Human Resources Committee on Sept. 26th, 2006

[Bonnie Brown, Liberal, Oakville, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you.

We're going to move on to our next questioner, Mr. Lessard.

I'll just mention this to the witnesses. You don't need to touch the microphones; they'll automatically be put on and off, in case you're wondering.

Mr. Lessard, seven minutes, please.

[Yves Lessard, Bloc, Chambly—Borduas, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I want to thank you for your presentation, which is very clear. I have lived much of my life with people who have disabilities. I personally had an issue for a number of years. Sometimes something very minor is enough to create an obstacle for a person with a disability. For example, as a Member of Parliament, I neither speak nor understand English. I believe that Mr. Allison is in the same situation as myself, but in the reverse. When we want to hold a conversation, we need a translator. That's why it's so important to have good tools available to gain a quick understanding of the information presented and be able to perform our work properly. I imagine it's no different for people with disabilities who are able to enter the labour market.

I would like to give you a brief demonstration using the document entitled “Diagnostique: People With Disabilities and the Labour Market”. The graphs are very important, but they are in English only. I understand part of the information, but there are some parts that I don't understand, specifically pages 2, 3 and 7. Now that won't prevent me from doing my work, but for the purposes of this exercise, it certainly makes my job more difficult. I imagine it's the same for people with disabilities, although it's even more cumbersome and complicated for them. That's my first point.

Second, Ms. Weber raised the question of the tax system as it affects people with disabilities. I would be interested in hearing a little more about this type of program in terms of changes in the labour market and consumer costs, for example. I'm thinking, in particular, of excise taxes, especially on gasoline. Excise taxes, which amount to 15¢ a litre, have not changed, as far as the people with disabilities are concerned, since they were first introduced. I would like to know whether there is anything new in this area or what we should make of the current situation. Those taxes are static, meaning that they are always based on the cost of the initial consumption. So, in the long run, what you're able to claim is really quite minimal, to the point where many people with disabilities don't even claim it. It's the same thing with tax credits, which are under-assessed -- particularly since these individuals have expenses that an able-bodied person doesn't have.

Perhaps you could comment on that.

[Caroline Webber]

First of all, please accept my apologies, but the presentation was sent to translation.

We'll go back and fix that.

[Yves Lessard, Bloc, Chambly—Borduas, QC]

I took malicious pleasure in what I did understand.

[Caroline Weber]

With regard to your other comments, the tax credits were increased in Budget 2006. There was an acknowledgment that some costs may have increased. I understand your distinction between out-of-pocket expenses versus the tax credits, and I can also acknowledge that nothing has been done further on those out-of-pocket expenses.

But there is a general recognition—and that's why those tax credits are there—that people with disabilities have costs higher than those faced by others. That's why there are those various credits—and there are a number of them—within our tax system.

Also, there's a committee that CRA has called the disability advisory committee, which has been working very hard to improve the tax system so that it is more accessible to people with disabilities and so that they understand better what the credits are that are available to them. That committee has done a lot of really interesting work in improving our tax system so that the benefits that are available to people with disabilities are received by them.

[Yves Lessard, Bloc, Chambly—Borduas, QC]

Let's continue along the same lines. You are really acknowledging it's not much. As far as the excise tax is concerned, I'm sure you'd admit that it hasn't moved at all. Perhaps we could look at what could be done at that end. Based on my most recent observations, the tax has not been increased. But it might be a good idea to take a closer look at this.

There is another point that you quite rightly brought up, and that is the fact that people develop disabilities as they age. They only receive assistance that is generally available to seniors, as opposed to assistance related to their disability.

What do you think of that? What should we make of that?

[Caroline Weber]

Yes. Actually these benefits are available to people who are willing to indicate that they have a disability. I think one of the challenges we've been seeing is that seniors don't like to be labelled “disabled”. They don't like to identify their functional limitations—and really, what we're talking about here for everybody is functional limitations—as disabilities, so they don't claim many of these benefits that actually they are eligible for.

There is some work we'd like to be doing with the folks who are working on seniors policy to start to figure out how we can get beyond that. Nobody likes to be labelled “disabled”, but if we can perhaps change the way we characterize it.... The names of those tax credits are all “disability” tax credits. Maybe if we start to talk about “functional limitations” or “participation limitations” or something.... I don't what the trick will be, but it's a big issue, actually.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you, Mr. Lessard.

We're going to move to Madame Savoie.

[Denise Savoie, NDP, Victoria, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to apologize for arriving late.

I have a question regarding access to post-secondary education. There are currently grants available to students with a disability. I believe they receive about $2,000 a year.

Is that amount adequate to ensure that they have access to post-secondary education and can be successful at it? Do these students have access to other types of assistance? That's my first question.

[Caroline Weber]

Actually I think it's about $3,000 maximum on the loan side, and there's a grant also up to $8,000. An initial analysis of this suggests that they're actually not using all of that money.

There are a number of students in post-secondary education who report that their needs are not met. I'm trying desperately to remember the numbers off the top of my head. It was a relatively small number, tens of thousands of students, compared to what it might be.

It seems that the bigger issue in post-secondary education is actually the accessibility of the learning environment, that there are some things that students need that they actually can't just buy themselves. If you go into a lab and you need some special modification in that lab equipment, students can't just modify the lab with their own money or access to the grant. There may be personal aids also that they can't provide themselves or can't always bring into the classroom. So those are some issues that need to be addressed. There are other issues about accessibility in the post-secondary environment that I think we aren't quite able to reach with the individual grants and loans.

The other thing again is that people with disabilities tend to take a little longer, on average, so some of the financial assistance that we offer is conditional on full-time participation, not available to part-time students, and many times students with disabilities would rather be in a part-time situation in order to be able to manage the workload.

