Human Resources Committee on Oct. 27th, 2006

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

I call this meeting to order. Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), it is our study on employability in Canada.

I would like to take this time to thank everyone for being here today. Some of you probably are aware, or may not be aware, that we've been travelling across this country dealing with issues of employability. We were in Newfoundland, Halifax, and Montreal; for the last two days we've been here in Toronto. We'll be heading out west to Vancouver, Calgary, and Saskatoon sometime in November.

We want to thank each and every one of you for being here. This is an important matter. I can assure you that as we move forward on these issues, we get all kinds of different discussions and different points of view, but they're all helpful in making recommendations on the employability issue.

In terms of what we have going on with the microphones, they will automatically turn on and off, so when I identify you, the people at the back will recognize who's going to be speaking and will turn those on for you. There is translation here. Number one is for English, number two is for French.

Each of you will have seven minutes for an opening statement. I'm going to try to keep to it really tightly, because we do have more people presenting. We have six presenters. We need to get through that quickly, so I will keep you to your seven minutes. I'll give you a one-minute warning just so you know that it's coming towards the end. If you don't get a chance to get it all in, hopefully you can use the questions as they're asked by individuals. We'll have one round of seven minutes, followed by a second round of five minutes.

We're going to get started a minute or so early, and I'm going to start on my list here.

Mr. Rae, we're going to let you go first, and you have seven minutes. Now, don't feel you have to use all your seven minutes, ladies and gentlemen, but you're certainly welcome to the seven minutes.

Mr. Rae, it's good to see you, sir.

[John Rae, President, Alliance for Equality of Blind Canadians]

Thank you.

Am I first?

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

You are first.

[John Rae]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Good morning, Mr. Chairman, and members of the committee.

On behalf of the Alliance for Equality of Blind Canadians—and I'm afraid I'm going to have to speak a little faster than the translators might want, because I've got a lot to cover—I appreciate the opportunity to be here.

What I'm going to do is to call for the Government of Canada to initiate a new national economic strategy for Canadians with a disability, including those of us who are blind, deaf-blind, and partially sighted.

The Alliance for Equality of Blind Canadians is a national consumer organization that was brought together to give us our own voice, to give us a vehicle for working together to support each other and advocate for change to improve the quality of life for both ourselves and those deaf-blind, blind, and partially sighted individuals who will come after us.

If we look at statistics—and I'm not one who tends to dwell on statistics too much—over the past 25 years, since the release of the landmark Obstacles report in 1981, numerous studies and programs have been initiated by government, the private sector, private philanthropic organizations, and consumer organizations such as ours.

If we look at those statistics in an employment context, the irrevocable conclusion is that taken together, those programs may have assisted some individuals. I'm a bit of a success story when it comes to some of the old programs, which I could talk about later. But the unemployment rate and the rate of poverty that continues to confront our community tells us only one thing: taken together, those programs represent a failure.

One of the reasons they represent such a failure is that employment is often looked at only in the context of employment and not in the broader context. That's the reason why. I'm not here to talk about just an employment strategy or a labour market strategy, but an overall economic strategy, because if individuals do not have safe and affordable housing, access to public transit in the communities where we live, coverage for needed disability supports and assisted devices, employer commitment, and most importantly, more money in our pockets, then the goal of getting employed, remaining employed, and advancing in employment is likely to remain elusive.

So what are we after? I've called this a national economic strategy. It must start with new commitment and dedication from the Government of Canada—something that has been lacking from all parties, not just one or two. That's the first thing.

To demonstrate this, the Prime Minister should call together leaders from business, government, labour, and organizations of persons with disabilities, such as ours, to develop this strategy to forge a new collaboration and to show that there is new commitment on the part of the federal government.

In terms of some of the needed building blocks, there's the Employment Equity Act and programs such as the federal contractors program, parts of which have a 100 threshold for employer coverage. In our view, that level is far too high. It needs to be reduced in stages. We can't expect it to be reduced in total overnight; we understand that. So reduce it in stages to an area of about 20, so that employers with 20 or more will be fully covered by the program.

