Thank you very much.
I appreciate those comments. Ditto for much of that.
I will also echo the sentiment that we need to look at targeting those with the greatest barriers, recognizing that certain disability subgroups, such as people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, face more serious and severe attitudinal and systemic barriers. Those barriers are unlikely to be overcome in a significant way if we approach the employment of people with disabilities as though they are a homogenous group. They are not. They are very different individually, but also as groups, and sometimes the groups merge and are complicated.
My experience is as a local provider, not only of employment supports but of supporting people with intellectual disabilities to live, work, and play in the Ottawa community. Part of that is helping people find employment and helping employers welcome them to their workplaces. Through that experience, I've seen a lot of what works and what doesn't work, and that's what I'd like to talk about.
I'm also a volunteer with United Way Ottawa. I'm one of the first focus-area champions. I go out and speak about the advantages of hiring people with disabilities and promoting attitudinal change in that area.
With respect to employment, I just want to bring home some of the local context, because right now, within sight of this great building, down at the Westin, one of our LiveWorkPlay members is actually at work in the accounts department. To move a little bit west on O'Connor Street, we support an individual who runs a small business, where he works with Accenture. To go south on Bank Street to The Works Gourmet Burger Bistro, we have someone there right now helping out with the lunch rush. Just to give you some local perspective, that's what we do. They're real people right here in your local community.
We are a local organization with a local focus, but we try to inform our work by best practices from across the province, the country, and the world. Some of the gentlemen you had sitting here—in fact, right in this seat you had Mark Wafer, and you also had Cam Crawford—are people who I'm very familiar with. Again, I would echo many of their comments, so I'm grateful that I don't really need to bring that context. We need more Mark Wafers in Canada. Our country would be a much better place, and a better place for people with disabilities.
We also work with the Ontario Disability Employment Network. I know that Joe Dale testified here as well. We're quite aligned with those comments.
Locally, we're part of the Employment Accessibility Resource Network, hosted by United Way Ottawa. It's bringing together about 30 service providers and employers. I think it reflects well what the panel was saying in their report, not only about promoting the benefits of hiring people with disabilities but also about how to connect with people like ourselves who know these individuals, can connect with an employer, can help communicate the benefits, and can find the right job for the right person.
I see how fast time flies, so I'm going to skip ahead.
There's one thing I want to do. I know it's common to talk about best practices, but I want to talk a little bit about worst practices, because I think that's important. In these times when it's a constant dialogue of scarcity of resources, I think we can't only emphasize the positives. We have to look at where our resources are being used perhaps ineffectually or even in a regressive manner.
One of the things that certainly concerns us and our partner organizations is segregated and/or sub-minimum-wage work environments. In the field of developmental services, as it's labelled in Ontario, we see scarce government dollars continuing to flow to practices and activities that not only fail to support community inclusion but in fact create barriers and have regressive impacts. A lot of this is covered in the CACL report on achieving social and economic inclusion, where they note:
Although enrollments in sheltered workshops are slowly declining...segregated day programming and enclave based employment persist as a dominant model of support for this group in Canada. With below minimum wage compensation, they constitute a form of financial exploitation and social and economic exclusion with substantially lower quality of life outcomes....
This has certainly been our experience, having supported people who have been in these segregated situations and who perhaps have been told that it is because they do not have opportunities, a future, or a possibility in the real workforce. This has been proven wrong time and time again. The greatest barrier was in fact that message to them and to their family members that they would not have success with employment, so this segregated work-like arrangement was what's best for them.
I would note that in some ways the Government of Canada does support that practice by sometimes contracting with these agencies where basically you have a salaried staff member like myself who is supervising a bunch of people with disabilities who are being paid at a sub-minimum wage to perform a task. I would encourage looking internally at what goes on there and dealing with that, because it's wonderful that there's this talk about best practices, but I think leadership through demonstration is critically important.
Another worse practice—this is more of a fear I guess—is going forward again in a dialogue of scarcity. Sometimes there's a tendency toward one-size-fits-all. It sounds economically efficient. Let's send everybody with a disability who is looking for a job to the same place, and then we'll save on various costs.
The problem is that tends to incentivize the marginalization of those who are most difficult to serve because the metric by which performance of those career centres is usually measured is simply how many jobs. So it's not a one job equals one job situation. If you have a person with an intellectual disability who is in a group that is facing 75% or higher unemployment, and they get a job, that is a very different outcome from someone with a Ph.D. who sustained a workplace injury and has been supported to return to work. I'm not saying that is not important, just that it's very different. If you count those two things as the same outcome, then the most marginalized people are unlikely to benefit from that perspective.
Years ago a young man came to our office—actually his mother, but he was there too. She was in a rage because her son had been assessed by a career centre as having a 3 out of 100 score in employability. That is not a very good message to receive. Long story short, he has now been working for a TD bank locally here in Ottawa for more than a decade, has a full salary, pension, everything. That is obviously not the outcome nor the destination that had been determined for him through that initial assessment, so we need to be wary of that.
If we do have people going through the same door, we have to make sure through the other side that there are people who understand the particular needs of different disability groups and subpopulations because those are very specialized skills. What we do in terms of the work we do with employers and developing those relationships is not the same as helping someone prepare a resumé and look through job postings. That's one type of job support.