Thank you very much.
In my two and a half minutes I'm going to talk quickly and hope that you've had a chance to read the full brief.
I want to focus on the fact that in a time of increasing labour shortages it's very ironic that a significant subset of the Canadian population eager and ready to work is doubly ghettoized. To explain, I want to tell you a story of long ago.
My Uncle Morris moved to the local institution in Portage La Prairie when he was 12 years old, much against the wishes of my grandmother. She was an immigrant and a single parent whose husband abandoned her and three small children at a time long before welfare, child care, or the community living movement. The doctor said to send him away when he was just a baby, but my grandmother tried for years to keep him at home with her while she worked in a factory to support her family. As he grew up, he was harder to provide for, and there was no help in the community. That was in the 1930s, and he came to live here in Portage La Prairie in 1942.
I've spent the past six years working for Community Living Manitoba, with parents of children with intellectual disabilities and the early childhood workforce who help them care for their children. For the past year I've worked for SpeciaLink, the National Centre for Child Care Inclusion, where we continue to hear the stories shared by parents of children with disabilities, like the single mother in Whitehorse who dropped out of a training program that would have brought her economic self-sufficiency because the child care program couldn't meet the catheterization needs of her child. A different northern community lost its only doctor because the community could not meet the special needs of his child.
Our research has shown that a significant percentage of parents of children with disabilities are unemployed, underemployed, or work part time because of the demands of their children's disability or health condition. Thirty-nine per cent report their employment status has been affected. Forty-six per cent say their work schedule has been affected. Sixty-eight per cent turn down overtime. Sixty-four per cent of two-parent families with one parent unemployed report that their child's special needs are the major factor in their family's unemployment. Mothers' employment is far more likely to be affected by their children's need for care and support and the extra logistics of balancing work and family.
We can support these families in regard to the many workforce barriers they face, and provide inclusive early education for their children. But SpeciaLink recommends that, in order to so, the federal government prioritize investments in building an inclusive children's public policy agenda in order to meet the social development needs and aspirations of children with disabilities and their families. We also encourage this government to develop specific policies that affect availability and access for children and parents, and policies that ensure all programs are physically accessible, with design features appropriate for care.
In budget 2007, we encourage you to move past tax measures and concentrate on sustained multi-year program expenditures focused on early childhood. And we ask you to track the impact of your policy decisions, particularly on these indicators: the number of children with special needs who are attending child care programs; the evidence of children with their range of needs and levels of disability being meaningfully included; the number of centres accepting children with disabilities; we know that about 40% of centres in Canada aren't able to include kids with disabilities because of the lack of resources they have; we have a high incidence of children with special needs being turned down and expelled from children's programs because of a very under-resourced system; and finally, we ask you to measure the quality-inclusive indicators and quality improvement over time so that we can really see the impact of policy decisions in the long term.
Thank you.