Mr. Speaker, on behalf of the NDP caucus I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak to the motion to move concurrence in this report. I wish to compliment my hon. colleague from the Bloc for raising this issue today and making a real effort to have this issue move forward prior to the summer recess.
The House of Commons is about to adjourn within the next 24 hours and this important piece of business will be left dangling. When there is rare unanimity at a standing committee for such an issue it is a shame that it should lay dormant and gather dust when it should move forward with these important recommendations.
I wish to compliment the critic for the NDP, the member for Dartmouth who sat on the committee, for putting forward some of the meaningful recommendations contained in the report. She spoke passionately and eloquently to this issue when she moved a similar motion the other day.
It is clear to any observer and any member of parliament who has been asked to deal with this issue that for persons with disabilities the letter of October 19, 2001, was one of the most callous, mean-spirited and insensitive things we have seen the Liberal government do. To their credit Liberal members on the standing committee realize this. I do not believe there was any malice or forethought that went into it. It was one of those insensitive oversights, and members on the standing committee were willing to remedy it.
The recommendations were straightforward. It was recommended that another letter be sent out to the 106,000 Canadians who received the first letter with an apology from the government for being callous and insensitive to their needs. Compensation should be offered to those same people because many of them did scramble to seek new medical recommendations from doctors to prove they were still disabled to the point where they would qualify. We have heard many stories from people indicating that doctors do not write this kind of letter free of charge anymore. If someone were to request that kind of letter it could cost between $30 to $120, which for a person living on a limited income with a disability could be a huge barrier.
The members for Dartmouth and Sackville--Musquodoboit Valley--Eastern Shore cited examples of individuals in their home province. One individual was a quadriplegic in a wheelchair who moved his wheelchair by blowing through a straw. It is a sensitive device. This guy has been in that situation for many years and nothing has changed in his personal life that would indicate that his disability had lessened in any way. He was one of the people who received the letter.
We heard stories involving double amputees. Nothing changed in their lives either that would make them any less disabled this year than last. We heard of people who were legally blind receiving these letters as well as people with Down's Syndrome. For those of us who are a bit jaded about these things, it seemed the government was doing its best to minimize its expenses on this file.
Even if 5,000 of those 106,000 Canadians could not or would not go through the necessary steps to attain a new medical certificate and fill out the required forms, the government would have saved giving the disability tax credit to those 5,000 people. That is petty, cheap and nickle and diming, and taking advantage of vulnerable people. There are many reasons why disabled people might fail to attain the medical certificate. Their disability might make it more difficult for them to visit a medical doctor to have a medical report drawn up.
We feel that the House should pass concurrence in this report and begin implementing some of the thoughtful recommendations developed by the committee. The member from Kamouraska walked us through many of those changes. He made some other interesting points that I would like to comment on and concur with.
He pointed out that the government's treatment of the disability tax credit and seeking to minimize its liabilities by hopefully cutting more people off reminded him of the government's treatment of the guaranteed income supplement file. The government knew of 380,000 Canadians who qualified for the guaranteed income supplement but it said that those senior citizens never applied and therefore they would not be eligible for the supplement.
For senior citizens to qualify for the guaranteed income supplement they have to be living on modest means. We are talking about an income of about $12,000 to be eligible to qualify for the supplement. It would give seniors a further $5,000 per year in supplementary income. That makes a huge difference in the quality of life of an elderly senior citizens living in poverty because $12,000 a year is true poverty.
The government knew who these people were by virtue of their income tax returns. It identified that these people were of an age and of an income level that they would be eligible for this funding but it chose not to do so. When pressed the government said it would be a breach of privacy if it used the information it gathered from their income tax returns to tell HRDC to give them the guaranteed income supplement. Can members imagine, a breach of privacy?
Frankly, this would be one situation where virtually all seniors in that position would be happy to have their privacy breached if it meant getting the income they richly deserve from the program that was supposed to give it to them.
I represent a low income neighbourhood in downtown Winnipeg Centre. A lot of low income seniors gravitate there because the rents are cheaper. We estimated there were as many as 5,000 to 7,000 seniors in my riding alone who would have been getting an extra $5,000 per year. That could make the difference between eating and not eating when one is at that low level of income.
I appreciated the hon. member from Kamouraska pointing out that there is a parallel, theme, motif and miserliness on behalf of the Liberal government that seems to be manifesting itself in these programs that are designed to affect the most vulnerable and most marginalized.
