We believe that the federal government has a number of roles to play in support measures for people with a disability.
The first role is to maintain a core funding of our organizations, such as Independent Living-Montreal and, more broadly, Independent Living Canada. We want to inform you—as you probably already know—that core funding will decrease until we no longer receive anything in 2015. At that point, you will have to compete with foundations, hospitals and university institutions, which have internal resources for funding requests and projects. For our part, we will be excluded from that because we don't have enough people internally or enough funding to hire people who really specialize in funding.
Core funding allows us to not only run an employment support program that is an alternative and complementary to what already exists, but also to provide resources and workshops on essential non-work steps to obtaining and maintaining a job, or facilitate peer support and mentoring.
The government's second role would be to fund employment support services within organizations.
Our third recommendation would be to put in place financial measures to facilitate mobilization, taking into account employers, productivity and the work situation. For everything related to employment accommodation, it takes much too long to achieve a minimum possible productivity.
Moreover, employers have obligations regarding means, but they don't have obligations of result. To obtain results, the government could propose incentives to all employers. To encourage them to hire people with a disability, we propose giving them a financial incentive.
As well, lastly, for people with a disability to be able to work, we know they need to have home support and assistant services, appropriate adapted transportation and accessible and adapted housing. If we don't have those services, we can't continue working. We need all of those services. Those services shouldn't be reduced.
Thank you.