Alberta Disability Workers Association (ADWA) and they agreed to put our resources and videos on their website where staff will see them.
2022 Activities
Plain Language Rocks - AACT sent in a proposal to the Government of Canada for a project that would make videos about how plain language helps people understand rules and how to fill out forms the right way, how it helps those who make language plain, and how to hire people with low literacy to make language in government documents plain. The videos would be shown at events for National AccessAbility Week and International Day of Disabled Persons. We did not get the grant for this project.
The Best Way to Have a Voice is to Be There - Using the PDD Review processes and reports from 2019 and 2021, we compared the recommendations that came out of these processes for how many of the things self-advocates said was important to them. When self-advocates were on the committee that made the recommendations for change, more self-advocate ideas made it into the report than when self-advocates were only consulted and not at the committee table. We sent our report to PDD and asked them to make sure we were included on the Action Committee in the next phase of the review. People with developmental disabilities have not been invited to be part of that committee.
2021 Activities
Election time - With a federal election in September and municipal elections in October, self-advocacy groups have been very busy helping self-advocates prepare to have their voices heard by voting. AACT is no exception. Our September 4 newsletter focuses on the federal election and tells you how you can register and vote, as well as linking you to events and resources that help you decide which political party best fits your views on what is important and what to do. Here is the link to the Parties' debate on disability issues hosted by the Pan-Canadian Disability Coalition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlhY1GcW72Q. We have also put together an extra municipal election newsletter in October with information about elections in the communities where our members live.
PDD Review - PDD asked AACT to gather answers to their questions about what PDD support should be for and how PDD should work. We told PDD and the Disability Advocate what people said on January 21. The questions and what self-advocates said are on our PDD Support page (http://www.albertaact.com/p/iq-tests-and-pdd.html).
2020 Activities
AACT Virtual Summit Project
AACT got money through FCSS at the City of Calgary to do a project to connect adults with disabilities in rural and remote parts of Alberta to the self-advocacy community. We provided new tablets and helped people learn how to use them. We put on 6 Self-Advocacy Summits on Zoom in This project ended in December 2020.There are videos of each of the Self-Advocacy Summit sessions on our Summit page.
We made 3 how-to videos and 10 "cheat sheets" with tips and resources that you can download from our Internet for Self-Advocates page. There is also a Training Manual for the project on the same page.
AACT co-hosted a Town Hall on Zoom with MLAs on May 14, 2020. Our ASL Interpreters were from FLIC Inc. and KLM Captioning provided text of the meeting. Thank you to all who participated.
Zoom Town Hall
You can listen to what was said at the meeting by clicking on Town Hall Zoom Recording. Click on Closed-captioned notes to download the text from KLM Captioning (33 pages in PDF). Also, here are links to Mental Health Resources letter by request (A letter from MLA Tracy Allard to MLA Marie Renaud April 14, 2020)
We have had regular meetings with the Disability Advocate and members of the Community and Social Services (CSS) Ministry in Alberta. This is the Ministry that runs the poverty support programs Assured Income for the Severely Handicapped (AISH) and Income Supports, as well as the Persons with Developmental Disabilities Program (PDD). The government has made a few changes this year that have negatively affected people with and without disabilities who rely on social assistance: 1) They de-indexed AISH and Income Supports so that they no longer increase with the cost of living. This means that the money people get does not go as far and pushes them further into poverty. 2) They changed the date they pay AISH and Income Supports into people's accounts to the first of the month. This means that thousands of Albertans have had to negotiate with landlords, lenders, utility and cell phone companies to change the dates that their payments are due. Many people have had difficulty doing this or doing this quickly and have experienced extra costs in late fees and NSF bank fees (about $45 for each payment). These increased demands on people with few resources has happened during the COVID-19 pandemic, during which time getting things done is more difficult and puts people at greater risk.
Over and over in our meetings with government, we have told them what people with disabilities and poor people need.
So far, the government has changed how they handle CERB for people on AISH and Income Supports who lost their jobs due to AISH. Before, they would claw back CERB or EI dollar for dollar from AISH or Income Support. Now, single people who get CERB and some form of social assistance get to keep $300 of CERB outright and then will have 75% of the rest of CERB clawed back from their AISH or Income Support. People who lost their job before COVID-19 started still have EI clawed back dollar-for-dollar from social assistance.
- We asked the government to change the AISH/Income Support payment date back to what it was.
- We asked for a top-up of $300 (like in BC) to AISH/Income Support payments to help with COVID-19 extra expenses.
- We asked the government to ensure that people on AISH/Income Supports be given proper PPE regardless of whether they get agency support or not.
AACT continues to advocate for these things and for the large majority of people on AISH and Income Supports who do not have access to CERB and have additional expenses due to the payment date change and COVID-19.2018 Activities
AACT took part in the PDD Review! Click here to read what AACT sent to the PDD Review panel based on what self-advocates said at the Self-Advocacy Summit.
We hosted a Self-Advocacy Summit October 1 - 3, 2018 at Deer Valley Meadows Camp near Alix in Central Alberta. Our theme was "Listen. Learn. Take Action!"About 120 self-advocates and allies came and talked with members of the Premier's Council on the Status of Persons with Disabilities, the PDD Review Team and the Disability Advocate's office. We identified lots of issues and came up with good ideas to make things better for people with disabilities. AACT will share these good ideas with the government. Check out our newsletter for the Summit story with photos.
