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.