Thank you.

Thank you for being here from the Okanagan as well.

As David mentioned—and I'm sorry, but my service dog has decided that our time is up, and you may hear a little bit from him in the background—the co-operation between federal and provincial levels just doesn't exist, but we have excellent systems, by and large, in the provincial systems, in comparison to the federal government, for getting people to jump through the hoops to be awarded provincial disability assistance payments.

We believe, as do many other disability organizations, as do some provincial governments, that once you've jumped through that hoop, that's enough, and you should be automatically eligible for the Canada disability benefit. Because the government is adamant that the only list they have of disabled people is the disability tax credit, that may mean that those people are made automatically eligible for the disability tax credit. It sounds so simple that it just floors me that it can't happen.

Again, it comes to this lack of ability for different levels of government to talk to each other. These responsibilities to stay siloed, and there's also the lack of imagination and the lack of drive to want to make this happen. You know, everybody working on this at the CRA in the government should be so embarrassed and working desperately hard to work out how those extra million people get this benefit, and that simply isn't happening.

I spend my days working on this as a volunteer for my organization, and we spend our time trying to come up with every method that we can. Can we do rolling workshops? Somebody suggested to me that we can use the army medical corps to roll through and get people signed up for the disability tax credit.

It's like filling Okanagan Lake with a teaspoon instead of a firehose. The firehose is getting people automatically signed up once they've already jumped through significant hoops at the provincial, territorial and federal levels, including, as I understand it, the people who already get CPPD—the Canada pension plan disability—who are not automatically eligible for the Canada disability benefit. You're receiving a federal disability benefit, and you still do not become automatically eligible.

You can hear my passion for this. We are desperately letting down severely and very severely disabled people who live in poverty.

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