Hello, everybody.
The Council of Canadians with Disabilities is an organization of organizations. We have a number of national organizations that are a part of our makeup that include specific disability groups. Then we have provincial organizations that are cross-disability and provide support at the provincial level, so we have a pretty good idea of what's going on across the country.
I'd like to bring your attention to a document that I'm going to refer to for most of the presentation. It's called Disabling Poverty, Enabling Citizenship, which was done through what's called a CURA grant. It was done by a combination of academics and organizations of persons with disabilities who were looking at what needs to happen. I'm going to stay mainly in the area of the first one, but I will touch a bit on the idea of helping businesses as well.
It's interesting that you identify a number of different groups of people who may need to have some support: unemployed, indigenous, people with disabilities, seniors. Actually, all of those groups include people with disabilities. Disability crosses everything. It's not one group by itself; it moves across every single group in the community. The numbers are quite high. As you'll see in this document, if you look at the number of people with disabilities who are living underneath the poverty level, it's astonishing.
One of the things that sometimes government gets wrong is it brings in programs and it doesn't look at what the outcome is going to be. I'm going to talk a bit about the disability tax credit, which is a credit for people with disabilities who can get the taxes that they've paid reduced based on their needs and what sort of support needs they have in living day to day.
The difficulty is that most people with disabilities don't earn enough money to benefit from the disability tax credit, but they're still responsible for those costs, so they're not getting anything out of that program. In fact, I would say that more than three-quarters of the people with disabilities in Canada don't really benefit from the disability tax credit, which is unfortunate.
The disability tax credit is a great idea to transfer money to people who need a bit of extra support because of something they can't control. However, if the disability tax credit were actually changed to a refundable credit, as opposed to tied to what taxes you pay, then it would provide the opportunity for every Canadian with a disability to cover off some of their costs around disability and move forward. There's information in this document about how that could happen, what the costs are, and those sorts of things.
When the government looks at employment—we've heard a lot about that—and the transfers to the provinces around employment, it should be looking at making sure there is adequate money for people not just to go to courses, which is what most of the labour market agreements do, but also for employers. A lot of the smaller businesses often cannot afford some of the accommodations that people might need, so again it's an ongoing struggle.
If you're an employer, you may want to provide an opportunity for someone with a disability, but they may need to have a screen reader, which unfortunately goes out of use very quickly, and you would have to buy a new one. Then that's an extra cost to the business. Therefore, providing supports to businesses in order to accommodate people with disabilities—not necessarily by giving money to the people with disabilities, but by actually distributing it among small and medium-sized employers so that they have the capacity to hire people with disabilities—would seem more realistic than some of what's going on now.
A lot of that is a federal-provincial issue, so it would be through the labour market agreements that go into the provinces and looking at the sorts of supports and how that program could develop things.
Again, I just want to identify that in the latest document from Minister Duclos, it's the same thing. I don't know if you've seen it, but he is looking at poverty. There are all these pictures of different groups and what percentage they are. It's the same thing; disability goes across.
As our population ages, there are going to be more and more people with disabilities. If we want them to participate fully in the community, which certainly Minister Qualtrough is moving towards—and there's the fact that they're looking at a Canadians with disabilities act and ensuring that people have the opportunity to get involved—then there's going to be a need for more money invested in disability supports. I'm not talking about just giving money to the people, but in the supports that they need in order to participate in the full extent of Canadian citizenship, not being left behind because they're living in abject poverty.
I'll leave it at that.