Evidence of meeting #53 for Finance in the 40th Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was colleges.
Director, Government Relations, Canadian National Institute for the Blind
Yes, that sort of fell off the back of my presentation because of the five-minute limit.
Conservative
Director, Government Relations, Canadian National Institute for the Blind
We're doing preliminary work. In the last year we commissioned a considerable study with the Canadian Ophthalmological Society on the costs of blindness, and it replicated some methodology that was used in the United States and Australia, where there were much better data about the costs of vision loss. Using that methodology, we found that the cost to Canada for blindness is about $15 billion every year. About $8 billion of that is direct medical costs, and another $6 billion to $7 billion is the personal and human cost of persons with vision loss. That's obviously quite a big number.
What Canada lacks is a coordinated, integrated approach to vision health. There's no real activity going on other than what CNIB is doing with some volunteer doctors and what not. There are no real activities to put the ophthalmologists together with the optometrists, with rehab centres, with employment strategies, and integrate those with provincial strategies and the federal government.
It's not really a new idea. The Canadian government actually showed a lot of leadership in 2006, with the World Health Organization, in endorsing just such a plan, but it really has not gone anywhere since then. So we are going to start talking to governments a little more actively in the next few years about provincial and federal roles in bringing all these groups together to talk about how health care integrates with employment, integrates with rehabilitation, and start lowering the cost of blindness in Canada.
Conservative
Ted Menzies Conservative Macleod, AB
That's interesting, and I wish you luck with that. We've recently had a friend diagnosed with wet macular degeneration.
Director, Government Relations, Canadian National Institute for the Blind
Yes, it's very common.
Conservative
Ted Menzies Conservative Macleod, AB
I didn't know there was wet and dry. There are a lot of issues out there that we don't understand.
To Mr. Drewett and Mr. Adair, forgive me if I put a little plug in for rural Canada. We had a gentlemen who was in a car accident just about a year ago now, and he ended up a paraplegic. The community got together and raised enough money to build him a completely new home that's disability friendly.
Conservative
Ted Menzies Conservative Macleod, AB
Not everybody has that advantage, so I hear what you're saying. I'll argue that's one big reason to live in rural Canada. They pull together when someone is impacted by that.
We put the $75 million in--all of our stimulus money, short-term, temporary, targeted. This is a big investment, but I guess you have pretty solid figures to argue why we need to invest in that because of the lost productivity, if you will--and that's probably far too commercial a term to put on it.
President, Canadian Paraplegic Association
Absolutely, and in terms of lost productivity, consider that at least 15% of the population has some type of disability, depending on the statistics you look at.
Also, when you look at investment through social assistance and other government supports to help people maintain their lives, despite the fact that they are able and want to work and so on, I think we are missing out on a really big opportunity to have people become more active participants in the workplace. They want to be taxpayers and ultimately give back to society, but the unfortunate part is that they're not often given the chance to do so.
Conservative
Ted Menzies Conservative Macleod, AB
We have a real role model who has joined us in the House of Commons.
President, Canadian Paraplegic Association
We know. Absolutely. We work with him.
Conservative
Ted Menzies Conservative Macleod, AB
It was a wake-up call for us to realize that even in the House of Commons we had so many committee rooms and so many buildings that were not accessible.
President, Canadian Paraplegic Association
Back in May, we did an event on the Hill through CPA in which we had a number of MPs using a wheelchair for a day, and believe me, it was quite an experience for everyone. I think they'd had a bit of an idea of how challenging it was, but they had no idea, even within their own House, how difficult it was.
Conservative
President, Canadian Paraplegic Association
We're planning on doing the same type of event next spring. We hope all of you participate. It's a real eye-opener for everyone.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative James Rajotte
Thank you very much, Mr. Menzies.
We're almost out of time, but I do want to follow up on a couple of issues.
First of all, with respect to Ms. Hewitt, there's a lot of interest in your idea. Sean Moore has talked to me a lot about this. I think you sense that there's a real openness to the concept, but there still is sort of a grasping as to what the exact corporate structure would be and what the implications would be.
