Finance committee  Are you talking about a home environment, a residential—?

Finance committee  I think—

Finance committee  I think that some of the provincial legislation will make a big.... The real issue, certainly in residential situations, is that in various provinces you can get funding to retrofit your house, should you acquire a disability and need a ramp or a lift or whatever. The real thing

Finance committee  Yes, and I think there are a lot of benefits on the tax side, in terms of the disability tax credit, the disability support deduction, and medical expenses. Students can, for example, claim a lot of their expenses related to their disability that are not supported by a grant, for

Finance committee  Yes, definitely. You're talking about within the federal public service?

Finance committee  Well, of course.... As I mentioned earlier, I'm not sure if I got the statistic exactly right, the level of employment of persons with disabilities is very low in the federal public service. It's very low in a lot of very big private sector companies too. I think a lot of that h

Finance committee  What's that?

Finance committee  Yes, I'm not sure about....I don't have the exact...and I'm not actually sure about the figure with the federal government, either. That was the most recent one I read, which was probably a couple of years back in the employment equity report. But I know a number of other crown c

Finance committee  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 ca

Finance committee  Yes.

Finance committee  I'm sorry. What can be...?

Finance committee  Yes. I think it's probably a larger question for the Council of Canadians with Disabilities, who are not here right now and probably know more about this than I do. But certainly the big issue is making sure that students.... In Ontario, for example, for a student who is on ODSP

Finance committee  Yes. I guess the most recent SLID data suggests that in the last 10 years, the percentage of students with disabilities who are getting university degrees, for example, is I think twice what it was 10 years ago, so that's encouraging. The issue becomes, though, that many of these

Finance committee  I think there is a whole range of measures that could be undertaken. I wanted to jump in when we were talking about the experience that students get while they're in school that benefits their job search when they graduate. A lot of students who have disabilities, while they con

Finance committee  I'm going to have to skip through a whole bunch of stuff here. Maybe I'll move on. It's fairly long, although we call it a brief. Let me go to the heart of the matter. The federal government has a variety of programs and supports for persons with disabilities: the labour market