Thanks for that question. It's something that keeps me up at night.
The COVID disability advisory group, as I said, was invaluable. In fact, I met with them 14 times over a period of months, trying to make sure that we were connecting in the spirit of Nothing Without Us, with the community on the ground. They advised Health Canada. They advised the Minister of Communities. They really had tentacles into our entire pandemic response.
The big lesson learned, as I said, is that as much as we wanted to get direct support out quickly to our citizens with disabilities, we really didn't actually have a way to identify or directly pay all of our citizens with disabilities. Disability supports fall under provincial jurisdiction historically, and we know that we need to do better as a federal government in terms of addressing that. We have a way to pay families. We have a way to pay seniors. We have a tax credit, the DTC, that serves, as I said, a gatekeeping function of sorts. We also have some programs through VAC and some programs through ESDC with the CPP disability, but really what we need and what we're committed to do is directly identify and interact with our citizens with disabilities, not through the tax system, but through an eligibility system based on a moderate and respectful understanding of disability. That's what we're going to do.
That's certainly what has been called for for a long time, and I'm very excited to embark upon that work. We're going to transition the disability advisory group—I think I might scoop in my own announcement here—into a permanent group, but they're going to keep working with us to help us make good on our promises around disability inclusion.