There needs to be new educational programs to get buy-in by employers. There needs to be enhanced infrastructure across Canada to support improvements in public transportation. There needs to be enhanced opportunities for mobility training for blind, deaf-blind, and partially sighted Canadians. Our transportation system needs to be improved.

The Canadian apprenticeship system is crying out for more participants. It talks about chronic skills shortage, yet persons with disabilities are one of the most underemployed and unemployed segments of our population.

We have not taken up the apprenticeship opportunity to the extent we should have, and so the Canadian Apprenticeship Forum needs to be given funding to do further research and develop a strategy to help us participate more in that system.

In the area of training, a number of existing EI-based programs are available only to EI recipients. If we look at our community as being as unemployed as statistics tell you we are, a lot of us have not participated in work to the extent that we become EI recipients, so we're doubly penalized. We didn't get to work, and now we can't qualify for retraining and other programs that are available to those who have had those traditional advantages, advantages we have never had.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

You have one minute, Mr. Rae.

[John Rae]

Thank you.

We hear about the notion of trickle-down economics. I can only say to you, it trickles down maybe to some, but it ain't trickled down to us.

Some of you worry about the coming recession. We all ought to be concerned about that, but we've never known anything but recessionary times. I hate to tell you that, but that's the reality.

Part of this involves changing the climate. That means fighting the discrimination and isolation that has been our reality. That should include reinstating funding for the court challenges program that was recently cut by the current government. It means focusing on the various pillars of the national economic strategy; they involve employment and employability, they involve training, they involve transportation, and they involve mobility. They involve lots of things.

Looking at employment alone is not the answer. Employment is one aspect of a much broader problem that confronts blind, deaf and blind, and otherwise disabled Canadians. We have to develop a strategy that looks beyond simply employment. Employment is not simple--I'm not suggesting it is--but only by looking at the issue in a broader context do we have any chance to address the problem that has been our nightmare.

In a country as affluent as Canada, the unemployment and underemployment rate of disabled Canadians is a national disgrace that cries out for redress.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you, Mr. Rae, very much.

We're going to move to Mr. Rankin, Mr. Collins, and Mr. Anderson. You have seven minutes, please. Thank you very much.

[Robert Collins, Director, Goodwill Industries, Partners in Employment-London/Middlesex]

Thank you.

Mr. Chair and committee members, first let me state our appreciation for the committee's understanding of the travel vagaries of Highway 401, since we were parked for an hour outside Kitchener.

Thank you for the opportunity to address the committee on behalf of Partners in Employment, a coalition of agencies in London and Middlesex County that provides employment services for people with disabilities. PIE's mission is to create a coordinated, person-centred employment and training system for persons with disabilities.

Bruce and I will be sharing the first five minutes and then we'll be joined by Mark Anderson, a new vision advocate, who will make a brief concluding statement.

Like many communities, we are working together to try to improve the employment opportunities and continued employment success for persons with disabilities.

Next week, through the leadership of TD Canada Trust and the London Chamber of Commerce, 250 employers will be attending an Ability First Conference, learning why businesses can prosper when they hire persons with disabilities.

We are about to launch a new resource to facilitate the school-to-work transition for youth with disabilities. We've recently been recognized for our collaborative self-employment, exploration and development program, our SEED program, opening new opportunities for potential entrepreneurs with disabilities.

However, despite these and other local efforts, as our document “The Time to Act is Now: Including People with Disabilities in Employment & Community Life” points out--and I hope all the committee members have received that document--persons with disabilities continue to be unemployed and underemployed, to live in poverty, and to face barriers to full inclusion.

While our document recognizes that all levels of government and the private and non-profit sectors have a role to play, today we wish to emphasize the important role that the federal government needs to play as a catalyst for change, first--as our colleagues from the March of Dimes mentioned earlier--by setting the right context and framework through the establishment of a national disabilities act that would articulate national standards and definitions for many areas, including employment and income support, and would promote inclusion in all aspects of community life. We believe many employers would welcome a clear national framework to facilitate their operations.

