To get the government to take action, we asked for your help.
In 2025 we asked Canadians to sign petition e-6853 to create a flat-rate refundable medical tax claim for the incremental cost of gluten-free food. More than 33,000 signatures were collected before the petition was presented to the Government in early 2026.
Advocating for Andy
Andy is a retired teacher who was diagnosed with celiac disease in the early 2000s. Every year, he collects hundreds of food receipts and creates spreadsheets and systems to submit a claim for the incremental cost of his gluten-free food.
Andy has now been audited twice by the Canada Revenue Agency. He has twice had to submit proof of his diagnosis and twice had to scan hundreds of receipts and make dozens of calls over a claim that only netted out a few hundred dollars.
Andy’s story is not uncommon, and it’s just one of the reasons that Celiac Canada is asking Canadians to sign the petition asking the government to introduce a flat-rate refundable medical tax claim for the incremental cost of gluten-free food.
In Andy’s Own Words
Receipts:
“[When I go grocery shopping], to make it easier for myself for retaining the receipts for tax purposes, what I do is I either put all of my gluten-free items at the front of my grocery order or at the back so I don’t have to search through the 30 different items listed. If I’m on top of it, which isn’t often, in the car I’ll sit with a pen and I’ll throw brackets around [the gluten-free items] like I’m supposed to for tax reasons and write little notes – this was bread, this was cookies, this was gluten-free soy sauce, etc. – because the detail or the description on a grocery receipt doesn’t often paint a clear enough picture for what the Canada Revenue Agency may want.”
Price Tracking:
“Products that contain gluten – cookies, crackers, bread products, cereals, sauces, anything that is described as gluten free – you’re going to pay through the nose. Here’s an example of how we need to track every item:
- A box of gluten-free pasta is $4 for 340 grams. It’s $1.17 per hundred grams.
- I now must look for a wheat-based pasta and compare the difference in price per gram.
- I found wheat-based pasta for $1 for 900 grams, or about $0.38 for 100 grams.
- The difference between the gluten-free pasta and the wheat-based pasta for the same 340 grams is $3.62.
- That $3.62 difference is what we’re able to claim.
- Now repeat that for every food comparison.
It’s a struggle and I’m a single guy. I think about young families with two or three children and one of the kids has just been diagnosed with the disease. I’ve spoken with people in these families, and they won’t even bother to go through the process, the long, laborious, time-consuming effort of having to count all those receipts, do the research, determine the differences, and then add that to the medical costs. It’s not worth the hundreds of dollars that they get back in return.”
Filing Taxes:
“This becomes a medical expense, an out-of-pocket medical expense. I take the hundreds of receipts that have something on them that is gluten free. I go through that process [of finding the price difference with gluten-containing food]. I add that into that file of dollars of differences [with gluten-containing foods]. I also keep receipts for the “add ons” to the original cost of a meal – the slices of bread that were gluten free at a breakfast place, or sub shops where I’m charged $3 more plus tax. When you file your taxes, you don’t submit those receipts unless you’re audited. Just the doctor’s letter that identifies your celiac disease diagnosis . But you still need to keep the receipts.”
Being Audited – the First Time (2022):
“It was a lot of questions back and forth, calling [CRA], speaking to people (usually a different person every time) to say, OK, what do we need to do?
The word audit brings up fear in a lot of people, and it certainly does for me. What are they going after? Is it going to cost me thousands of dollars? How much time and effort is going to be involved in this?
When you file your taxes, you don’t submit those receipts with gluten free items at first, but now with an audit they’re saying they want to see them. I had to go back through and check every receipt. Has [the gluten-free food] been bracketed? Have I put the information there? Checking my calculations and doing all those things in addition to the other [medical] receipts, the out of pocket for prescriptions etc.
I’ve got maybe 150 receipts, I can’t just scan or photocopy them one at a time and then upload them to the CRA’s website. What I did is I glued them onto regular 8.5 x 11 sheets of paper and then took a photo or scan that would become a JPG. But I could only send three or four JPGs at a time because that was the site’s capacity – so it was upload and wait, upload and wait, upload and wait.
I spoke with a CRA agent and I said, ‘OK, just so I’m sure, I’m sending this stuff in and you need a copy of the doctor’s note showing that I’ve been certified for real – the gold standard, I’ve had the biopsy, and I’ve tested positive with this disease. Will I need to send that doctor’s note in future years because this disease doesn’t disappear. I’ve got it for life.’ His reply was ‘Yes, that will be fine.’ So off it went.”
Being Audited – the Second Time (2023):
“Bearing in mind what I had been told in 2022, I didn’t send in the doctor’s note, so it all came back, and said all those gluten-free things are rejected. I owe this amount of money plus this penalty on the taxes. When I called up the CRA and asked why they had been rejected, the woman said, ‘Well, what proof do you have that you have celiac disease?’ I replied that in 2022 I talked to the agent who said once it’s sent, it’s in the system and you don’t need to send it again. And she let me know that’s not true. I’m not blaming anybody, but mistakes can be made and I didn’t send it in and that was the cause for me [having to do this again].
So, I sent the same letter in that I’d sent the year before, along with the 2023 receipts. All of those JPGs had to get uploaded again. That was dozens upon dozens upon dozens of hours of stress and frustration that’s so unnecessary.”
Why Sign?
“The cost of living for anybody with this disease is going to cost them thousands, plural. Thousands of dollars more a year to eat the same thing that people without this disease consume.
This is why people need to be signing this petition – to really encourage our federal government to understand this isn’t by choice. We haven’t asked for this. It’s something that happened. We have a genetic autoimmune condition. And the only way that we can manage it, and not cost our healthcare system more money, is by eating gluten free. Period. And if we follow the strict diet, we have a really good chance of living a very healthy normal life.”
