Mr. Speaker, it helps the community by giving more independence and more community involvement to individuals who sometimes have been marginalized. In this day and age, when we can do anything to ensure that individuals who have a diagnosis of some sort are no longer marginalized, if it is giving them a dog, ensuring they have the services they need, ensuring they get the funding that they need, then we as parliamentarians need to start looking at doing that.
However, when it comes to the specific use of service animals, we have seen numerous cases of individuals having their lives changed. Individuals who go from having vision and sight to losing their vision and becoming blind or having a visual impairment, they get their dog and they get their freedom and their life back, as they say. They can get back out in the community, get back on public transit, get out and do grocery shopping, things that we overlook and sometimes take for granted.
As I said, I am so pleased to see individuals with autism now making huge strides because of the support they are getting from service animals.