Helpful for now

Frances Bula offers up what should be a good-news story about a volunteer effort to track down tax rebates for homeless people:

Ms. Lissimore did 300 tax returns last year and expects to do about the same or more this year. Most of those returns do little more than ensure that a lot of low-income people get their HST rebate.

But for some, who have been living disorganized and occasionally homeless lives for longer, she gets much more: as much as five years of GST and HST rebates (the maximum) and tax refunds from many more years for people who once worked.

“Sometimes, I’ve gone back as far as 14 years,” said Ms. Lissimore, who works out of the church most of the time using her laptop to record information and file returns.

She’s helped out by a couple of other agencies: Revenue Canada and another non-profit program.

Canada’s friendly tax agency has supplied her with forms and manuals going back to the 1990s, so she can file old returns properly.

“The income-tax people have been wonderful,” she said.

But does anybody think the Cons will see providing that type of assistance as being part of the core function of the Canada Revenue Agency? And if not, how long can we expect the good news to last as long as the civil servants who managed to assist in the effort are on the chopping block in an entirely misguided attempt to save money by attacking the public service?