I think one of the things that may help is if you actually list a series of examples as to what exactly you're talking about and then address the concern about the unintended consequences of competing with a small business down the street. I'm ashamed to say that I can't remember the name, but there's the example of a restaurant in Edmonton's city hall that has homeless kids working there, and I think that's exactly what you're talking about.
But there's one question I would have. You talked about access to capital, so can you expand on why these enterprises would need access to capital? What would they use it for? Are they looking to expand? If so, in what way?
Director, Social Entrepreneurship, Social Innovation Generation
It really is. It's about impact. So if they're doing a great job.... My job, writ large, is about social innovation, so if we looked at this group and said that they're really doing great work, they've figured it out, and they've got it, we would want to expand that.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative James Rajotte
Basically it's a way of expanding without going back to the provincial, federal, or municipal levels of government for funding. Is that a fair statement?
Director, Social Entrepreneurship, Social Innovation Generation
Yes. I really used to be a little bit pie in the sky, but I actually want them to have access to a variety of forms of capital. If charitable dollars are available and people want to bring them in, that's fine, but they should also have the opportunity to get access to capital to scale if they're particularly impactful in addressing the social challenges that we're facing.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative James Rajotte
Would this also work well with the changes the government made in 2006 with respect to donations of securities and not paying capital gains tax on them?
Director, Social Entrepreneurship, Social Innovation Generation
Yes. That's one of the areas.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative James Rajotte
Okay.
We've heard a lot at this committee about employment insurance, an awful lot, and I wanted to follow up on it. It's a very dynamic political debate right now in Ottawa. Obviously there have been some changes made, but it's a real challenge.
The government has made some changes, but you're right to point this out, because certainly there are cases like this one that I've heard of. A woman has worked for 25 or 30 years for a company. She started when she was 20, is now 55, and has never accessed EI in her entire life. So she'll say she needs a longer period to make that huge adjustment at this time. She feels that she's paid into it for all those years, but then she gets short shrift.
The challenge is this: do we want to make it a program where it's almost individualized? She would pay in for 25 years and then draw down on that so that it's a true full insurance program. Is that what you're hinting at for longer-term workers? That's what one of the gentlemen on the previous panel seemed to be hinting at, but the implication of this is that people in those regions where they need it more obviously would suffer somewhat, comparatively.
So it's a very tough policy question, but when she phones my office and says this is unfair, it's very hard for me to disagree with her.
As an Individual
Oh, I agree. Certainly the length of the benefits should be looked at, maybe not on an individualized basis but as more of a long-term kind of thing, because you only look back for a very short period of time to determine how long their benefits are going to be. And if there are people who have had access to it several times over a short period of time, then maybe their next claim should be a little bit shorter. And for somebody who has paid into it for 25 years and has never collected anything and is now 55 years old and having a difficult time finding employment, if the rules could be changed in that kind of a situation it would certainly help.
One thing I do want to point out, which I didn't mention earlier, is that I don't think we really need to find another dime of new money, because in the last two years the surplus in the account, which was paid by the employees and the employers, was $3.3 billion in 2007 and $2.835 billion in 2008. That is workers' and employers' money that was put into that fund to support these people when they lost their work. So we're not asking you to come up with new funds from anywhere. The money is already there. It has already been put aside by the workers, and now when they need it they should be given that support.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative James Rajotte
I appreciate that, and that will continue to be a very dynamic debate.
The last point I want to mention—if you want to react to this—is that we have a buyer/seller forum every March in Edmonton, and the effort there includes every province, every territory, six U.S. states, and five countries. We're having some employment challenges now in Alberta, but the view there was not for everybody to move to Alberta; the view there was to move the work out of Alberta to sort of get the supply chain working, especially across the country. I had colleagues from Peterborough and St. Catharines come. Now, 18 companies from Peterborough are accessing contracts from the province of Alberta. So this is not people uprooting and moving; it's sort of uprooting the work and moving it over here. I think that's something we should certainly look at.
I don't know if you or your union have looked at that in terms of areas of very high regional unemployment, like Windsor, and how they can partner with areas even like my home riding of Edmonton—Leduc in doing the work here but forming those partnerships back and forth. It's something you should encourage both your union and your regional economic development agency to look at.