Thank you for your question.
The United States gives us a benchmark for what we should be doing. In the United States there is an organization called the National Community Tax Coalition. The coalition is a series of towns in the United States where the cities have come together, realizing that a lot of the low-income communities in their midst are not accessing their entitlement. They've created organizations to help people access them. The latest information I have on this is that in about one hundred U.S. cities these organizations have been generating about $20 billion to low-income communities. It's been going on for 30 years.
Of course, there's a program in the United States that makes that amount bigger. They have what they call the earned income tax credit. The Canadian counterpart is what we just established in this past budget, the working income tax benefit program, which committed half a billion dollars over four years and is likely to grow.
How do we make sure people get their entitlement? It's a combination of things. You need to be able to put on the ground, through the agencies serving the poor, the capacity to identify who is missing out on something. Then you need to be able to refer them to an agency that can help them access these things. Their level is to look at the federal agencies that are delivering these programs, like Service Canada and so on, and look at the effectiveness of their service delivery programs.
My research shows there's a problem, so we need to look at what the federal organizations are doing.
The next level is to create these community-based service delivery mechanisms to make sure people are getting it. These agencies serving the poor have a key role to play. They have to get the in-house capacity to at least be able to screen who needs help in this area and refer them to the right places.
Those are the three levels that we can do.