Policy Forum: Does Non-Filing Hinder Access to the Canada Learning Bond for Low-Income Families?

Abstract

Since the Canada learning bond (CLB) launched in 2005, 1.6 million children have ever received a CLB payment; these are from among the 3.8 million children who have ever been officially eligible. Starting in 2022, hundreds of thousands of CLB-eligible children will become adults able to make an independent claim for a retroactive benefit payment. While these adults will have formed their own core fiscal unit, eligible for other transfers tied to their own taxfiling, their access to the CLB will be determined by a core fiscal unit that they have left. This arrangement pushes at the boundaries of Canada’s tax and transfer system, which generally assumes coordination within a core fiscal unit, where a fiscal unit refers to family grouping used by the Canada Revenue Agency to asses taxes and transfers. Extant data suggest that taxfiling may be an administrative obstacle for a non-trivial share of children and young adults, but it has not yet received much attention from policy
makers. In this article, I discuss options for policy change that might improve access to the CLB by reducing reliance on annual filing to assess income for both adult claimants and current minors eligible for the program.

Keywords: Benefits, Children, Registered Education Savings Plan, Tax Returns