[Bruce Rankin, Manager, Employment Services, Partners in Employment-London/Middlesex]

Secondly, we know Canadians with disabilities are more than twice as likely to live in poverty as other Canadians. In this time of increasing labour shortages, more than half of all working-age people with disabilities are neither working nor seeking work.

Participation in community activities improves a person's health, sense of well-being, and quality of life. We need to ensure that federal funding and programs work together to address the continuum of needs of people with disabilities.

This includes reviewing and revising the eligibility and access to EI-funded employment programs, including skill development, to reflect the realities of persons with disabilities—qualifying hours of work, local opportunities. It includes working with the particular challenges of some disabilities, for example, the episodic nature of some mental health disabilities. We need to review and revise the labour market agreements for persons with disabilities to ensure that there is an appropriate continuum of services and coordination of service at the community level. This would include support to people with complex or more challenging disabilities by making employment services available to those who require employability assistance, not just employment assistance. Social support and life skills training are an essential first step to employability.

Those deemed harder to serve are currently being excluded. We must support people with disabilities in accessing all forms of employment—be it contract, temporary, seasonal, part-time, or full-time—to match the realities of the changing nature of employee-employer relationships. We need to make long-term employment supports available to people with disabilities based on participant needs to recognize that people with disabilities and their employers require flexibility and a range of accommodation to be successful in the workplace.

We should maintain and expand the opportunities fund, which offers individualized and more flexible approaches for services to job seekers with disabilities and benefits from local planning mechanisms to match local priority. In monitoring the labour market planning agreement and establishing the labour market partnership agreement, we hope to ensure that persons with disabilities are included and encouraged to participate.

[Robert Collins]

Thirdly, we urge the federal government to act as a champion and role model in the creation and development of employment opportunities for persons with disabilities. We recommend that they consider means such as the following: first, using the purchasing power of the federal government to acquire products and services produced or provided by persons with disabilities; second, creating tax incentives for employers to recognize their cost contributions in hiring and supporting the long-term employment of persons with disabilities; and third, ensuring that the full spectrum of employment opportunities of the federal government and its agencies include persons with disabilities from constituency offices to Parliament Hill.

Mr. Chair and members, thank you for your attention. Mark Anderson will now make a brief concluding statement.

[Mark Anderson, Member, Partners in Employment-London/Middlesex]

Good morning. My name is Mark Anderson, and I am from London, Ontario. I have a part-time job from Community Living, London, at a small florist shop. I also work at the London Western Fair for two weeks out of the year. It is important to me, because I get to meet new people and make extra money, and because the money I make from the government pension is not enough.

I got help to find a job from Community Living, London, and I'm hoping that someday I can work more than six hours a week or at a different job and maybe have more than one job. I hope there'll be employment services available to help me with these goals when I am ready to take those steps.

I hope you can see by my example that people with disabilities can make a valuable contribution if there are services available to help us.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you for that presentation.

Mr. Caplan, you have seven minutes.

[Marvin Caplan, As an Individual]

Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for having me today. Since I know my French is poor, I will be making my presentation in English.

I also want to thank your staff, who have been very polite and very kind in accommodating me here today.

For the francophones here today, I will say it's always humorous to me that while I strongly encouraged my kids to learn French--which I think is a vital thing for our country--they didn't, and I will tell you that each one of my four sons has come to me and admitted that their father was right. That's a very rare thing for parents.

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[Marvin Caplan]

I'm going to tell you a little bit about myself, for a couple of reasons. One is that I used to be a member of a government. I was a member of city council and regional council for the city of Hamilton, and I recall it was quite often the case that when an individual would come, rather than a group, their demeanour and comments were sometimes not quite at the level of those who were representing a larger group.

