About $950 my helpful member from Nova Scotia points out. Really what this constitutes is a once a year opportunity for these low income, disabled people to perhaps make one large investment for which it is difficult to save, be it furniture, housing issues or anything. However it really does make a difference in their lives.
Sometimes it is not even the disabled person who benefits from the tax credit. It is the family or the caregiver of the disabled person. There is very little recognition for live-in caregivers, be they parents, family members or relatives. The mother and father of a severely disabled person incur a great amount of additional costs in their day to day lives in caring for that family member. If they are not in a position where the disabled person is institutionalized, they get very little credit or recognition for the extra financial burden and the extra time and work it takes to keep the individual out of an institution. This disability tax credit is one way we can recognize the contribution they make to the broader community by being a full time caregiver.
Recommendation eight is one which I had highlighted. The committee recommends that, beginning with the tax year 2002, the government pay the cost for the services of a medical practitioner who provides the CCRA with any additional information beyond completing the form T2201. The committee is saying that in the eventuality if any new applicants, from the tax year 2002 on, need to get supplementary medical evidence or a letter from a doctor, this would be paid for by the Government of Canada. This takes the burden away.
The committee is saying that the upfront costs should not be a barrier to accessing this program because these people are already poor and marginalized. It would be completely unfair if it were also limiting them from availing themselves of what help was available to them because of the upfront costs. This would include any charge for providing the CCRA with supplementary information about an individual's disability tax credit recertification or a medical appraisal for the purposes of appealing the denial of a claim.
For greater clarity, appellants would not be able to claim these costs for providing any information beyond a completed form T2201 until their disability tax claim is approved. Therefore, if the claim were approved, then the government would pay for the extra medical advice. I suppose if the claim were rejected and the person was not deemed to be disabled to the degree that they would deserve the tax credit, the government would not have to pay. It sounds like a reasonable compromise.
The committee also recommended that to use health care resources more efficiently and to reduce potential costs to disability tax claim claimants, the recertification process should be streamlined to easily identify the instances where an individual's disability had remained unchanged or had worsened. They would view this as less of a burden on the health care system if we could streamline the way we observe the ongoing health care condition of the disabled person who is claiming the tax credit and monitor whether they remain unchanged, or if they worsen or in rare cases if they improve.
I will close simply by saying that I really believe that the letter of October 19, 2001 was a horrible mistake. I would like to believe that we would take steps to remedy that before the end of this session of the House. That is why twice in recent days we have seen members of parliament, under routine proceedings, move a motion of concurrence of this report, to try to get it moving forward so that we are not bogged down with this thing gathering dust.
An injustice has been done. There was a terrible unfairness. The government seems willing to apologize. It should get that letter of apology out to those 106,000 disability tax credit claimants. Anyone who incurred a cash outlay trying to requalify for that tax credit should be reimbursed promptly. This should happen before the end of this session of parliament