The single most important thing for dealing with individuals with a mental illness, frankly, is more supportive housing. If you look at the Senate committee report, we recommended a very significant increase over a decade in supportive housing units. That would be number one.
Number two would be, as I said in response to Mr. Savage's question, a redesign of all the federal programs that are designed to help people, so that they're designed effectively or uniquely to take into account the differences between a mental illness and a physical illness, and not doing it by simply tinkering with the individual programs but by producing a single program, so that you're not overlapping all the time and are not dealing with different people.
Those are, right off the top of my head, what I think are the two most important things.
The other thing we ought to think about is whether you ought to be offering some form of incentive to employers. We did this way back—I guess, looking around the table, none of you were here—when I first came to Ottawa. Back in the 1970s, we launched a couple of pilot projects to encourage employers to employ the physically disabled. Look where that is today: access to public buildings with ramps, bathrooms—we've come a long way in this country in 25 years with respect to physical disability. A lot of it began with incentives from the federal government originally to employers, and then the feds deciding that they would change access to public buildings, and so on. We have to do the same thing with respect to mental illness.
The fact is that 80%-plus of the people who have a mental illness are employable. You may have to make some adjustments. If you have someone who has an episode of depression and they are away from work for two or three days, that's okay; you're going to have to make some workplace accommodations. But you could go a long way to starting us down the road we've already come with respect to physical illness and physical disability by recommending some pilot projects that deal with that sort of issue, so that we could begin to find out what works and what doesn't work, which is exactly what we did with respect to physical handicaps.