I will attempt to use my voice. If you can't hear me, welcome to my world.
Thank you for the opportunity to talk about employment and people with disabilities.
I am the executive director of the Canadian Association of the Deaf. We are the oldest national disability consumers organization in this country, founded in 1940.
I want to emphasize that we are the Canadian Association of—not for—the Deaf. We are the people who are deaf in Canada. Every one of us knows first-hand what it is to be deaf and to face the unique barriers to employment that exist only for people who are profoundly deaf and who use sign language.
I want you to stop and think for a minute just how much you depend upon your hearing for your own employment. How are you going to function in the House of Commons if you can't hear?
To those of you who work as staff for this committee or for the government, how are you going to do your job if you lose your hearing?
To members of the media and anyone else listening to this presentation, what if you couldn't listen?
If you lose all of your hearing overnight, you will still be able to get along by reading and writing notes, because you already know English or French. You learn English or French or any other spoken language by hearing it.
What if you have never heard it? What if you were born deaf or you became deaf in early childhood, before you learned to read and write?
Our organization's research indicates that as much as 65% of the deaf populace may be considered functionally illiterate. It's not because they're stupid. It's because they're trying to learn a spoken language that they cannot hear.
Unfortunately, for the past century the education of deaf people in Canada has been obsessed with trying to teach us to “hear” and speak instead of actually teaching us academic and practical subjects in the one language that we can and do easily master: sign language.
Is it any wonder that less than 5% of deaf Canadians go on to post-secondary education, or that as much as 91% of them leave high school without a certificate, or a degree, or a diploma?
Now, what are the employment prospects for these people?
In 1989 the Canadian Association of the Deaf conducted an informal poll of service agencies, educators, and community leaders. The consensus of these knowledgeable people was that the combined rates of unemployment and underemployment for deaf Canadians was around 80%.
Ten years later, in 1998, we conducted what is still the only credible data collection with regard to deaf people ever done in this country. We found that the rate of unemployment and underemployment was completely unchanged. It was still 80%.
Let me turn that around and drive home the point. Only 20% of deaf Canadians are fully employed.
Imagine having to report to Parliament and the media and the voters that only 20% of all the people of Canada were fully employed. As I say, that was 15 years ago. No one has done a credible follow-up survey in the intervening years. We have repeatedly applied for funding to do it, but no government wants to provide money to hear that 80% of its populace has consistently been out of work for 35 years. Incidentally, the last time the Public Service Commission was willing to provide us with data on the number of deaf people employed by the federal government, it was 0.01% of the civil service.
I don't want to imply that there's a hierarchy among disabilities, but governments and the private sector are much more comfortable hiring people with just about any other kind of disability than deafness. The reason is simple: you know you will be able to communicate with them; you can talk with them. As long as you can talk with them, it's easy to pretend not to see their disability.
But what's the very first thing that comes to your mind, if you are an employer and a deaf person applies for a job? It's “How am I going to communicate with them?” And then there's the thought of safety issues: “How is she going to know that the building's on fire, if she can't hear the alarm?” There is the issue of expense: “Oh my god, we'll have to spend thousands of dollars on interpreters and visual alarms for one employee!”
Really, it all boils down to your making an assumption that deaf people would be a nuisance to employ. These are systemic and attitudinal barriers that still persist to a very depressing extent all across Canada. It doesn't seem to matter that there are quite reasonable answers to every one of them; we're a nuisance, and employers don't care to expend either the time or the brain cells to find out otherwise.
What are the solutions? Our researchers uncovered an interesting fact. A lot of working deaf people were self-employed, and what they were doing was delivering their services to the deaf community itself, not to the general community, except when they were teaching sign language to non-deaf people. In other words, the only place deaf people were finding jobs was inside their own community; the outside community would not hire them.
With these facts in mind, at the turn of the millennium the Canadian Association of the Deaf negotiated with the federal government to deliver a series of projects that we called the national deaf jobs strategy. With less than $600,000 over a five-year period, we created more than 150 brand-new jobs and training opportunities specifically designed for people who are deaf. That's a cost of just $4,000 per job.
Bang for your buck, anyone? Every one of those 150 people is still employed or self-employed, because we gave them exactly what they needed to succeed. We knew how to do it because we are deaf people ourselves.
All of the federal funding programs that enabled us to create these lasting new jobs have been killed off. They have been replaced by...nothing. Supposedly, relevant funding was downshifted to the provincial and municipal governments, but those have done nothing.
You have to be proactive in tackling the deaf employment crisis, and most importantly you have to be willing to let the deaf themselves design and direct the programs and the resources. I know that the idea of the federal government providing funds for a national body to meddle in provincial jurisdictions of employment and training is against everything the present governing party believes in. But just as in governing Canada, you need a trusted central authority to receive revenues and distribute them through provincial affiliates in order to deliver jobs and training at the grassroots level.
That is exactly the same structure that we have in the Canadian Association of the Deaf. That's why we were so effective and cost-effective in creating new opportunities with our national deaf jobs strategy.
The Internet is proving to be potentially the greatest ever self-employment outlet for deaf people. It is the greatest ever tool for making it feasible for deaf people to work outside their own community, whether for someone else or for themselves. It is the ideal way for us to overcome systemic workplace barriers, discriminatory attitudes and practices, and the tyranny of the voice telephone.
We need your help to maximize the abilities and resources of deaf Canadians to become Internet entrepreneurs, workers from home, remote employees, and mobile online workers. We need your help to utilize Internet-based video technology to deliver training and education to deaf Canadians in their natural language, the language of sign.
We have proved already that a deaf-controlled national deaf jobs strategy can deliver far more successful results than anything that any level of government or any private sector employer has ever delivered, before or since. We are calling on you to recognize this truth and to make recommendations to support the funding of a new national deaf jobs strategy.
Or do you want us to go back to our community and tell them that the government doesn't think an 80% unemployment and underemployment rate is such a big deal?
Thank you.
