There's only so much you can push for in legislation. I think what I'm hearing from my colleagues, particularly from People First, is...and I know the minister has talked about this briefly before. Again, on day one if this is passed and gets royal assent, what I think Canadians with disabilities are looking for in the larger context is an agenda of accessibility and inclusion that would be around programming and services and investments. Those get into budgetary items, of course, and programming, which are not necessarily in Bill C-81.
There are limits to what you can do in the bill, but there are the ideas of investments in disability supports and services, whether it's for people who are deaf, hard of hearing or hearing impaired.... There are other kinds of investments in services and in labour market agreements that have been recently retooled for employment opportunities.
To really give this bill its best chance of success is in the larger context of investments in other policies and programs, many of which are provincial not federal, in fact. But where does the federal government have a role, whether it's through the enabling accessibility fund, which would be a very important way of...?
In my call for amending clause 7 and bringing in other entities, and when I talk about incentives...either some grants or contributions, or looking creatively at tax credits or tax measures that would provide incentives for employers on accessibility in a way that we haven't. We toy around with that with home modifications for seniors and people with disabilities. We've dipped into it that way, but why can't we do similar things around other incentives?
With the enabling accessibility fund and the opportunities fund, the disability tax credit, the RDSP, the registered disability savings plan, which is a fantastic public program in this country, and we're the first country in the world to bring in something like that, there's that larger context.
I might be criticizing parts of this bill. It has a lot of room for improvement. But I would also make a plea to the committee to make this a people's bill and a social policy-oriented piece of legislation, some of which could maybe be in here, but a lot of it's going to be things that parallel and complement this. This is the right committee to be doing that.