Just to give you a bit of understanding of why I'm here or the passion that I feel for these things, before I was on city council, I was the president of the Social Planning and Research Council of Hamilton and district. I was the president and founder of one of the first business improvement areas in Hamilton. When I was elected, I continued my interest in social issues by looking at where I believed the basis of government is, which I believe is health, because I think all of the things we do talk about a healthy community and healthy individuals. I'll come back to that in a minute.

When I was on the city council, many of you served with Sheila Copps. Her mother was the chair of the persons with disabilities committee in Hamilton. Mrs. Copps and I often would disagree, but I will tell you that her passion about issues for persons with disabilities has helped make our community one of the better communities in Canada for persons with disabilities. She did a number of things that we don't have time to talk about.

I was a member of the executive of the District Health Council. I chaired the public health committee of Hamilton, and then I was chair of the province-wide Association of Local Public Health Agencies. I was a member of the board of the Association of Municipalities of Ontario. I founded the refugee and immigrant committee for the city of Hamilton. I also founded the gay/lesbian, bisexual, transgender committee. So I have a long history of social inclusion that I'm very proud of. I think I have an understanding of many of the issues that face you that is perhaps a bit more than the average citizen's.

I'm also going to be a little unusual, not only in being here as an individual, but because I'm not going to ask you to spend more money. As a former member of the government, I know that no matter who's in power, dollars are limited. It seems to me there are ways of maintaining the envelope but spending that money a little more wisely.

I should have told you I'm going to talk about four things. The first one is that I understand financial constraints.

The second thing I want to talk about is the need for more cooperation among levels of government. As a former municipal politician, I think many of you will understand that there are things municipalities can do because they are by their nature somewhat closer to some of the issues that face their communities. Unfortunately, not all of them have that same level of understanding or interest in those issues.

I'm going to tell you a short story. A few years ago when the Kosovar refugees came to Canada, I started up a group. Everyone in the group is now angry with me, because they did all the work and I started the group. We sponsored the largest single family that came to Hamilton as refugees, some 38 extended members of a family--and I'm very proud of what my neighbours and friends did for these people. But when they were refugees sponsored by the federal government, they were not eligible for provincial programs. Until they became--

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

You have two minutes left.

[Marvin Caplan]

Two minutes, wow! Okay.

So that's a problem. We have to find ways of solving those things.

The third thing is that it has always struck me as very unusual and very weird that we will spend a great deal of time, effort, and money controlling the expenses of how we dole out our finances, auditing them and being very careful that we ensure that the money is well spent for achievable goals that we set up ahead of time to measure, rather than starting from the point of view of what is the best way of achieving the goal. So one of the things you've heard about from other people is the need for advocates for people with disabilities and people, particularly with issues of psychological health. That really was my fourth point, but I wanted to bring in the issue of social inclusion.

You've heard two speakers before me this morning, both of whom talked about the need of employment as a social need. The economics are important, but even more important is the feeling of mental health and contributing to the community.

If we can find a way of inclusiveness and perhaps some sort of negative income tax so that everything we do as a country, and everything we do as a province and as a municipality, helps people to raise their level of contribution to the community rather than holding them back or punishing them.... I realize that's never the intent, but you've heard from others that it's sometimes the effect.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you, Mr. Caplan.

We're going to move on to Mrs. Frache. Seven minutes, please.

[Pam Frache, Director, Education, Ontario Federation of Labour]

Thanks very much.

I'm pleased to be here and I welcome the opportunity to present to the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities. I wholeheartedly agree with the remarks of the previous speakers from the disability community, and I'll touch on a few of those things myself.

The Ontario Federation of Labour represents over 700,000 workers in this province--a variety of workers who have access to training programs, do training programs, and work in the system.

We are extremely disappointed with the federal government's reluctance to honour the labour market partnership agreement. It would have put $1.3 billion toward the targeted communities that this committee is looking at, namely people facing barriers to the employment markets--people with disabilities, young workers, older workers, and aboriginal peoples. This money would have gone to workplace skills development, literacy, and essential skills training. It would have gone toward integrating immigrants into our workforce, and to apprenticeship programs, all the points that previous speakers have touched on.

