Thank you very much for the opportunity to present today.
JDRF is the leading charitable funder of research to cure and prevent type 1 diabetes. I am joined today by Angie Sullivan, who is a mother of a child with type 1 diabetes.
Until 1921, when Canadians Sir Frederick Banting and Charles Best discovered insulin, type 1 diabetes was a death sentence. Thanks to their landmark discovery, the 300,000 Canadians living with type 1 diabetes today not only survive but thrive. On the eve of the 100-year anniversary of insulin's discovery, we're here to offer recommendations to improve the lives of Canadians who live with type 1 diabetes today.
Type 1 diabetes remains a daily struggle for Canadians. It's a relentless, 24-hour-a-day, 7-day-a-week disease, requiring constant monitoring and attention. Even with the most advanced glucose-monitoring technology now available, there's a constant risk of dangerously high blood sugar, leading to costly long-term complications, and life-threatening low blood sugar, which may lead to confusion, coma and even death.
To improve the lives of Canadians with type 1 diabetes, we have four recommendations for the committee. Our first recommendation is that the government should support the Canadian Institutes of Health Research's “100 years of insulin” proposal. This proposal would leverage nearly $50 million in research commitments by CIHR and its partners, including JDRF, with $50 million in additional funding to create a $100 million fund. To mark 100 years with $100 million would be a timely tribute to Banting and Best, accelerate Canadian discoveries to defeat diabetes and certainly keep our leadership position in this field of research.
As recommended by the Standing Committee on Health, our standing recommendation is that Canada implement a national diabetes strategy, called Diabetes 360°, with specific outcomes for type 1 diabetes, including new funding for research in areas such as prevention. An investment of $150 million over seven years will put us on the path to ending the burden of diabetes for Canadians and will save billions in downstream health care costs.
Diabetes is a costly disease, not only for our health care system but for individuals and families. Depending on which province you live in and what type of benefits package you have through your employer, Canadians with diabetes may be out of pocket as much as $15,000 annually. Our third recommendation, fitting for the hundredth anniversary of the discovery by Banting and Best, is that the various types of insulin used by Canadians today should be included in the formulary under the national pharmacare program. JDRF has a concern that the emergency medicines list referenced by the advisory council on the implementation of national pharmacare does not contain the types of long-lasting and fast-acting insulins used by Canadians today.
The final recommendation we would like to make this year is to request that the government permanently fix the disability tax credit, or the DTC, so that it actually works for Canadians. JDRF has advocated in the past for reducing the number of hours needed, from 14 to 10, to qualify for the DTC. A similar approach was proposed by Mr. Kmiec in the fairness for Canadians with disabilities act that he introduced last session. Recently, the disability advisory committee appointed by the Minister of National Revenue proposed an even better solution: that qualification be automatic for all Canadians who need life-sustaining therapy, including insulin, which is certainly a life-sustaining therapy.
To speak more on the impact of the disability tax credit, I will now turn things over to Angie.