Finance committee  First of all, thank you for the question and for supporting the amendment to make it easier for people to get the disability tax credit. That's fantastic. I would say that since Banting and Best discovered insulin, Canada has hit above our weight in diabetes research. We're lead

Finance committee  That would be ideal, for sure. Insulin is a life-sustaining therapy. There are no ifs, ands or buts about it. Once you have type 1 diabetes, you have it for life. That would definitely be the simplest way to make it accessible for everybody.

Finance committee  First of all, we champion for people with type 1 diabetes. I guess if it is possible to make something that would be focused for type 1 diabetics, that would be fantastic. That would be wonderful, because it would probably give clarity to a specific condition that is different fr

Finance committee  It's a great question. Things like dialysis come to mind, where you must have that treatment, and it takes hours to do. Then it may be the number of times you would need to do it per week, so it would be those sorts of conditions. I think what we end up.... For us, it's about all

Finance committee  I think what we're really trying to overcome here is the problem of health care practitioners debating with patients the amount of time they are spending on managing their type 1 diabetes. By eliminating or reducing that, we're trying to make that a lower hurdle for people to cle

Finance committee  I think so. It would really make the bar much easier, especially because there are a couple new additional activities that are being added in this round of discussion. Between those two, we feel that it will make it much easier for people, and many more people will have access to

Finance committee  I'll take a crack at that one. I would say that there are encouraging revisions that are being proposed, but I do think there is a degree of arbitrariness to them, because these would be open to interpretation from a health care practitioner. That is really why we are proposing t

Finance committee  I'll take a quick crack at this. Mr. Stimpson gave a great example. He has two members in his family; one got it automatically and one had to sort of fight to get it. We hear that story a lot. We did a survey of our constituents base and 43% said they were either denied or had

Finance committee  Thank you very much. Good morning, everyone. My name is Dave Prowten. I'm the president and CEO of JDRF, the leading charitable funder of type 1 diabetes research. Today I'm joined by Mr. Matt Stimpson, who is a person living with type 1 diabetes and also the proud father of a

Finance committee  Thank you for the question. Yes, we have been involved in the consultations. There has been a series of meetings. I would say the Public Health Agency of Canada seems to be driving it. What we hope to see from it is a real mandate. I think a framework could just be a document t

Finance committee  We would agree with you, strongly. In reality, if you have type 1, you need insulin from the moment you're diagnosed. Therefore, it's a life-sustaining therapy. If you're making an extra 300 decisions a day.... I did a calculation. That's like a decision every 12 seconds to get u

Finance committee  We had a big issue a few years ago, when there were some changes being made. That's when this really came to light. Ever since then, we've been battling that and it seems like there's a series of them. Patients have to track their hours, the doctors have to sign it off and then t

Finance committee  The other thing is that companies have started to pop up to be the processors of the forms, because it's such a cumbersome process. If this could be streamlined for the patients, which is what this is really about, that would be the win. If they could have a very simple form that

Finance committee  This is sort of relative to other diseases. That's one of the things we've heard. This was established in 1988. We're actually not really sure of the genesis, whether it was something like dialysis or some other condition, so 14 hours became a bit of a threshold. We're seeing a l

Finance committee  I'll start, and then I'll let Dr. Weisman maybe conclude. We did a survey of our constituent base, and 43% of those who responded indicated that they have trouble getting the disability tax credit, whether or not that's from their medical professional or through the system. It's