What was important about this agreement is that it did precisely what speakers have alluded to: it de-linked access to these training dollars from qualifying for employment insurance. That is a tremendous loss, in addition to the cuts that were announced at the end of September that affect literacy organizations, women's organizations, and people doing the grassroots advocacy in the community that's so critically important to connect workers with employment opportunities.

We reject the notion that there's a labour shortage per se, or that too few workers are employable. In fact, we think we're facing an erosion of modest income and well-paying jobs, under-investment in training and education on the part of government and employers, systemic non-recognition of prior learning and internationally trained credentials, employer reticence to accommodate workers with disabilities and injured workers, inadequate public resources to address literacy issues for Canadian-born and newcomer workers, plus inadequate adjustment programs. Of course, the most basic adjustment program is employment insurance, which fails to provide workers with the safeguards they need before, during, and after periods of layoff.

I want to talk about two worrisome trends in the areas of training and employment strategies. The first is just-in-time training. We're increasingly seeing a market-driven, niche-driven trend toward short-term training that addresses specific needs of the job market. In other words, workers get very specific training to do a very specific job, and once those jobs are not required anymore they're either without employment or they have to go back into the training area.

There's a document put out by the Canada West Foundation that put this explicitly. I'll quote two sentences from it.

It said: “Many companies already provide on-the job training to develop their own specialized skilled labour. Nonetheless, much more could be done by employers in this regard.” That's in some way a very worrisome trend, because skills that are developed for one employer aren't necessarily transferrable to another employer.

The document goes on to say: “Because of the time-sensitive nature in which certain industries require skilled workers, there is often a very short window of opportunity for a post-secondary institution to establish training programs.” This speaks to the precariousness of training people for only specific short-term jobs and then finding them vulnerable down the road.

We're advocating a much more holistic approach to training, lifelong learning, and so forth, especially in the area of apprenticeship. There's been a growing trend to water down apprenticeship training, despite the fact there is recognition that the red seal program in the area of apprenticeships is critically important. In fact, one of the goals set out in the labour market partnership agreement was to strengthen the red seal program, but in many ways the opposite is happening.

I'll give you one example of how this is playing itself out in Alberta. Foreign-trained workers were brought in to do a very specific welding job in Alberta, and they brought with them lower working standards, and so forth. They weren't subject to Canadian employment standards and they worked at a much lower wage. When there is an incentive for an employer to hire people who are less qualified, who don't have the full certification, first of all, it means there's not a demand for people getting full certification for their skilled trade, and secondly, it actually puts downward pressure on the wages being earned.

This brings me to the question of concern about a just-in-time workforce. We're seeing this again not just in the area of training, where you bring workers in and then you let the workers go when you see fit, but we're also seeing this on a global scale, where migrant and seasonal workers are being brought in, they work for lower wages, and so on. A worrisome trend is that if governments and employers continue on this path, instead of governments and employers investing in education, investing in training, and investing in those things that actually connect workers with jobs, we're going to see people bypassing the system and bypassing that kind of investment in order to get people who are already trained and who are prepared to work for less money.

I'll conclude by running through a series of recommendations we have.

First of all, I think it's critical that we have a labour market partners forum that brings together the labour movement with government representatives and employers so that we can sit down and actually develop this kind of job strategy that people have alluded to--a job strategy that stewards our natural resources and enhances well-paying jobs for all Canadian workers. We need to honour the labour market partnership forum and get that $1.3 billion to the targeted groups. It's absolutely critical.

All workers, whether they're migrant or temporary workers, need to have access to the same high living and employment standards as other workers. We need to have a targeted employment and educational program for aboriginal workers, in partnership with aboriginal organizations. We need human rights legislation that requires employers to accommodate the accessibility needs of people with disabilities. In fact, the Canadian Abilities Foundation has noted that the average annual cost of accommodation to employers would be less than $500 per worker, and yet we've heard about the terms of unemployment and poverty facing these people in these communities.

