Thank you.
I'm not going to chase the security angle of this, because I think it's been covered. I want to understand how what you found might in some significant way impede the delivery of service to citizens.
For example, in the last year or so, through conversation and in listening to people who come into my office, I've discovered there are senior retirees, literally hundreds of thousands of them, who aren't accessing the programs they're qualified to receive. It seems to me there has to be a better way of informing those folks that there's a program and they don't have to live in poverty. They could access it, they paid into it, and they should automatically be getting it.
If we decided as a government to move to a system where we in fact began to be proactive on the CPP, OAS, GIS, etc., would the problems you've discovered with the SIN process and the program support that, or would there be a problem in doing it?
I have a further question on this. I'm wracking my brain to understand why we didn't move to this previously. I think they do it in Quebec. In Quebec they actually contact people to make sure they're getting what they need.
Maybe they're not doing it because they don't have the confidence in the SIN number that they should have—and by “they”, I mean government—to actually move to begin to deliver that kind of program across the country.