Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to speak to this bill today. I just wanted to compliment the member who brought this forward because of the issues facing Canadians who are living with disabilities and dealing with issues on a day-to-day basis that certainly I have not had to.

We need to ensure that we are doing everything we can as a government and as parliamentarians to ensure that we are making life easier. This bill will continue the work done under the previous Conservative government to centralize information across government and to reduce red tape as a whole. This is incredibly important and is something very close to home.

When I was about 10 years old, almost on this date, January 30, my mother was walking across the street, and she was struck by a vehicle. She was disabled, probably permanently, in many ways, with both mental and physical disabilities. She has healed in some ways since then.

I can tell members about the difficulties families and individuals face when they first start to figure out how to re-evaluate their situations when there are major life changes. It is not all people with disabilities. Some are born disabled, and some deal with similar types of occurrences. However, there are life-changing incidents that happen, whether it is to those who support persons with disabilities or others who come in and out of their lives, that affect the person's ability to move forward.

This bill would bring all the information the Government of Canada has to one place to ensure that all the forms a person needs to fill out are in one single place. It would do nothing but help those people who are on the ground.

Often we think that we come up with better ideas and solutions here in Parliament or as a government than what is requested on the street by people who are dealing with these issues, the people who are living with disabilities. As we have travelled across the country, whether we were in Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Toronto, Montreal, or other places, meeting with groups that are advocating on behalf of persons with disabilities, the number one thing we have heard is that it is too complicated. People have to go here for this and have to go there for that. Getting it all in one place at one time is a very difficult thing to do, specifically for people who are dealing with these types of situations. On top of that, a person may have a mental or physical disability to deal with, which can often get in the way of being able to accurately fill out the information or interpret the information and return it.

It is a very important matter to make the process as easy and simple as possible for those people who are dealing with disabilities, as well as their family members, support workers, etc. Red tape is a major issue for families and those who are dealing with a disability.

I have one personal story that aligns with this bill. It is something that affected my own family. When my brother was 18, he decided that he wanted to go to college and he wanted to work. He was in high school, going every day from 8:00 until 2:30 and then going to work every day, from 3:00 until 11:00, at Pizza Hut. Every day he would go to work and come home.

Where I am from, we respect those people. They are working hard to break the cycle of poverty. They are working hard to create a future, to create opportunity for themselves. The result was that the funding for my mother was cut off, because my brother was saving too much money to go to university or college. Therefore, we ended up in a situation where the cycle of poverty was essentially enforced by the same government that intended to end it. The intent was to provide support, not break it.

What we end up with in government are rules made, regulations created, and responses made off the cuff to situations that bureaucrats or government members see.

The result is that those regulations are enforced by those who work for the Government of Canada, the provincial governments, the school boards, or municipal governments, and in doing so, they are merely enforcing regulations or other things that are in place, which end up enforcing this cycle of poverty or allowing these injustices to continue. Therefore, it is very important that we get the obstacles out of the way and ensure as much ease as possible for those people who are seeking to improve their situation.

This bill would begin to make life a bit easier, making sure that all information can be found in one place, by creating a single, comprehensive application that accesses all programs for the federal government. My hope is that through this process we will be able to align not just all of the federal government application processes in one place, and it is not just about the rejig of Canada.ca and everything coming in through one portal, etc., but that we work with our provincial and municipal counterparts to ensure that there is a process for persons who are dealing with disabilities.

A lot of these funding formulas have overlaps between federal and provincial jurisdictions and the effects of one application process and result will end up affecting the ability of another government to proceed. Even within the federal government we have programs that depend on one another. If people are accepted for one program, then they can be accepted for another, like the disability tax credit and the savings plan. In order to be able to pull up the savings plan, one has to first be accepted for the disability tax credit.

This bill would continue the work of the previous government, which introduced a landmark registered disability savings plan that helps parents and grandparents of children with severe disabilities contribute to their child's financial security. The previous government also invested $218 million per year for labour market agreements for persons with disabilities to assist provinces in improving the employment situation of Canadians with disabilities.

It is important to remember that we need our federal government to continue to implement, hand in hand, with other jurisdictions to ensure that the taxpayer, as there is only one taxpayer, is able to access all programs equally. The previous government invested $30 million annually in the opportunities fund to help persons with disabilities prepare for and obtain employment. It supported caregivers by recognizing their enormous contribution through tax incentives.

Canadians with disabilities are already struggling because of the increased cost of living under the Liberal government. We have seen it already with the changes it made to the disability tax credit. We know that the cost of living is going to continue going up with the introduction and implementation of a carbon tax across this country. Those two items will have a debilitating effect on the ability of persons with disabilities, specifically those who are struggling in terms of financial means, to respond to and create a future that is full of opportunity.

I wanted to finish with some of the things I heard when we were out meeting with groups across the country.

Persons with disabilities are not looking for the government to provide everything for them. They are looking for the opportunity to succeed, the opportunity for employment, and the opportunity to access the programs that will help them reach the successes they are looking for. What we see here is a bill being introduced that will do just that. It will simplify. It will make it easier. It will make it a better process for persons with disabilities to be successful and to work with their government in the future. For that, I know we will support the bill, and I thank the member for introducing it.

Alex Nuttall

Transcript

Private Members' Business

Discussions (0)