We need to restore and increase funding to the federal and provincial training and apprenticeship programs that specifically targeted women. We need to restore and increase funding to literacy programs to ensure free access for all adult learners up to and including high school completion. We need to improve the Employment Insurance Act such that literacy skills and skills training are entitlements for both employed and unemployed workers in the same manner as we have pregnancy, parental, sickness, and compassionate care leaves. We need regular insurance benefits that are actually stored so that people can have a living wage while they're suffering unemployment. We need to make sure that people who are taking apprenticeships are eligible for EI for their in-class portion.

We need to commit federal financial support to all provinces that have a training levy that's legislated for employers, for spending on workplace literacy and training. Only employers who would not be investing in training would pay into the levy fund. This fund could be administered by government and overseen by tripartite organizations representing workers' employment, employers, and government.

Finally, we need to strengthen the interprovincial and international portability of credentials through the Red Seal program.

I'll leave it at that. Thank you very much for your time.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you very much.

We're going to move to our next organization. I believe we have Mr. Mantis and Mr. Buonastella.

Mr. Mantis, seven minutes, please.

[Steve Mantis, Secretary, Ontario Network of Injured Worker Groups]

Thank you for inviting us here today.

My name is Steve Mantis. I'm the secretary of the Ontario Network of Injured Workers Groups. We have 21 member organizations across Ontario, from Ottawa to Thunder Bay, where I'm from, to southern Ontario.

I guess I've been doing this too long. I get a little jaded. We have been advocating for employment for workers with a disability for, personally, over 22 years and feel like our desires and our words have been twisted and used against us, and our members end up in poverty, depressed, in crisis, losing their family, and even sometimes committing suicide. I'm asking, what do I have to say to get your attention to do something? What do I need to do that will bring home to you the suffering we see day in and day out? I don't know.

I want to really focus on income security, because that is what people need. People need to be able to pay the bills. And it seems like our society is moving to a place that says, let the market decide. Well, if the market is going to decide, who's going to hire people who have a disability? You tell me.

Historically, we can look at the numbers for injured workers. These are people who have established job histories. They have years and years, oftentimes, in the workforce, and end up with a permanent disability. Many of these disabilities are not even visible. You wouldn't even know it. But 50% to 80% are chronically unemployed, and I say 50% to 80% because no one even wants to know what the impact is. It's not something that people are really looking into in terms of what the impact is.

Somewhere just under one million workers in Canada today have been acknowledged as having a permanent disability as the result of a workplace injury or disease in Canada--almost one million. There are over 300,000 here in Ontario. Most of these are unemployed.

We hear there's a labour shortage and we have to bring people in. What's the deal? We have an established work history with hundreds of thousands of employers. We know the job. But there is a lack of commitment and a lack of understanding to providing that accommodation and helping to maintain employment.

I was in Montreal earlier this week for two days. It was a gathering put on by the public health agency in Quebec, and the conference was focusing on preventing work disability. We had researchers, clinicians, insurers, employers, and a few workers, and the whole focus, all they wanted to talk about, was return to work: “Oh, we're going to get you back to work and everything's going to be fine.” But the anecdotal information we have doesn't bear that out, and certainly the research doesn't bear that out either.

What happens--and we've seen this both anecdotally and in terms of research--is that people want to go back to work, they're eager and they go back to work, but the accommodation isn't there. The management doesn't really do it in a supportive way. The worker ends up becoming injured again, and they're off. Then they go back again and they become injured, and the disability is now getting worse. Now we have mental health issues involved because of the dynamics, and you feel like you're not wanted there.

Last week, at home, I had a guy come and say he had been crushed. It was logging. He was crushed between a skidder and a truck--all internal injuries, so you can't really see them. But he said he was scared about going back to work because, as a mechanic, he felt that when injured workers came to work they were all slackers. That's what he thought. He said, “I didn't want to have anything to do with them, and now I'm in that position. I'm going to go back there and I know my co-workers and my supervisor are going to think I'm scamming. It makes me feel terrible.” This is a master mechanic, with 30 years on the job.

