Thank you, and good afternoon.
My name is Alar Prost. I am the president of Innovera Integrated Solutions, which is a research and consulting firm that develops employment programs that target people with disabilities and aboriginal peoples. We also do a considerable amount of research on employment issues related to these two target groups.
I'm also representing the Canadian Abilities Foundation from Toronto, which is an organization that provides some services, primarily information services, to people with disabilities. For well over a decade now it has been publishing the Canadian Abilities magazine, a lifestyle magazine for people with disabilities.
The reason I'm here today is to speak about the situation that people with disabilities face in the employment field, and more specifically about a study we undertook a couple of years back in collaboration with the Canadian Abilities Foundation. The study was called Neglected or Hidden. We attempted to find the reason that people with disabilities and employers were not connecting.
I've been in this field for well over 20 years, and I have heard the story over and over again. The people with disabilities are saying employers are not interested in hiring them, and employers in turn are saying they can't find people with disabilities, even if they want to hire them.
About three or four years ago we launched a training program targeting people with disabilities that confirmed exactly this. We worked with employers to develop a training program that met their needs and launched a program in five centres across the country, with 50 positions available.
My exposure to the number of organizations that serve people with disabilities in Canada tells me there are at least 550 organizations out there. We expected to be inundated with applications, because the jobs were guaranteed for those trainees who successfully completed the training. Instead we had 89 applications for 50 positions. It was a frustrating situation for us. The jobs were waiting, and we couldn't find the people with disabilities, even when we knew where to look for them.
We set about to find out why employers are not able to find people with disabilities and why people with disabilities are not responding to employers' solicitations. The study involved 1,245 people with disabilities. They responded in telephone interviews or online or with mail-in responses to a very extensive questionnaire; it was 14 pages. It took anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour and a half to complete over the phone. About 66% of the respondents to our study had some post-secondary education. We also spoke with, or met directly with, over 50 employment services providers that specifically target people with disabilities. That comes to roughly 10% of the service providers in Canada. Finally, we also interviewed well over 50 employers to get their perspectives on this issue.
Interestingly, in spite of the tens of millions of dollars that have been provided to employment services providers across the country over the last few decades--and we are talking tens of millions of dollars--it basically shows that the most effective approach for people with disabilities in terms of finding employment turns out to be friends and contacts in the industry. The last on the list, in terms of usefulness of services, is job fairs. I thought I would throw that in.
We have tonnes of statistics that came out of the study, as this package will attest, and I'd like to share some of the more interesting findings with you today.
In essence, 70% of the people with disabilities were telling us that employers are indeed reluctant to hire them. They feel that employers need to provide more flexible working conditions and certainly need to make workplace accommodation available to them.
Employers tended to agree in many respects that, yes, they know there are those employers out there who have a negative attitude toward people with disabilities, and who certainly leave the impression that employers are not particularly interested in hiring people with disabilities. But when we finished the study, we certainly came to the conclusion that while the interested employers are in a minority in Canada, there are certainly sufficient numbers of them that, given the right programs and the right services available to the stakeholders, we wouldn't have an unemployment problem for people with disabilities in Canada. There are certainly many employers who are ready, willing, and able to hire people with disabilities.
What employers did tell us—and this was also confirmed by service providers and people with disabilities—was that they really lack the recruiting and integration experience, and that they often believe that people with disabilities have very limited skills and abilities. This is a stereotypical issue, in that unless an employer is willing to take the plunge and hire people with disabilities, that attitude isn't going to necessarily change.
Employers certainly admitted to us that they do not know where to find qualified people with disabilities, and seldom do they even reach out to service providers in their community. There is certainly a need, then, to increase awareness of disability issues in the employer community, as well as to help employers to be more forthcoming and open with workplace accommodation.
In terms of people with disabilities or labour force participants with disabilities, it certainly became clear to us that there are many qualified people with disabilities, but they still need to improve their employment preparation, particularly in the soft skills area. When people with disabilities have been taking training, they have tended to take training that interests them rather than training that employers need and in the skill sets that employers need.
We interviewed people, for example, who had spent thousands of dollars—and this is personal money that's spent—taking training in aroma therapy. There aren't many positions available for aroma therapists in Canada, but there have to be over 40,000 positions for truck drivers. Not all people with disabilities can be truck drivers, but a good portion of them can, and there's a desperate shortage in that field in Canada.