Madam Speaker, welcome to Adjournment Proceedings, where I will be taking up a question I asked on June 4 of this year. As members will recall, Parliament had only recently resumed. I had intended to ask a different question, but someone had called my office and caught my wonderful chief of staff on the phone. As the caller was explaining that she was living with disabilities and could not figure out how she was going to feed her children, she started to cry on the phone.
When the minister responded to me, she made the assumption that this was a constituent of mine, but I do not know where Tina lives. She called our office and changed my question that day because I just had to know.
We had been working so hard in this place and in the previous Parliament. My friend, the former member for Kitchener Centre, Mike Morrice, had worked incredibly hard with other advocates for people with disabilities from all sides of the House. We worked to try to get a commitment and the legislation through to ensure that we would have a Canada disability benefit. We knew that it was about to start being mailed out at that point, in July.
There was sadness at the tragedy of it all because we had been promised by ministers in the previous government that when we got the bill through it would lift Canadians with disabilities up out of poverty. However, hearing Tina, living with disabilities, crying on the phone because she could not figure out how to feed her children, I knew that the cheques that were going to start going out in the month of July would max out at $200 a month. That was not going to lift people up out of poverty.
Therefore, my question that day was this: Now that the Prime Minister was raising the urgency of having nation-building projects, could the government, please, not make lifting all Canadians with disabilities out of poverty a nation-building project?
The answer I received was not from a minister responsible for disabilities, and the minister who responded, actually the Minister of Jobs, misnamed the program that I was talking about. It is the Canada disability benefit, not credit. However, the response was not adequate. That is why we sometimes send in slips and say we would like to discuss this in the Adjournment Proceedings. Yes, as the minister said, it is important to work with provinces and territories to ensure that money will not be clawed back, but there needs to be much more done by the federal government.
For example, we need to increase the benefit amount. That is pretty basic. We need to broaden eligibility so people can automatically get their Canada disability benefit if they are already receiving other disability-related benefits. It should be individual income, not household income, that determines when the Canada disability benefit is sent. It is not the income of the people they live with; it is for them. We need to raise the income threshold and the working income exemption. We need to do these things to ensure that the Canada disability benefit lifts people with disabilities out of poverty. We should make sure there are no clawbacks and no reductions.
I am still proud of the work that we did, and I want to again mention Mike Morrice. More than half of the amendments accepted to the bill were his amendments, including the one to ensure that this benefit be indexed to inflation. However, if they index $200 to inflation, they are not going very far.
I will wrap up here and hope for a better answer tonight and a real sign of commitment.