At 55 years old, Maddie Mitton can’t afford food.
Some days she lives on cereal and peanut butter sandwiches.
“Most of the time I just go without, for food. I just don’t have it,” she said.
“I have to go to the food bank every two weeks because I can’t afford to buy the right foods.”
Mitton is disabled. Every day she wrestles with mental disabilities, from depression, anxiety and borderline personality disorder to PTSD, along with a slew of physical disabilities, like fibromyalgia, widespread pain in her bones and muscles that comes with sleep, memory or mood issues; sciatica, pain in the largest nerve in the body, which travels from the foot to the lower back; and degeneration of the spine, she said.
She has other back issues but couldn’t remember what they were called, she said.
“For me to bend over and pick something up is very painful. I can’t take a shower on my own, because if I fall in the shower and hit my head, I could get very injured,” Mitton said.
Mitton relies on disability income support payments from the government, but she says it’s not nearly enough money.
That’s why she and other members of ACORN, a housing advocacy group, rallied outside of the Assumption Place in Moncton on Friday. The group also held a rally at the same time outside of Jill Green’s office, the Minister of Social Development.
The group is calling for the province to increase disability income supports to $2078.
Right now, the income supports provide $11,016 a year, according to a news release from the group. That’s only $918 a month.
Mitton said she was excited to speak at the rally. She said she spoke out a few years ago about something wrong at her building and it prompted change, and she hopes something similar will happen again.
The group also wants the government to get rid of what they call “punitive clawbacks” to payments.
If someone getting disability payments has a job or other form of income, the government will assess how much the recipient will contribute to their own disability payments, according to the province’s website.
Mitton said it means people have to give back money to the government if they have a job, which often prevents them from making more than the maximum payment from the government.
ACORN also wants to end the role household income has in calculating the disability payments.
Because of that policy, Mitton said that if you are disabled and live with another person, then they often have to pay the most to support you, and you aren’t able to contribute much, if at all.
She said eliminating those two policies would help people living on disability support payments bring in more money.
“Even though you worked for it, you can’t keep it. They take it. But why [then] are we working?” said Mitton.
