Your original comment about quick service restaurants, or fast food restaurants, bringing in people from other countries through the foreign worker program is a very good one because in Alberta we do have issues. Even in my business at Tim Hortons we have problems finding staff, yet in Alberta the unemployment rate for people with disabilities is 70%. It's 47% according to StatsCan, but we know the number to be much larger.
It all comes down to the same thing. What do employers believe? Either they buy into the series of myths and misperceptions, or they don't. They're enlightened. The only way they're going to do that is to have people with disabilities actually work for them. I own six Tim Hortons stores and one Cold Stone ice cream shop. In the last 18 years I've hired 85 people with disabilities. Every single one of those was in a meaningful and competitively paid position. Today 36 of my 210 employees have a disability, and that's in every department.
If you look at the benefits from my operation, first of all, I have the lowest turnover rate of any Tim Hortons operation in the GTA. I have 35% turnover rate versus 75% for anybody who is doing just as good a job as I am. It's not because I'm a great operator. I like to think I am, but it's because I hire people with disabilities.
You see the key—and this is what Walgreens really picked up on—is that I have 180 employees who do not have a disability so what happens is it changes the mindset of the other employees by being inclusive. It actually changes the way that your employees think about who they're working for, or what they're working for.
If you look at the other benefits, you have absenteeism, which we've now found to be 86% lower than for people who don't have a disability. You have innovation. I can assure you that we would not have had a police escort up to the front door of this house of Parliament today if it wasn't for this very innovative man here in a wheelchair who managed to do that. I couldn't have done that and Ken couldn't have done that, but if I have a person with a wheelchair with an innovative spirit working in one of the drive-throughs of one of my stores, I can guarantee you I am going to have more sales and I'm going to have more crowds coming through there because that innovative spirit is brought over into the workforce.
If you look at productivity it's a huge one because businesses believe that if they hire somebody with a disability, productivity is going to be lower. I know that productivity is at least the same, but in many cases productivity is higher. I have one particular instance that I tell everybody about because it's so profound. I have a deaf person who is working as a baker who replaced a person who was working for nine years. Her productivity is 18.4% better than the person she replaced.
There are so many benefits. There is no downside to disability employment. We have to get business owners to understand those benefits. Once they do, when they get it, believe me they're not going to go back.