Yes, well, I think I told you that we've had actually nearly 30 transition from school to work events right across Canada and we've had representatives from many private sector companies right across the spectrum of the employment market speak to students with disabilities and career counsellors who work on the campuses and all that.
I think that many employers are making an effort but generally the representation of people with disabilities in most parts of the private sector is pretty low. It's pretty low in the federal government too. I think it's around 3% or something, so the federal government needs to do a much better job when it comes to equity hiring.
There are all sorts of industries that are doing innovative things. They have special training programs and they have.... If you look at the financial services sector, for example, if you get a job in a bank, you may be more likely to get disability supports or sign language interpretation if you need it, for example, on the job.
On the other hand, I've heard a lot of people say—one person said it at an employment meeting of disability organizations organized by HRSDC—that the banks don't have a hiring problem; they have a retention problem.
Sometimes what happens in that sector, but in other sectors as well, is that people with disabilities—in many cases with university education—are being hired and put into call centres, for example, where the demand may be. Depending on somebody's disability, if you put them into a call centre environment, you may be setting them up for failure. A call centre is basically how many calls you can make in a certain period of time, how many widgets can you produce, that sort of thing.
In some cases it's thinking differently about how you're staffing positions among people with disabilities. So people with certain types of disabilities may not be very good when it comes to call centre jobs. Somebody with a communication issue because they have CP, for example, can't do telephone soliciting, but maybe that person has a commerce degree and you should be giving them a business-related job. It could be a teller position or it could be something higher than that.
I think that there are lots of efforts and I think there's funding from the federal government through various programs and the provinces as well to help support employers in their efforts to recruit and retain people with disabilities. There's also an issue with hiring managers too. I think it starts and ends with hiring managers. So a company can have a great employment equity policy, but if the people who are doing the hiring are not interested in hiring somebody in a wheelchair, then it starts and ends right there.
So I think that generally the private sector is doing a better job working with the disability community and hiring people with disabilities but there's a lot of—