A new INCLUSIECON report documents the economic circumstances of 527 working-age Albertans who have a disability or receive income assistance, captured in the months before the Alberta Disability Assistance Program (ADAP) launches on July 2, 2026. Three in four respondents live below Canada's low-income line, the typical respondent cannot afford five or more everyday essentials, and hardship deepens with disability severity and is sharpest among AISH recipients. Because this round was fielded before the reform, it sets the reference point against which ADAP's effects will be measured.
On February 4, 2025, the Government of Alberta announced ADAP, a new income support program for Albertans with disabilities paired with a set of employment supports. The program was created in legislation through the Financial Statutes Amendment Act, 2025 (No. 2), which amended the AISH Act and received Royal Assent on December 11, 2025. Under the amended Act, ADAP operates alongside the Assured Income for the Severely Handicapped (AISH) and sorts recipients by assessed work capacity: AISH serves people whose severe disability permanently prevents employment, while ADAP serves people whose severe disability substantially impedes it. From July 2026, applicants apply through a single combined application, and many existing AISH clients are transitioned to ADAP.
This is the first round of a longitudinal panel survey that will follow the same population roughly every six months as the reform rolls out. Round 1 is a baseline: it was completed before ADAP took effect, so it describes where this population stood beforehand and fixes the starting point for later comparison. The report is descriptive throughout. It does not measure change over time, it does not evaluate ADAP, and it does not attribute any outcome to any program — that is the work of the rounds to come.
The respondents are a deeply low-income population for whom government income assistance is the financial foundation. Three-quarters reported receiving provincial assistance, the large majority through AISH, and for most that reliance had lasted years — more than eight in ten recipients for at least two years, and nearly four in ten for more than a decade. Paid work is the exception: most respondents reported being completely prevented from working, overwhelmingly because of their own illness or disability, and those who did work tended to put in few hours in precarious jobs at below-average wages.
That low income translated into pervasive hardship across three separate outcome-based measures. On a material deprivation index, respondents went without far more often than a nationally representative population on nearly every item — more than seven in ten could not cover an unexpected $500 expense or repair a broken appliance. Food insecurity ran at roughly twice the national rate, and housing costs consumed more than 30 percent of household income for three-quarters of respondents and more than half of income for over four in ten. The report also surfaces needs specific to this population: roughly one in four respondents could not afford disability aids, and one in seven could not afford prescription medications.
Two threads run through every dimension. First, hardship deepens with the severity of a respondent's disability — labour-force participation falls at every step of the severity scale, while deprivation, food insecurity, and housing strain all climb. Second, and more sharply, AISH recipients are the worst off: they were far less likely to be in the labour force, earned substantially less when they did work, and were nearly twice as likely to fall below the low-income line as respondents receiving no assistance. The divide by program receipt is wider and more pervasive than the gradient by severity alone.
ADAP is one of the most significant changes to Alberta's disability income supports in years, and it lands on a population with little or no financial margin. Reforms of this kind are usually assessed through income alone, which can miss the everyday realities — unmet medical needs, the inability to absorb a small emergency, going without essentials — that determine whether a change actually improves people's lives. By capturing material deprivation, food security, and housing alongside income before the reform, this baseline makes those realities visible and creates a reference point that income statistics on their own could not.
The value of a baseline is entirely in the comparison it enables. Without a clear picture of where this population stood before July 2, 2026, it would be impossible to say with confidence what ADAP did or did not change. This report fixes that starting line, and the panel design means the same people can be followed as the reform takes hold.
The findings describe the 527 people who responded, not a representative sample of any caseload or of Alberta's disability population. Respondents self-selected in response to recruitment through community organizations and social media, and program receipt and disability status are self-reported. Round 1 is a single snapshot and cannot speak to change over time — that is the purpose of the rounds that follow. Read in that light, the baseline is consistent and clear: a population whose material security rests heavily on income assistance and that is already, at the outset, experiencing widespread and serious economic hardship.