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.