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.