It's actually very important and there are a number of reasons for that. One of the things that we've discovered over the years is that people who have disabilities, when they get out of school—even if they came out of university—are lacking in soft skills. When they come into the workforce, whether it's a minimum wage job like my business, or Deloitte, there's going to be extra mentoring required, not just for the job but for life skills. In fact, we were just talking about this before we came in, and we had a couple of funny stories about it. It is definitely something that every company should set up in some way. It's not something that needs to be formal and it's not something that needs to be costly.
Mentoring works in many different ways. Eight of my 36 employees who have a disability happen to have an intellectual disability. They don't necessarily need mentoring, but they definitely need coaching. That's where the relationship with the community becomes crucial. When I bring in a new employee who has come from a community-living organization or something similar, my expectation is that the job coaches and the job developers will develop a relationship with me that is ongoing. This way, these people can act as my consultants. They will be experts who will come in and help me to get through whatever the issue is, whether it's related to work, the home, or the disability.
Mentoring is good but I will caution that there are too many companies out there that use mentoring for free labour. We have to be very cautious of that. Take a person coming out of university with an M.B.A. who happens to be in a wheelchair. Getting him job experience is very important because he probably doesn't have anything on his resumé. He probably didn't have a paper route or work at Tim Hortons. He has a blank resumé. So having him work in a company that has a mentoring program can be very beneficial and important, but there have to be start and end dates. We can't have people in mentoring situations that go on forever, because that's free labour.