First, I would like to thank everybody for having us here today. We're really excited about this opportunity to present.
We got our document in a little late and we didn't have it translated. It is being translated and will be submitted later, so we just have the English version now. We apologize for that. You can blame that on me, I guess—slow editing.
We'll get started here. We are with Spinal Cord Injury Canada. We were formerly known as the Canadian Paraplegic Association. We're in the process of changing that name all across the country. We're still the Canadian Paraplegic Association of P.E.I., but we will be changing in September. It just takes a little while sometimes for the process to work through.
We're really excited about presenting in front of you today, the House of Commons HUMA committee, pertaining to employment opportunities for persons with disabilities.
We are pleased to see that your committee has devoted time and energy to examine this very important issue. We are also pleased that employment opportunities for persons with disabilities are being viewed as a priority in moving forward.
We would like to inform the House of Commons HUMA committee that we are in agreement with all components of the presentation the Council of Canadians with Disabilities did last week, on February 28. We would like to emphasize that the Government of Canada should develop a five-year strategic plan to address employment needs of persons with disabilities. Spinal Cord Injury Canada would welcome the opportunity to be part of any technical advisory committee that may arise out of that and to provide community input on this initiative, suggested by CCD, and to have a pan-Canadian representation.
We would also like to stress the five points of the Council of Canadians with Disabilities' key message pertaining to the federal-provincial labour market agreements for persons with disabilities. The federal government must emphasize program targets with provincial governments and ensure the necessary resources are made available to deliver programs to individuals with disabilities.
The sad thing is the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador recently announced they're cutting funding to Spinal Cord Injury Newfoundland and Labrador, in the amount of $900,000. This is going to be a loss of 23 full-time staff, and over 2,600 clients are going to be affected by that. So it's a sad and ironic thing, especially when we're talking about this today.
Today we're going to focus a bit more on an operational approach. There's a project that we did in P.E.I., to give an example of how things can work properly. It's a program called Discovering the Power in Me. This will really help people with disabilities reintegrate into the workforce. We presented this endeavour to HRSDC's call for social bond concepts in December of last year. It's a pilot project that was undertaken in P.E.I. by us and the PEI Council of People with Disabilities, beginning in January of last year, with 10 participants. The program was very successful. Initially, we had eight people out of the ten employed. Today, we have four still employed, and four realized that they wanted to upgrade their skills and returned to university for post-secondary education. It was a very successful program.
I'm going to give a little more detail about how it worked. People with disabilities—as you know, we had a great report—are faced with numerous challenges and barriers as they attempt to integrate into society and secure employment opportunities. The Discovering the Power in Me program, the DPM, was developed in collaboration with the Canadian Paraplegic Association and the Pacific Institute. It's based on decades of research in the fields of cognitive psychology and the social learning theory. It's aimed at people with physical disabilities who have been experiencing significant roadblocks in their journey to independence, self-reliance, employment, and community integration.
The program is designed to build an understanding, with a structured process, of how the mind works and how people can control the way they think to achieve success in any part of their lives. For those with traumatic injuries, for their families, friends, and caregivers, it is more important than ever to corral the power of the mind and focus on a fulfilling, productive life.
According to a major national employment participation study conducted in 1997 by Spinal Cord Injury Canada, formerly the Canadian Paraplegic Association, only 38% of people living with a spinal cord injury are employed. SCI Canada plays a crucial role in providing individuals with spinal cord injuries and other physical disabilities and their families with information through best practices, which give support in education and timely employment referrals.
While 60% of newly injured people integrate successfully back into society—they probably had previous employment and they reintegrated back into the jobs they had before—40% really struggle. That's where CPA and our best practices can come into play.
A lot of them work less than 20 hours a week and are actively seeking full-time employment, or are unable to work full-time and are actively seeking increased employment, or are in receipt of a notice of an imminent layoff, or must leave their current occupation for medical reasons.
The objectives of the Discovering the Power in Me program are to provide comprehensive skills enhancement for individuals with disabilities that will assist them to build and further develop the necessary life skills to better prepare them for future career goals; develop life and employability skills whereby individuals with disabilities strengthen their personal development and independence, and participate and gain employability skills in a safe environment that is conducive to positive learning and assists in building self-confidence before entering the workforce, which is very important; and enable individuals with disabilities to explore and develop the essential skills required for their career of interest through the career exploration component of the program.
The expected results are that all participants in the program will either be employed at the end of the program or will have begun the process to upgrade their skills or training through education in order to prepare them for a new career that they can be excited about. The results are easily measured.
We found with this project that when people went to employment, they weren't satisfied with the level of income they were at and they realized they needed to improve their skills. That's why four left their positions and returned to school. I think they'll be returning to the jobs they've had because they've had so much support there.
At Spinal Cord Injury Canada we have a two-year renewable licence to deliver the Discovering the Power in Me program, and eight provinces have formal training to deliver the program. Its main focus is to enhance employment opportunities for persons with disabilities by assisting them to identify that they have an internal locus of control and are not hindered by their external environment. That is so that people can understand that it's up to them to get through life's barriers and that they can't allow the environment.... When people tell them that they can't go or that maybe certain places aren't accessible, it's up to them to make sure that they get themselves out there, and that they're the ones who control their own lives.
We also work collaboratively with other provincial disability organizations, such as those that have an established employment services program. In P.E.I. we worked with the P.E.I. Council of People with Disabilities, which has 28 years of experience in employment-related services, to partner with our project, because we did the Discovering the Power in Me component of it and they had the life skills component of it. We worked together and we developed a 13-week project out of that for people with disabilities. We also place them in employment for 13 weeks.
In conclusion, Spinal Cord Injury Canada thanks you for the opportunity to present here today. We are of the opinion that our initiative is clearly in line with how the federal government is seeking to improve the lives of Canadians with disabilities.
We hired a facilitator and a coordinator to initiate this project, and they had 13 weeks of classroom training. I'm a trained facilitator for the Discovering the Power in Me component of the project, which takes a week to do, and that was a component that's always been missing in life skills programs in the past because people didn't really understand the way the brain works or what was holding them back.
They were allowed to see what successful people, such as the Rick Hansens of the world, or everybody sitting in this room, think about their future and how they set goals for themselves. That's a component that we found most people with disabilities were struggling with and was missing. They didn't know how to set goals; they didn't know how to think properly. It's that little voice that talks to you all the time. They would think, “I can't do this, I can't do this, I can't do this”, whereas this program trains their internal voice to think, “I can do this, and this is how I'm going to do this”, and they set their goals and learn how to get the energy to achieve the goals and to think about each step. You don't have to know how to do each step when you set a goal, but when you set your goal, you get energy to do that step. That's the way the project really works.