Thank you.
I'll back up a little bit. As Cameron mentioned, the unemployment rate for people with disabilities is 47%. That's actually a StatsCan number. We know the real number to be much higher than that, so the significance of this problem is much greater than one may think.
There are 800,000 job-ready Canadians with disabilities looking for work right now, but if you look at the population of Canada and who has a disability, that's 16% of the population. That's the entire population of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta combined, so it's a very large number.
We know that the reason we have such a high unemployment rate is because business owners, especially larger corporations, buy into a series of misperceptions and it's those misperceptions that we have to change. They are the greatest barrier that a person with a disability faces in order to get into the workplace. For example, business owners believe that people with disabilities are going to work slower, they're going to be sick more often, they're going to take more time off, they're going to be working less productively, they're going to be less innovative, and so on.
When we subsidize workers to get into the workforce, if the business owner doesn't understand that those are actually myths, the subsidy becomes free labour and that person with a disability will work for 12 weeks, 5 weeks, 26 weeks, depending on the province, and then they're let go because they simply become a burden on that company.
The opportunities fund, which is now going to be moved up to $40 million as of 2015, is an excellent source of resources for companies that do want to hire people with disabilities, but it has to be used in a more constructive fashion. We need to be able to use that money for accommodations that could be costly and also for any extra training, because as we know, people with disabilities, even if they're Ph.D.s, quite often get into the workforce and they're lacking soft skills.
So there is extra training and extra mentoring that is required. That is an expense to a company, so we need the opportunities fund and other funds like it to take that step back from the work subsidy mentality and get into using that money in a more constructive fashion.