First of all, thank you for the question.
Although this is my first time appearing at committee as a minister, I certainly lived at committee for the last number of years.
First of all, I'd like to express, given the conversations we've had, how important the Canada disability benefit is. I recently met with my equivalent minister in Australia, a country that went through this and basically transformed their own system a number of years ago. The impact that's had on their citizens has been dramatic.
Part of the reason that we are embarking on the modernization of our benefit delivery systems is that we are dealing with old technologies that in a lot of cases. It's 60 years old for OAS, 50 years old for EI and 25 years old for CPP. Also, siloed departments don't necessarily speak to each other.
In order to tackle the problem that you're specifically talking about, we need to empower the de-siloization of departments so that we can actually have them share information among each other in a secure way and have the flexibility to make sure the policies that elected members of Parliament want to implement are actually implementable once that policy hits the ground.
The kinds of frustration that you talk about, especially if they affect vulnerable Canadians, disabled Canadians, are completely unacceptable. Sadly, we're in a position of making up for generations of technical neglect all at once, but I am certain that, working together, we're going to be able to overcome that and provide a benefits system that delivers to everybody who needs it.