So here we have, in Montreal, all these people with best interests, and researchers who know everything, and all they can think about is that they've got to get people back to work as fast as possible. They don't look at whether you're able to maintain that employment and what happens in the long term, but we see it. And what we see is that 70% of these people end up in poverty.

A recent study done here in Toronto on homelessness, by Street Health, found that 57% of the homeless people they interviewed were injured workers. Yes, we need all this help for employment, there's no doubt about it, but we need a platform so that we can live while we're engaged in being fully inclusive in society. One can't replace the other. Without the money to live, all the rest of it here is fluff, it's covering the problems, and that's really the issue.

The systems we have in place are being deteriorated. People are seeing us as scammers. And we need to be able to say, I put in my time, I paid for it, and I shouldn't have to now starve as a result. So we really look for you, in a number of programs, whether it's the EI sickness that was mentioned earlier, which people can't access because they're in and out of the workforce; whether it's the Canada Pension Plan disability program, which, depending on the government, is more open or less open; whether it is the compensation systems, which we see all across the country are cutting back and demonizing workers and people are ending up in poverty.... This is a shame. We need to say it's not the market that decides. We want a country that is inclusive, that values all its members, and has, number one, that you're not going to have to live on the street as a result of being disabled.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you, Mr. Mantis.

We're going to move to our last presenter, Mr. Crawford. Seven minutes, please.

[Cameron Crawford, Director, Research and Knowledge Management, Canadian Association for Community Living]

Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee, for inviting me.

These are very hard acts to follow.

In my work is as a researcher, I was previously with the Roeher Institute and am now with the Canadian Association for Community Living. My comments will be specific to people who have intellectual disabilities, although when we get to the recommendations part of my little talk, there will be a broader applicability as well.

When speaking about people with intellectual disabilities, just to be clear, I'm referring to people who used to be called mentally handicapped in Canada and who are still called persons with mental retardation in the United States. Fortunately, Canada has played a lead role in shifting some of the language to a more respectful approach, which is catching on internationally.

These are people who have very significant cognitive difficulties and who face a range of practical difficulties with everyday activities that most of us can do without major problem. We're talking about approximately 2% of the population in developed countries. Estimates vary a little, but we can probably assume that about 400,000 working-age Canadians, 15 to 64 years of age, have some level of intellectual disability.

We know that about 109,000 people with intellectual disabilities are registered in the Statistics Canada 2001 disability survey, the Participation and Activity Limitation Survey. This for the most part is a fairly severely disabled group of people. Having said that, the employment rates for this group of people have been low for the last 10 years or more. Well, they've been low forever, but based on statistical evidence that we have for the last 10 years or so, they've been hovering around 30%. That's a very high non-participation rate, when you consider that in 2001 almost 73% were either unemployed or not in the labour force.

Approximately 40% of these folks have never worked. We're talking here about a large underutilization of human potential. If you were to speak to people, almost to a person you would, I'm sure, hear that they want to work. They want to be involved in their communities; they want to be contributing. They certainly want to have more money than what is available in most provinces and territories through social assistance, and it is a job that would be the ticket to a better income.

Indeed, where people with intellectual disabilities are employed—and this is again going back to the 2001 disability survey, which focuses on a fairly severely disabled group of people—they're earning on average somewhere around $14,000 a year. This is not major money from most people's point of view, but it's actually thousands of dollars more than what is currently available through provincial and territorial social assistance programs. You can't live high off the hog with that kind of money, but you can live better than in dire poverty.

Getting people jobs is an important endeavour for their mental well-being, but also for the vitality and inclusiveness of our communities. There actually have been gains in recent years, particularly in the last decade, in furthering the employment of people with intellectual disabilities in regular jobs in local communities—not in sheltered or segregated workshops for the disabled, but in real jobs in real communities.

