The Montreal Gazette – Opinion: Canada’s quiet crisis in sibling caregiving 

As people with intellectual disabilities and autism live longer, families are expected to absorb the gap between need and support. When parents age or die, the responsibility does not disappear. It shifts — almost automatically — to brothers and sisters. This transfer of care is rarely planned, rarely supported and almost never acknowledged by public policy. 

Sibling caregiving is not incidental. It is structural. Canada’s disability supports are designed around the assumption that someone in the family will step in. And when that someone is a sibling, their labour is treated as natural, not as something that deserves recognition, compensation or relief.