People with disabilities, in my view, are probably the greatest untapped resource we have, because they have the highest unemployment levels in Canada. There has been movement, and there has been an awareness, particularly in Ontario with the AODA. The universities and colleges have all been challenged to become accessible. March of Dimes did an assessment about a year and a half ago of every college. We ranked them, and we rated them on their own accessibility plan. They have to become accessible. They're not all now, but they will become accessible by mandate. I think that's a good thing. I think we need to look at that across the country.
But it goes beyond that in terms of accommodation. We participated in a provincial government commission—I forget the full title—that's become known as the Rae commission. It looked at higher education and what is required to help people with disabilities and others in an educational framework. What we saw was a range of accommodation. People with hearing and visual loss need materials and support in many different formats. Some professors are providing this on their own and really getting it and are putting out materials. Their lectures are inaccessible to a person who can't read them, or they're inaccessible to a person who can't hear them. Some of the individual professors are actually modifying what they do.
I met with two or three individuals. One was the only visually impaired gentleman in Canada who is getting a doctorate in engineering. It's amazing. He just showed us the technology he's using. It exists. There are now several Canadians with total hearing loss doing doctorates.
They used to go to the one university in North America that everybody probably knows about, Gallaudet. We don't have any one university, and we shouldn't. We should have integration. That was part of the debate: whether we should create a particular college or university in which we encourage and facilitate education for people with a disability. That is an open debate in our communities today simply because it would be less expensive, and you might have more people attend.
Our ultimate goal would be integration and the creation of an environment that would be accessible for all. There's a long way to go to making that happen. We do have the people with the intellect to achieve that, and we're not using them.