The first consideration we have is the authority to use a social insurance number.
It may be helpful to explain in layman's terms how the current process works. If an individual passes, the death certificate is filled out by the funeral director. The death certificate is sent to the vital statistics agency of the province. That information is then verified and uploaded into the social insurance register.
What happens then is that the programs we have now update their programs electronically. We receive the electronic link from the province. The programs that use the social insurance number, for example, the Canada pension plan and the old age security program, update their programs electronically by using the updated information in the social insurance register. Currently that process is only limited to those programs and departments that are authorized to collect the social insurance number. To be able to expand this to other programs, one of the major considerations would be that we would have to expand the authority to use the social insurance number to other programs and departments.