Thank you for the very thoughtful question.
One thing I mentioned previously was the CRA phone calls. They are federal public servants and those employees were not trained on how to deal with a bereaved person. One of them actually said to me, ”You must have registered him.” We didn't leave the hospital with a live baby. Why would I have registered him for benefits? It is just the thoughtlessness in the training for employees that occurs. It is the same with any of the services that happened.
We have friends who recently lost a four-year-old, and we had to be the ones to tell them that they needed to stop the Canada child benefit. The idea that we have these processes in place.... As a bereaved parent, unless you have someone telling you that, you wouldn't know that the benefit stops after six months or that this information is there. They didn't receive that from the hospital. There are a lot of processes in place where, as a public servant, I see that we can make improvements in sharing information and providing that information. Each health care system is separate. I understand that, but we have a responsibility as a government to provide information to Canadians.
I think that if we have processes in place, we need to make them clear and we need to not have them buried in a link on a website somewhere. This information needs to be provided front and centre to employees—and not just to employees. Actually, as an employee of the government, that's also something I could have received from my employer. I feel that there is a lot of room for improvement there.