He made another good point that I would like to paraphrase. He said that society ultimately will not be judged by the might of its armies, grandeur of its tall buildings or the monuments it builds. Society will be judged by future generations on how it deals with its most vulnerable and the equity issues. Those are the things for which it will be noted and that it will be judged by.
In the case of the disability tax credit, the government gets a great big fat F for failure in terms of fair and equitable treatment. I have yet to see another example of such a callous, mean-spirited and insensitive act as that letter being sent to 106,000 people.
There was another thing that was pointed out by another member of parliament. It reminded him that we seem willing to give tax loopholes to corporations but little tax credits to the most vulnerable. It seems to be beyond the government or it is not something it wants to expand.
One hon. member mentioned family trusts being tax deductible. It is more than that. Operation loophole that we just went through involved the Bronfman family moving $2 billion worth of family trust money out of the country without paying any capital gains tax on it and the federal government chose not to go after it. That was about $750 million worth of taxes that would have been paid. It waved that off without even going after it in any kind of aggressive way.
Yet it will nickle and dime the disabled in this program, the poorest and most vulnerable people in our society. It will squeeze them for the little bit of a tax credit that they receive and it is willing to let the Bronfmans walk out of the country with $750 million of unpaid taxes. That is a glaring contradiction that other hon. members have pointed out.
I wish to cite some of the recommendations that have great merit. A second letter should be sent out immediately, as soon as the motion to concur in this report is finished in the House, and hopefully passed. We would hope that a letter would be sent out to every individual who received the October 19, 2001, letter that asked them to be recertified as disabled.
The CCRA should apologize for the tone of the previous letter, provide a full explanation as to why it thought it was justified in requesting the recertification and any individual who shelled out $30 to $120 to comply with the letter should be reimbursed. As soon as they produce the receipt, they should be compensated for having to get a new medical certificate. We have reason to believe many thousands of Canadians did comply. When someone receives a letter from their government asking them to do something they will co-operate and do it. Those who could, did.
However there is also a recommendation that no new requests for recertification should be sent to individuals who have claimed the disability tax credit in whole or in part during the period 1986 to 1996 until the form is redesigned. The hon. member for Medicine Hat explained some of the problems with the current design of the form and the amendments necessary. As he has said, there are medical conditions that are intermittent and that may plateau off at a certain level and then spike or drop down. Therefore it is very difficult to fit the language that one has to qualify. It has to be prolonged for a period of more than 12 months and so on. A person may have a type of condition that is devastating for a few months and then, improves or plateaus off, et cetera.
There also needs to be language implemented to more properly address persons with mental illnesses. Sometimes mental illnesses are such that the symptoms, which present themselves in a variety of ways, make it difficult for a person to hold steady employment. That person is disabled in the truest sense of the word. However mental illness is so often misunderstood. We believe, and one of the recommendations of the committee is, that language should be put into the application document that would reflect the issues facing persons with mental illness.
We also note that there is language in the form that is just poorly written to the point that people were being turned down, not because they did not meet the terms but because the language in the application was so flawed. They really should have had a lawyer scan it. An example of that language is a person who “thinking, perceiving or remembering” and “feeding or dressing oneself”. This deals with mental competencies issues like Alzheimer's disease. To be eligible, one would have to have trouble with all of those things.
It was felt by the committee members, who were viewing this in a more favourable light for the applicant, that by saying that if one had difficulty perceiving or remembering or feeding or dressing oneself, many people who had those problems would have qualified in that case. I hate to think how many people have been turned down over the years based on the flawed language in the document.
Another recommendation is that a letter should be sent to people who were recently turned down and failed to qualify. They should be asked to reapply under the language of the new forms. They may find that they do qualify and that they are disabled to the point where they deserve the disability tax credit because the flawed language in the old document kept them from getting the benefits they deserve.
Many of the other recommendations are technical. I do not know that it is necessary for us to go through them one by one. However it is enough to say that form T2201 drastically needs to be redrafted and rewritten with the view of making the program more accessible not less accessible. It almost seems that this program is designed to trip people up, to keep them off benefits and not help them avail themselves of the disability tax benefits they deserve.
We should also point out that this is a very small amount of money. This is not a monthly allowance or an income revenue stream. This is simply a small disability tax write-off at the end of the year. I believe it often amounts to $800 to $1,200.