Good afternoon, and thanks for the chance to present today.
My job is to add a little colour commentary, which isn't pretty, but I'll give you a few stories. As Bruce said in regard to the clients we're working with—over a thousand people a year—about half have spinal cord injuries from traumatic causes, and the other half have disease-induced spinal cord injuries. The latter group is growing and in fact is a larger number now, which comes with the aging of the population. So we're expecting to see a greater trend in the number of people who have a spinal cord injury in the country.
Our clients, the people we work with, enter into the cycle of poverty and discrimination through no fault of their own, which oftentimes keeps them away from workforce participation and from full citizenship activities, and puts them in prison, in a sense. It puts them in a situation where they are homeless.
One example would be a gentleman we're working with who has an MBA from Harvard University. He's a Canadian from Montreal who moved back to Toronto and was ready to pursue a career but was in a car crash. He went through the acute care services and the rehabilitation support services. Then his home was not accessible; his apartment that he had purchased wasn't renovated in time and wasn't ready. So he went into a long-term care facility. He had to live there for four months. He ended up with a pressure sore and was readmitted to acute care, and the nasty cycle of recurring health complications started to set in. He still is not gainfully employed seven years later. We in Canada have lost, albeit not permanently, a very capable leader who could be leading a company and a business. We've also lost the tax dollars he could have contributed. So this is a shame, and it's centred around housing.
This time of year, we tend to get up on our roofs and clean the leaves out of the eavestroughs, and we have a client who broke his neck after falling off a ladder while doing this. He went through acute care and then through rehab, but because he was not a high-income earner, he did not have the resources to renovate his own home. He did not have the ability to purchase an accessible apartment or to rent an accessible apartment. So he is now separated from his wife and his two younger children and is living in a long-term care facility. Again, he is burden on our welfare system. And the heartbreaking thing is that he's not back to work, and not even with his family raising his kids.
Our clients are often locked into the cycle of poverty because, once they access appropriate housing after a fair bit of waiting, they're loath to leave to go anywhere else. So they're pretty well locked in, because if they have a job in one community but are moving forward in their careers and have to move to another community, they usually won't go because there's no accessible housing in that community. So they have to stay where they are.
That's a bit of colour for you, and I'll cut it there.