Gillian Petit's new report for the Canadian Tax Observatory — Broken Links: Poverty and the Limits of the Disability Tax Credit — documents how Canada's Disability Tax Credit has been retrofitted into the gateway certification for the federal disability benefit system, and finds that 84 percent of working-age people with disabilities lack DTC certification.
On April 22, 2026, the Canadian Tax Observatory released Broken Links, a new report by University of Calgary economist and INCLUSIECON co-founder Gillian Petit, alongside an executive summary and an FAQ. The central empirical finding: about 84 percent of working-age Canadians with disabilities do not hold DTC certification, which means the majority cannot access the federal disability supports the certificate has come to gate. That list now includes the Registered Disability Savings Plan, a range of medical and home-renovation tax credits, and most consequentially the Canada Disability Benefit, rolled out in July 2025.
The report walks through the certification process step by step and identifies four broken links in the pipeline: narrow severity criteria that exclude episodic and mental-health disabilities; a 16-page application form that overwhelms people without navigator support; the cost and inconsistency of medical practitioner sign-off; and the absence of cross-program data sharing that would let CPP-D and provincial disability assistance recipients flow through automatically. Each break disproportionately affects women, low-income filers, and people with mental-health and episodic conditions — the very groups for whom federal poverty rates are highest.
The DTC was not designed to be a gateway. Built in the 1980s as a tax-equity measure to acknowledge the higher daily costs of living with a disability, it now functions as the certification engine for the federal disability benefit system. That includes the new Canada Disability Benefit — Ottawa's first serious attempt to reduce poverty among working-age Canadians with disabilities. If 84 percent of the people the CDB is meant to reach cannot pass through the DTC gate, the policy will not deliver on its core promise.
The report's framing is consistent with INCLUSIECON's broader argument that tax administration is benefit-delivery infrastructure, and that design choices made decades ago for one purpose now shape who can access programs designed for another. The fix does not require dismantling the DTC. It requires automatic certification for people already enrolled in CPP-D and provincial disability assistance, broader severity criteria, coverage of certification costs, and an investment in the navigator capacity that low-income applicants need to file successfully. Each is concrete, each is implementable, and each was on the table when the federal government tabled its Spring Economic Update in late April 2026.
Gillian's research sits at the intersection of public finance, tax administration, and income security. Co-founder of INCLUSIECON with Lindsay M. Tedds, she is the lead author of the forthcoming Tax Filing as State Administrative Infrastructure (Canadian Tax Journal), co-author of Income and Social Supports: An Inclusive Systems-Based Framework for Cash Transfer Design (Canadian Public Administration, 2026), and a regular contributor to the Institute for Research on Public Policy on automatic tax filing and benefit access.
The report surfaces three ideas that should anchor the policy conversation. First, that the DTC's role as a gateway was a path-dependent accumulation, not a deliberate design choice — and that retrofitting old tax instruments to deliver new benefits creates predictable failure points. Second, that intersectional outcomes matter for benefit-delivery design: women, people with mental-health and episodic disabilities, and low-income filers are not failing the certification process; the certification process is failing them. Third, that meaningful change is incremental and concrete: automatic certification for adjacent program enrolments, navigator funding, and broader severity definitions are the moves that would let benefits flow without rebuilding the underlying credit.