Article content continued

“I feel like there’s a nuance being used between a change in law and a change in practice,” said Dave Prowten, president and CEO of JDRF Canada.

The two groups said they met personally with the revenue minister last week and showed her the emails, but said that the minister appeared unlikely to reverse the change.

“I think that there’s either been a terrible breach in communication between the CRA and the minister, or the minister has been expressing false information,” Kimberley Hanson, the director of federal affairs at Diabetes Canada, told reporters Monday.

In a written response Monday, the revenue ministry repeated its claims that eligibility requirements remain unchanged, saying the CRA email “indicated an update to communications related to Life-Sustaining Therapy, however no change has been made to the eligibility criteria for this credit, nor has a change been made to the criteria laid out in the legislation.”

The greater number of rejected DTC applications come amid record-high volumes of applications for the credit, according to the agency. The CRA receives about 220,000 applications for the DTC every year, and approves about 80 per cent of applicants, the agency said.

For sufferers of type-1 diabetes in particular, new and simpler technologies for insulin injections mean that patients spend less time regulating their glucose levels than in past years.

“Unless there are exceptional circumstances, adults with diabetes can generally manage their daily insulin therapy without taking 14 hours per week,” the May 2 email said.