Thank you.
I agree that vulnerable people are valuable and they are made vulnerable by the systems we have in place. A policy system is a choice, so we can choose different and better.
One of the recommendations in our submission, which is described in detail and which I do want to highlight, is with respect to a supplement to the Canada child benefit. We know that the Canada child benefit worked to reach families and children in poverty when it was first implemented, but there has not been an increase in the base amounts for that benefit. Our annual research shows that it is stagnating. It's losing its power to reach children, especially those who are in deep poverty. Even with it being indexed to inflation, the child benefit is not reaching those families who are on social and disability assistance programs. It's just flatlined now. A supplement targeted towards those families would drastically and immediately reduce rates of child poverty.
The other recommendation I will quickly highlight is that anybody who does not file a personal income tax form does not get any benefits, and oftentimes those people are very marginalized. A report last year from the Auditor General found that CRA struggles to reach hard-to-reach people. We are asking the federal government to research and pilot a parallel cash transfers program that would work through community-based organizations such as Campaign 2000 members that have relationships in communities with these folks to get cash benefits to people who are left outside of the personal income tax system.
In our submission, we also have recommendations around affordable housing, full pharmacare that includes medicare and vision care, and access to child care, and we're building out a national system to make sure that child care is affordable for people who really can't pay $10 a day so that there's a zero-to-$10-a-day sliding scale fee. It's all written out in our budget submission to you.