Hon. Diane Bellemare: Congratulations on your speech and this bill. This initiative is a credit to you and also to the government. However, my question is the following. Since the bill will be implemented through regulations, how will people with disabilities be assured of receiving a sufficient income? All the bill’s parameters are vague. Why didn’t we decide to create a cost-shared program with the provinces, for example, to ensure that the benefits are adequate?

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Senator Cotter: I don’t have a complete answer on that, Senator Bellemare. On the question of negotiating shared-cost initiatives, those are complex, as you know. My guess is that there is a time for that. My experience in a provincial government was that there are times when the Government of Canada wants to move — let me say unilaterally — to do a good thing, and direct payments are often a model that is embraced in that respect. There are days in the province when I would have liked a different approach, but this seems to be an attractive and more immediate response.

It does require work to make sure that the provinces don’t take advantage of the initiative, because we are talking about, I don’t know how much, but a lot of money that will make its way to people with disabilities. It will actually infuse provincial economies because people with disabilities are disproportionately in the lower areas of the income status and stratosphere of Canada and they tend to spend the money not on trips to Hawaii or Palm Springs, but to pay for rent and food, to support their families and try to make ends meet. There will be benefits out there, and I think the idea is to try to get them quickly, and shared-cost programs would have been a bit of a challenge.

It’s also a bit more complicated here because it wouldn’t be a greenfield that you would start with, but a situation where the provinces have their own and some disparate — in fact, no two are the same. Each one of those would require a careful and lengthy dialogue. It’s going to be challenging enough as it is.