To be sure, a lot of people will need some level of ongoing assistance in order to maintain that job. The assistance might come informally, from employers and from their co-workers, and you may need some external assistance from agencies, such as Community Living in London and other communities, that go in and work with employers, work with co-workers—soften the workplace, so to speak—and help people understand what an individual needs in order to thrive in the workplace.

Currently we don't have a system that intentionally goes about doing that kind of work with people who have intellectual disabilities, so the persisting pattern is that people are falling through the cracks.

What can be done to improve things? I'm going to speak mainly to what falls pretty clearly within the federal jurisdiction. The labour market development agreements, as has been pointed out here, systematically exclude people who have histories that haven't involved a lot of attachment to the labour force, which would include many people with intellectual disabilities. That system is actually pretty well funded. There's a lot of potential for it to be more inclusive, to provide wider access to training for people who are currently excluded in large numbers.

The system could also make available longer-term employment supports than are currently available. Typically, those that are available will be there for people for maybe a year. These would be auxiliary supports for employment, training, and so on, maybe up to 72 weeks if you're lucky, but typically that wouldn't be the case.

The opportunities fund, which has been mentioned, was designed in part to get around that problem, but it limps along on a very iffy basis. It's uncertain from year to year whether or not it's going to be funded, so everybody is in a state of hysteria. It would be better if that were more robustly funded so it could deal with more people who need the support. It would also be a greater measure of security for organizations that are always having to lay off their staff.

Federal and territorial officials could put their heads together to figure out how to render provincial social assistance systems such that people won't lose the other supports that they need—not just the income support, which is critically important, but also the attendant services, the medications, and so on, which for many people are only available if they're attached to the provincial social assistance system. Arguably, that's just dumb. It's bad social policy. It's better for people to be able to work and make some of their own money, rather than being reliant in the long term on passive income support. Governments would have to continue paying for some of the other supports that people need, but it makes more economic sense for governments to do that than it does for them to be paying full freight for the income support and the disability supports.

There are those and other measures that are needed, such as an accommodation fund. It would be available primarily, I would argue, to small and mid-sized businesses that don't have the operating capital to invest in accommodations.

We're talking about money here. The money has to be wisely spent. I understand that there are many competing demands; however, we could have a more thoughtful and more systematic approach that could open the doors to employment for people who have been excluded for decades now and whose contribution to their communities has gone unheralded.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you, Mr. Crawford.

I want to thank all the witnesses for working, under very difficult circumstances, to keep it within seven minutes. I know you could speak for seven or eight hours on all these issues. It certainly has been the case that we do appreciate your taking the time and presenting to us.

We now start our first round of questions and answers, which will be seven minutes, beginning with Mr. D'Amours.

[Jean-Claude D'Amours, Liberal, Madawaska—Restigouche, NB]

For those who need translation, I will ask my questions in French.

First of all, I want to thank you for taking the time to come here to speak to us this morning. I know some of you got caught in traffic on the 401. Back home in rural New Brunswick, there aren't many traffic tie-ups. When traffic is bad, it takes us seven minutes instead of five to get to work.

In previous submissions, you talked about the budget cuts a number of groups experienced following the government's announcement in September. I come from a Francophone minority community. As you can appreciate, these cuts have affected minority official language communities in particular and minorities in general.

Have the cuts to the Court Challenges Program, to literacy programs and to women's programs forced some of your groups to fight to preserve the status quo, rather than focus on building the future? Maybe it's not so obvious for certain groups. Nevertheless, generally speaking, in so far as disabled persons are concerned, are you not worried about these budgets cuts that affect the most vulnerable members of our society? Some of your organizations or causes could be targeted for future cuts.

The government sent out a negative message to the Canadian public in late September. As a Liberal member, this worries me a great deal. Given how deep these cuts go -- something that was completely unexpected -- I wonder what we can expect next? Basically, it was the same as being hit over the head with a shovel when you least expect it.

I'll give you a chance to respond.