A new $150 one-time payment lands automatically this month for anyone receiving the Canada Disability Benefit (CDB), under regulatory amendments that took legal effect September 1. Service Canada says the money is meant to help offset the cost of getting a Disability Tax Credit (DTC) certificate — the document required to qualify for the CDB in the first place. No application is needed; recipients don’t have to do anything to get it.
That much has been widely reported since the change was published in the Canada Gazette on July 1. What’s had far less attention is a Canada Revenue Agency rule sitting one step removed from this story: a law specifically designed to cap what claimants pay to get that same DTC certificate has been suspended by a court injunction for nearly five years, with no resolution in sight.
Why the $150 Exists in the First Place
The CDB itself launched in July 2025 as a supplement of up to about $200 a month, or roughly $2,400 a year, for low-income Canadians with disabilities. From the start, disability advocates called the amount inadequate — Cardus and other groups have noted it works out to roughly $6.71 a day, and Inclusion Canada said the final regulations “miss the mark” on reducing disability poverty. University of Victoria professor Michael Prince resigned from a federal disability advisory group in 2024 over what he called a benefit that is “too low” and “too complicated to access.”
Eligibility for the CDB runs through the DTC, a decades-old tax measure that requires a doctor or other medical practitioner to certify the severity of an applicant’s condition on a form known as the T2201. Advocates have long argued that certification step is itself a financial and bureaucratic barrier, since many applicants turn to paid specialists to help navigate it. Ottawa’s $150 payment is explicitly framed as addressing that cost.
The Fee Cap That Never Took Effect
What the announcements haven’t mentioned is that Parliament already passed a law meant to control exactly those DTC-related costs. The Disability Tax Credit Promoters Restrictions Act, and regulations that followed in 2021, set a maximum fee of $100 that a for-profit “promoter” could charge to help someone complete a DTC application, with built-in inflation adjustments starting in 2025.
The regulations never took effect. Days after they were finalized, a company called True North Disability Services won an injunction from the B.C. Supreme Court in November 2021, arguing the fee cap was unconstitutional, and a judge froze the rules pending a full hearing. According to the Canada Revenue Agency’s own current guidance, the regulations “are suspended until further notice” — a status that, as of this September, has now persisted for nearly five years with no trial date reported. Doctors’ own fees for filling out the medical portion of the form were never covered by the cap to begin with, since the law only targets non-medical promoters.
In practice, that means some DTC applicants can still legally be charged well above $100 by firms that help file claims, historically on a contingency basis tied to a percentage of the refund recovered — the exact kind of arrangement regulators cited as the reason for writing the fee cap in the first place.
A Patchwork That Still Depends on Where You Live
The value of the new $150 payment is also uneven for reasons that have nothing to do with the DTC. Because the CDB is a federal payment layered on top of provincial disability and welfare systems, several provinces have committed to not clawing it back from recipients’ provincial benefits, while Alberta has said it will treat the CDB as income and reduce provincial support accordingly. A $150 federal top-up, like the underlying monthly benefit, is worth less in practice to a recipient whose province claws it back than to one whose province does not.
None of this means the $150 payment isn’t real help for the hundreds of thousands of Canadians receiving the CDB. But it lands inside a system where the specific cost it’s meant to offset — what claimants pay to get certified in the first place — is still governed by a consumer-protection law that has never actually been allowed to operate. Whether the True North case finally reaches a resolution, and whether Ottawa revisits the fee cap if it does, will determine whether $150 is a one-time gesture or the start of a more durable fix.
via Daily Hive. Additional sourcing from the Canada Gazette, the Canada Revenue Agency, and Advisor.ca.
