Public Accounts committee  Very briefly, the agents here are primarily putting in the data. They are doing data entry, and based on the data that's in the system, the IT system then says that everything is there and that therefore this individual is entitled. They do exercise some judgment when there are

Public Accounts committee  It is.

Public Accounts committee  Generally speaking, it's very similar across provinces and the one territory. We're working with the two other territories that aren't part of this to try to put in place those systems and the information-sharing agreements to get the right information so we can be confident of g

Public Accounts committee  Generally it's in a secure digital form.

Public Accounts committee  Madam Chair, if I may answer, it is not use it or lose it. If you're late in filing, you just get your CCB later, so as long as an individual does file, he or she will get those amounts going back up to 10 years.

Public Accounts committee  Madam Chair, I'd be happy to contribute to this. Let me give you a couple of examples that we deal with on a regular basis. You can imagine that a woman in a shelter for battered women, for example, may not be able to go back to the house to get the information they need in orde

Public Accounts committee  Perhaps I could turn to my colleague Heather Daniels with respect to the privacy-sharing rules. I think it's very case-specific. In some cases, there are going to be limitations in terms of whether the other department is able to share that information. At other times, it's a s

Public Accounts committee  Thank you for the question. I don't believe we specifically looked into this issue. Certainly it would be a decision by the Department of Finance. At first glance, it's not clear to me why a reconstituted family should be subject to a different rule with respect to an income

Public Accounts committee  Generally speaking, the rule is that you can go back 10 years with respect to making a retroactive payment.

Public Accounts committee  I don't have any statistics on that. Perhaps my colleague Mr. Lemieux would have that available at his fingertips. I doubt it, but we could ask him.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you very much for the question. As I said, with respect to newborns, they are automatically registered. Many of the individuals who are signing up later in the process tend to be recent immigrants, or there may have been a change in the custody situation, or perhaps a deat

Public Accounts committee  What happens now is that the immigrant support groups are really helpful in that regard, helping individuals fill out various forms for all kinds of programs, be they federal or provincial, and certainly there's a lot of attention given to the CCB, given how important it is. Auto

Public Accounts committee  As you are aware, and as has been discussed, we do have the female presumption rule. That is in legislation, so the way the system works right now is that it does go to one individual, but there can be situations in which amounts are split depending on the custody arrangement. C

Public Accounts committee  Thank you. It's difficult to determine exactly how many people are not applying, but we do have—and this is really important—the automated system at birth. When we have newborn children, we work with the hospitals, the people there, to automatically provide us with that informat

Public Accounts committee  I'm sorry; I don't have that statistic at my fingertips. People with quite a bit higher income could get a small amount of the CCB as a result of this. With respect to your question on whether the lower incomes of COVID affect CCB entitlements, the answer is generally no. Curren