Okay.
I live in a small rural community outside of Winnipeg. In my home town, we have a sheltered workshop. We also have very inclusive schools in my community. Parents will come to me in my community as their kids are starting school and ask what they need to have in place. I caution them on that aide thing. If your child doesn't need a full-time aide, don't ask for it because kids become very dependent on that. When kids transition out of school into the adult world, they hit a brick wall, absolutely.
We've done a great job with inclusive education and I agree with what you say. Inclusive education should be individualized. It should be what the child needs. Not everybody has to be in a classroom because that's the way we say it has to be now. That doesn't work for everybody. I think it needs to be done on an individualized basis.
Particularly in a rural community, and we hear this across the country, it's very difficult to find meaningful employment for people. In my community of 3,000 people, we have a lot of non-disabled people who leave our community because they can't find meaningful employment.
Our thoughts on a sheltered workshop are if people are being paid to do a job that their support staff are making a real wage at to support them to do the job, then so should they be paid for the job. If you're paying somebody and out of a 30-day month they're bringing home a paycheque for $38, I don't know why in this country we are not allowed to call that slave labour, because that's exactly what it is. Somebody is being paid to do a job that a factory worker is being paid minimum wage or better to do and yet, for some reason, it's okay for people with a disability to make less than $1 a day. That's what we're opposed to.
If people are going to day centres or day programs and they are learning skills—and I know at the one I worked at we did that, too.... For people who could, with some skilled training, become job ready and be employable, then, great, we were doing that, but there was a group of people there who I believe could work at video stores. We have people who somebody might see as unemployable, who I know would be the greatest employee because their attention to detail and tasks are beyond anything I've ever seen before.
Did you get where I'm going with that?