Canada: Provincial Court Rules Ontario Benefits Law Discriminates Against Alcoholics, Drug Addicts

An Ontario law that bars alcoholics and drug addicts from receiving long-term disability benefits violates the provincial Human Rights Code, the Ontario Divisional Court ruled last Friday. The ruling effectively strikes down a provision of the Ontario Disability Support Program enacted by the former Conservative government in 1997 that barred people from receiving long-term benefits if their "sole impairment" was addiction.

Last week's ruling was the latest in a 10-year legal struggle by two Ontario men, Robert Tranchemontagne and Norman Werbeski, who suffer from alcoholism. The pair were denied long-term assistance under the Disability Support Program and were instead found to be eligible only for Ontario Works benefits.

Unlike the disability program, the employment program requires recipients to be involved in "employment assistance activities." Ontario Works also offers substantially smaller benefits, $536 a month, compared to $959 a month under the disability program.

The pair lost when they appealed the ruling to the provincial Social Benefits Tribunal, but in 2006, the Canadian Supreme Court ordered the tribunal to reconsider the case with an eye toward seeing if the law violated the Human Rights Code. The tribunal did so, and found that the exception for addiction disability indeed violated the code.

The Ontario government appealed that ruling, and a hearing was held in December. There, government witnesses argued that almost all addicted people could work and that lower payments could provide an incentive for recovery. But medical experts for the two men retorted that addicts are in a better position to recover if their lives are stable, with low stress, and adequate income to support themselves.

The Ontario Divisional Court justices sided unanimously with the two men. The government failed to provide a "tenable justification" for its decision to treat addicts differently from other people with disabilities, wrote Justice Denise Bellamy for the court. The Ontario law "promotes a stereotypical attitude towards addicted persons. It suggests that those who do not suffer from an additional medically recognized disorder are not genuinely disabled, or in any case are not as disabled as persons with concurrent disorders," wrote Judge Bellamy.

"The Human Rights Code does not permit us to choose between the disabilities we like and those we do not," said attorney Lesli Bisgould. The Ontario government should now "move on" and not bother to appeal any further, she told the National Post.

Ontario is pondering whether to pursue the appeal, government lawyers said.