You're right. Budget 2025 announced a couple of measures on automatic federal benefits, the predominant one being that the CRA will start to offer prefilled returns for the 2026 tax year—in spring 2027—to one million lower-income Canadians. This will scale up to five million lower-income Canadians for the 2028 tax year—in spring 2029. Basically, an individual will be able to go into their CRA My Account, and the CRA will present them with a simplified version of their tax return that includes the information the CRA has on file for them. The individual will be able to modify certain fields as necessary and then submit the return directly to the CRA. In that way, it'll be a quick assessment, hopefully. The CRA will determine benefit entitlements upon that filing.
