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Healthcare Reflections
The Art of Taking Up Space
I laid charging in bed. Body still, eyes closed.
Saving my energy for the flight.
The home nurse was hanging IV lines when she heard my prof ask her question. “What does healthcare mean to you?”
My eyes peeked open and met hers. Her eyebrows rose in irony.
(Was it irony? Alanis has forever ruined my confidence.)
A burst of air escaped my lips.
If I had more energy, it would have been a chortle.
“Really?” She chuckled. “You are being asked that while a home care nurse is hanging meds?”
We’ve formed an easy banter over the last six months.
Hired on some ring of the healthcare chain, she comes to my house on Tuesdays and drips hundreds of thousands of dollars of medication into my veins.
About The Art of Taking Up Space
Life has bumped me through some hard seasons.
Both glad and surprised to be through the worst of them.
Nurse, doula, university student, mom, public speaker, and disability justice advocate, currently living on the unceded, unsurrendered Territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation, in the Canadian city we now know as Ottawa, I’m just trying to figure out how we can make changes to the systems so that it’s a little easier for everybody.
If you have any ideas - drop me a line - would love to hear from you.
-Erica Zacharias
DISABILITY JUSTICE
Advocate
Navigating ODSP
Did you know that the average person receiving disability support in Canada (either through federal supports like CPP-D or provincial supports like Ontario’s ODSP) is receiving a monthly income 30% below the poverty line?
...Pardon?
30%
Below.
The Poverty line.
Thankfully - people in charge agreed this was a problem, so a bill passed unanimously in 2022 that told Canadians that people who are living with disabilities would not be left in poverty.
That's how the Canada Disability Benefit came to be. It rolled out in 2025.
However, at it's max amount, it only offers an extra $200 per month.
Let's agree that $200 isn't lifting anyone from 30% below the poverty line to anywhere near it.
Not when the average, annual income of an unattached single person in Canada is around $15,000 - $20,000 a year.
So - we need to #BetterTheBenefit.
Disability Without Poverty has made communicating with your MP pretty straight forward.
Get a quick overview about the Canada Disability Benefit and check out their information, instructions, and templates.
Leave their website with a little more knowledge than you had before and consider contacting your MP.
You aren't broken. The system is broken.
This panel, part of the Virtual Research Symposium hosted by Disability without Poverty, highlighted how Navigating ODSP is overwhelming and often inaccessible, with systemic barriers like inadequate income, complex eligibility rules, and inequities that disproportionately affect marginalized recipients.
Speakers emphasized both the structural failures of the program and the need for practical knowledge and community strategies to survive within it.
Panelists:
• Asif Khan (Income Security Advocacy Centre)
• Camille Deondra Stewart (ODSP recipient, aka Minnie St. Claire)
• Trevor Manson (ODSP Action Coalition)
• moderated by Erica Zacharias
