Thank you for our virtual last-minute inclusion.
Good afternoon, honourable members and Mr. Chair.
My name is Steven Christianson. I'm the national manager of government relations and advocacy at March of Dimes. I thank you for this opportunity and for your time today.
As you've heard time and again, disability can affect anyone at any age at any time. It may be present at the time of birth, it may be the result of an injury or illness, or it may be simply part of the natural aging process.
In nearly six decades, the March of Dimes has evolved from a research-focused organization, raising $14,000 in 1951 to eradicate the threat of polio, into an organization with an annual operating budget in excess of $90 million, through which we provide a diverse range of services that help more than 40,000 consumers across Canada to live independently and to participate in community life.
Who are the people we serve? About 80% of March of Dimes consumers have personal incomes of less than $20,000, and 91% have incomes below $30,000. A staggering 40% of the people we serve, based on data from our 2007-08 fiscal year, have incomes of less than $10,000. Many of them reside right here in Toronto. About 72% of the service expenditures of March of Dimes assist people with incomes below $20,000.
I have a few more statistics: 65% of our consumers are over the age of 55, while 2.5% are under 19 years old. In Ontario alone, 1.85 million people have a disability, and nearly half of those between the ages of 15 and 64--49.5%--are unemployed. The national picture is not fundamentally different.
It's safe to say that we know quite a bit about poverty and its relationship to someone who lives with a disability. When we speak of poverty, we mean social conditions as well as economic conditions. Similar to many of the recommendations we recently made to the Ontario legislature, our recommendations today are that any federal strategy should explicitly embrace the principles of preserving and enhancing dignity and respect and should incorporate participation in the planning and public policy process.
Barriers to employment, housing, social inclusion, health care, and participation in society can often lead to poverty for someone with a disability. The lack of, or cost of, supports in home care, workplace accommodation, and assistive technologies and devices can also contribute to poverty.
Our approach highlights those two terms and concepts: supports and barriers. The success of any federal contribution, from our perspective, will ultimately be found in those very supports and the barriers they help eliminate.
People with disabilities are among the most disadvantaged, with lack of employment being one of the main reasons. Employment for people with disabilities has its complexities around access and training in particular. We appeared before this committee speaking to that very topic during your 2006 study on employability. Barriers to employment make up a huge area that can be addressed through a national strategy with annual benchmarks.
Affordable social housing that incorporates the necessity of accessibility and support is equally important and, in Canada, equally lacking.
We also want to emphasize the growing need for caregiving, as well as the need for a framework that recognizes that modifications to one's home that facilitate independence, make community participation easier, and help ease provincial health care expenditures can also help alleviate poverty among Canadians with disabilities and their families.
Our main point is that the federal government needs to reconsider discussion about enacting a national disability act that would create a baseline for all provinces so that provincial legislators will have a point of reference from which to enact legislation.
A national framework on disability is an idea that is not new. National legislation is something that we at March of Dimes have been encouraging for nearly 20 years. Parliamentarians recommended such an approach in a 1981 report, “Obstacles”, and the Conservative commitment to exploring how such legislation might be formulated also advanced the debate on the issue.
Despite these many initiatives, and many more that I don't mention, Canada remains one of the few countries without a national legislative framework on disability. This in no way suggests that a national disability act would be a panacea to fix everything tomorrow, but it does represent a focal point, providing national measures and a baseline that the federal government can use to more effectively coordinate its contribution to reducing poverty with the provincial governments and the non-profit or third sectors.
Poverty for Canadians with disabilities can be unique, and any efforts to address poverty, be they programs or new legislation, will require at least national standards for supports that identify, eliminate, and prevent barriers to the full participation and inclusion of Canadians with disabilities.
Thank you for your time. Always feel free to call upon us for any assistance this committee might need.