I know that my colleagues responsible for student financial assistance have been discussing those kinds of modifications that would make it so that the system may be worked a little bit better, but on the financial assistance front it looks like we actually are providing the right amounts of money. There's a small change that we could make, but in general it looks like it's more about the institutional environment that needs more modification in order to be more accessible to people with disabilities.

[Denise Savoie, NDP, Victoria, BC]

So those loans or grants are not available to students who are part-time. That's unfortunate. Because of their circumstances, for many of them that would be the terms of their--

[Caroline Weber]

Exactly.

[Denise Savoie, NDP, Victoria, BC]

So is that being--

[Caroline Weber]

But despite that, we see people with disabilities making gains in post-secondary educational achievements.

[Denise Savoie, NDP, Victoria, BC]

But the idea is, given the skill shortage, how can we promote greater employment across the board, and I would come back to the concern that was expressed earlier with respect to those who aren't being accounted for in the two million disabled and 291,000 or so who met the standards.

In my city, two-thirds of the people who are homeless in Victoria, according to medical public health, are people suffering from disabilities, and many of them did not meet the eligibility standards. So that tells me that perhaps we need to look at those standards if it's resulting in that kind of outcome.

[Caroline Weber]

CPPB is a kind of long-term disability insurance for people who have been in the labour market for a long time. I think if we want to talk about how we provide adequate income for people with disabilities who can't work, you don't really want to look to CPPB because of the nature of that instrument, but you maybe want to have the conversation about how we provide adequate income for people who have never been able to work and can't work. That's certainly an issue the provinces want to talk about because of the number of people with disabilities who are on social assistance.

We also try to focus on the people who could work. What can we be doing to help those people into the labour market? What kinds of supports do they need? How can we make the systems work better for them so that they can participate in the labour market?

So again we have some programs that are available to people who don't have a significant labour market attachment--they don't have to qualify for EI, for example--and in that way try to help them into the labour market. So far those programs look like they succeed. There's another group, though, on social assistance for whom we'd like to figure out how we could help them move off social assistance.

[Denise Savoie, NDP, Victoria, BC]

Are there any recommendations or avenues to pursue at this stage to accomplish that? It seems a fairly urgent matter, because the increasing presence on our streets, in our cities, is really problematic and I think it needs to be addressed by more aggressive strategies to solve the problem.

[Caroline Weber]

We completely agree with you. I think there are a number of things we could talk about, perhaps working with the provinces and territories.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you.

That's all the time, Madame Savoie.

We'll go to the last questioner in this round for seven minutes. Mr. Lake.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB]

I'd like to start by thanking you for being here.

I have a basic question to start with. This is a little bit of information overload, I agree with Bonnie.

The definition of disability--and I was looking at the PALS you were referring to--talks about two million working-age Canadians reported. It looks almost like a self-report of some form of disability. What is the definition of disability, and could you maybe differentiate between a learning disability versus a physical disability, or something like that?

[Caroline Weber]

PALS, again, does ask people to self-identify. It runs through the census. When you fill out the census, if you indicate that you have any sort of limitation that interferes with your activity or participation in your community or in employment, once you check that you get followed up with this other survey called the participation and activity limitation survey, which actually is in the field right now, I believe. So it's tied to the census, but it is totally self-identified.

Individuals self-identify in addition whether or not it's a mobility limitation or a learning difficulty.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB]

I find this really interesting. I have a son with autism. He's now coming up to eleven and I tend to view this in terms of opportunity to contribute according to his ability and wanting to maximize that. That's sort of the vision we have for him. For example, during the election campaign we wanted to make it a family event. I also have a seven-year-old daughter, so we looked for opportunities for him to be able to do things.

By definition of “contribute”, I mean not simply being busy but actually doing something that adds to what we are doing. For example, when we were delivering brochures, he'd go out with my wife and he'd run up and down the sidewalks, which he loved to do, and together they were able to do more than my wife could have done alone. Another example was putting labels on envelopes and things that he wanted to do that would mean he was able to contribute, more than only our volunteers working on their own.

In terms of my interest in these issues in general, I like to think of them more in terms of contributing according to ability, as opposed to tagging people with the term “disability”, as you said. I'm interested to know, first of all, where autism may fit, as an example for me, in terms of the definitions we were talking about.

Secondly, is there a differentiation in some of the statistics when we talk about income levels or post-secondary education between people with a physical disability versus someone with something like autism?

[Caroline Weber]

In general, when we start to group these we put autism in as a developmental disability. I have a son with Asperger's, since we're all owning those things today.

I haven't done the analysis in terms of how wage gaps track against different disabilities. In general, I think we've all been working very hard to try to figure out the commonalities across disabilities, rather than fragmenting it. So there's a challenge there. This can be a very complicated area. There are lots of variations. People are born disabled, people become disabled, people grow out of being disabled. It's a very dynamic category.

We're trying to identify the themes that reach across, generally speaking, that would provide the most benefits to a maximum number of people in these categories. We haven't done a whole lot of work trying to break it down and see how these things track, but the data is there and we could do that on request.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB]

I'm interested when we talk about income levels and post-secondary education concerning that, and about goals for it, and when we read about the average income levels being lower, or education levels being less, or employment levels being lower.

As a parent, when I think of Jaden and envision him at 18, 19, or 20 years old, my goals for Jaden aren't necessarily that he go to university; or that he make the average income, or whatever the case is; or that he work 40 hours a week. My goals for him are that he's able to contribute, that he has a good happy life, and that he's able to communicate with people. So the goals might be different for him, yet when you're measuring against some of these other things he can do, all of those things that would be our goals for him, and yet bring the average income level down, or the average education level down, or the average employment level down, the goals may not be compatible there, I guess.