Finance committee  Thank you, honourable Chair. Honourable parliamentarians, ladies and gentlemen, let me start by thanking you for the opportunity to speak to you today about the section of Bill C-74 concerning the medical expense tax credit for service dogs. I'm sure there are parliamentarians o

Finance committee  The media contacted me after budget day and asked what this meant in financial terms. My response was that it would be approximately $37.50 a month. Their incredulous response was, “You fought a five-and-a-half year war over a $1.23 a day?” No, I fought a war for equality and hum

Finance committee  The medical expense tax credit should be embedded inside the Income Tax Act and provide equality for a psychiatric service dog—and here I would suggest to the committee that we look toward dispensing with the use of the stigmatizing word “psychiatric”. “Veteran-assist service dog

Finance committee  The CRA doesn't have to go to VAC for those, because they're not going to any other department.

Finance committee  For example, they're not going to the health department to provide the credentialing for diabetic-alert dogs or seizure-alert dogs, and they're not going there for the Canadian National Institute for the Blind. In some cases, the Veterans Affairs issue is a little bit of a red he

Finance committee  What you're seeing with the annuitizing of the lump sum with a gender-based differential is what happens when you take a benefit from a defined benefit pension to a defined contribution pension. Once they make it a defined contribution pension by taking the amount of the lump sum

Finance committee  Thank you for your question. I regret that I'm not able to speak about this subject in French, so I will answer in English, if that's okay.

Finance committee  Part of the problem of whether or not we can clearly delineate whether the old benefit suite is better or worse than the new benefit suite depends on what some of the objectives are. Indeed, in the last question I answered, I mentioned the difference between defined benefit and d

Finance committee  The actual capital cost of the dog, depending on the organization from which you're acquiring a dog, is somewhere between $15,000 and $30,000. However, to put the ongoing operating and maintenance budget into purely budgetary terms, when you take a $3,000 sum and multiply it by t

Finance committee  In a lot of cases, the serious mental health issues we're dealing with are trauma-based injuries—traumatic brain injuries, post-traumatic stress injuries, and operational stress injuries. All of those injuries cause significant loss of future earnings capacity. In VAC's defence,

Finance committee  In reality there is a international standard that is out there and recognized. It's called the Assistance Dogs International standard and it also runs in conjunction with the IGDF standard, that of the International Guide Dog Federation. Probably the most advanced standard on a p

Finance committee  Well, actually the easiest move afoot is for Veterans Affairs Canada to contract with the B.C. government to use their standard, which will also be the Nova Scotia standard, to bring it across the country, translate it into French as appropriate and put in the inter-agency recipr

Finance committee  Yes, because currently the medical expense tax credit is available to all the other service dogs that are there. It's embedded in the ITA. You can see it. The sole exception is those dogs that we're using for mental health injuries. I'm avoiding using that “p” word on purpose bec

Finance committee  Well, we need a practical standard. The other side of this is that—and we have to be very careful here—we do not run the risk of just opening the floodgates and letting people run willy-nilly and hither and yon. For those of you who are familiar, last Wednesday in Quebec an IC

Veterans Affairs committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Five minutes is a bit of a surprise, considering that the notes I have are five to 10 minutes; however, we shall prevail. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for the opportunity to assist you in establishing the requirements for a federal service dog standard.