Good morning. Thank you for inviting us. I'm from the Yukon Council on disABILITY. We deal primarily with education and employment as well as advocacy and community education for persons with disabilities. So that will be the group I'm focusing on today.
We're seeing the same trends coming up with regard to housing or lack of affordable housing. In Yukon we have very outdated residential tenancies act, which I believe at this time the NDP will be working on strategically. However, due in part to that, we have a lot of substandard housing where housing is available. Rent will range anywhere from $750 to $1,100 a month for a one-bedroom apartment. That may be with or without utilities.
So we find that a lot of our clients are constantly struggling with housing in addition to any disability issues or barriers to employment they might have. Here are some statistics that are actually from the Yukon Anti-Poverty Coalition. The general rental vacancy rate is 2.6% in Whitehorse, whereas the rental rate for subsidized housing is zero. Based on our observations, it typically takes six months to a year to have clients placed in Whitehorse housing. Even a wait time of one to two months is quite often enough to put somebody into a situation of homelessness.
One thing we're seeing for clients who are recovering from addiction is that they're living in substandard units where they're surrounded by others who are also facing addiction issues. So despite counselling and all the good efforts to get into a recovery stage, they're constantly being pulled back into the old cycle.
According to other organizations--and we've been doing a lot of inter-agency collaboration in the last six months--the number of homeless youth in the 13 to 15 demographic is growing. Through our client base, we see that a lot of these youth have learning disabilities, FASD, or possible mental health issues. Supported housing is a program run by Health and Social Services, and we've actually seen that as a really positive program under which a person with a disability lives in a unit adjacent to a unit that is lived in by the support person. However, there's been a shortage of persons volunteering to rent in this program. So public education and an increase in efforts for this would greatly help our clients.
Social assistance is something that at some point most of our clients will pass through when their EI runs out, when they're no longer eligible for sick benefits. We tend to see that we have a lot of clients on long-term social assistance, because they can never fully get back into the workforce. They have a fear that if they start at a 40-hour-a-week job and their benefits are gone, they may not have enough money for food, housing, medication, and transportation. According to some of our figures, which I worked out with a client, in order to make slightly more than his social assistance a month, he would have to earn $14 an hour for 40 hours a week. This man will never be capable of working that many hours a week without aggravating his current condition, so we need a system to help people work the best they can while at the same time gaining social skills and employment skills.
We see a need for support in transitioning. For a lot of our clients with disabilities, at some grade level, they're streamed out of academic and into a skill-building program. That means they're given a grade 12 pass certificate. That essentially means they've been in school either for 12 full years or until they're 21 years of age. This means that when they finish school, they won't be able to get into post-secondary institutions without a good deal of upgrading. We're finding that a lot of students don't realize this when they're streamed into the programs at 16 or 17 years of age. They're not fully aware of how this is going to affect their future. We have found that for most of the students with learning disabilities, with a little bit of help and some extra support, they could have actually gone through and gotten that grade 12 diploma.
As it is now, the majority of our clients are working at jobs that pay $12 an hour or less, which is a reasonable wage for the rest of Canada but not for the Yukon, considering our high cost of living. The recommendation would be to have more transition planning in the school system. We just last week made some recommendations on transition to the Department of Education. We're hoping those working groups will come forward with some solid recommendations.
There's an acute need for professional support persons in the Yukon. When we refer clients to counselling, we're looking at a three- to six-month wait just to see a mental health counsellor. Typically, when someone gets a support person, we're looking at one to three hours a week of support. Supported independent living workers are also looking at a one- to two-month wait.
For persons with newly acquired disabilities, we see that we're needing special support. We're having a lot of clients who don't know how to navigate the system. This is their first time trying to receive benefits, and they're completely at a loss. In September, our organization actually applied for funding, territorially, for an advocate who would help people navigate the system. We were turned down for the funding because it didn't meet our mandate. In line with that, we also see clients going through workers' compensation and being put off for weeks, months, or years. I've personally seen people with conditions that deteriorate incredibly during that time.
There's also a tendency for persons with disabilities to be in jobs that are low paying or without benefits. The Ontario Ministry of Community and Social Services, in 2006, found that half of working-age adults with disabilities were either unemployed or not in the labour force, and 36% of the majority of persons with disabilities earned under $19,000 a year. I would think that the Yukon statistics are similar. This is because of a number of factors, such as a slow job market and the tendency, as we spoke of, for persons with disabilities to have generally lower education because they are streamed out of academic programs earlier on. We still have many employers who are not willing to accommodate.
We have a stigma around disability that, unfortunately, still exists today. There's difficulty with persons with disabilities moving into higher-paying jobs with more responsibility. That's in part, again, a societal and employer issue. Despite some programs we have through the territorial government, such as the workplace diversity employment program, we find that not all of our clients are eligible for that program or have the skills base or the personality to work in that line of work.
That is all. Thank you for your time.