Thank you very much for that very open-ended question. If we had the remainder of the day to respond in detail, I could certainly take it up.
However, to précis a response from the Canadian Council on Rehabilitation and Work's perspective, we are an organization that is thirty years old this year. We started as a result of a number of community-based organizations identifying employment as a key issue, back in the 1960s. Over the course of time, the CCRW continued to evolve. Now our mandate is completely to promote and support the meaningful and equitable employment of people with disabilities internationally, with Canada being our primary focus. Our employment program has been documented in the “In Unison 2001” and “In Unison 2002” reports as being a best practice model for the country.
A very well-documented program is our skills training partnership program, which came as a result of the Obstacles report and the work the CCRW did back in the 1990s.
Our first skills training partnership program was held in 1995, and my colleague sitting next to me is the queen of skills training partnership in Canada, as we like to refer to her in our office. Basically, over the course of a five-year period, over 400 people with disabilities went through our model program, and today the success rate remains 83%. All those who went through our program remain employed in Canada.
From that particular program...and because the Government of Canada went through a devolution of funding from the federal to the provincial forces over the course of time, “training” is no longer a word we are allowed to use when applying for government funding. Henceforth, the skilled training partnership program became the workplace essential skills partnership, which is the given agenda of the day for government, as you are aware.
We're very grateful for that because we have been very successful. The CCRW has mirrored its STP, as we refer to it, in the workplace essential skills partnership program. We have funding from Service Canada in Toronto, the GTA. We have acquired funding from Surrey Service Canada in B.C. We have worked with other community-based organizations to help them use our program, so that they can work specifically with their client bases in smaller areas in Canada.
As well we have worked with other community-based organizations to understand what elements are so strategic to ensuring that people with disabilities find appropriate employment. We have worked with a number of national groups and organizations, believing there is a purpose and methodology behind supporting the employment of people with disabilities in Canada. So it's not anecdotal. There is real evidence of the work supported by NGOs in Canada and the value they can bring to the table in working with governmental departments in the employment of people with disabilities.