Mr. Speaker, I rise tonight in adjournment proceedings to follow up on a question I asked in the House in October. In October, the House was seized with a number of tax-related issues. The finance minister was dealing with the backlash over the small business tax changes he had recklessly brought in during the summer without much forethought.
We were also becoming aware that the finance minister, after castigating small business owners all summer and talking about how business owners used complex corporate structures to reduce their taxes, had continued, through a complicated arrangement of a number of private numbered companies, to own shares in his publicly traded family business, Morneau Shepell, much to the surprise of everyone, including, presumably, his own Prime Minister.
Around that time, we also became aware that the Canada Revenue Agency, through a change made to its assessment process for the disability tax credit, was rejecting a full 80% of applicants with type 1 diabetes. This was in contrast to right up to May 2017, when approximately 80% of applicants who suffered from type 1 diabetes were approved.
On October 23, I asked the question we can see in Hansard. The answer from the minister that day was not adequate. The minister talked at that time of being in the process of hiring nurses to assess DTC applications. That did not really make any sense then and it still does not make any sense now. If the agency were capable of processing DTC applications without any problem in particular for type 1 diabetics who had been applying and had been approved 80% of the time for over 10 years, why all of a sudden, in May 2017, would a shortfall of nurses employed by the CRA have anything to do with what was going on? Subsequent events have revealed that this is nonsense. This was really a matter of the minister and/or employees in the CRA simply deciding to make it more difficult and to raise the bar for eligibility for type 1 diabetics.
Here we are. This is a government that has gaping holes in its budget and an out-of-control spending problem. It will go after any low-hanging fruit for additional revenue, including pursuing type 1 diabetics and single parents or any sort of angle to generate more revenue. We saw and heard talk again last week about retail and restaurant employees. However, it is really a spending problem and a case of misplaced priorities government-wide, made all the more bitter by the hypocrisy of the finance minister himself.