Thank you very much for inviting me here. It's quite an honour.
By most people, the Institute for Research and Development on Inclusion and Society is called IRIS, so let's go with that. It has been around for quite a while, doing work under one brand or another in the voluntary sector. An important focus of the work for the last 20 years or so has been on employment and disability.
As you know, a great many people in Canada have disabilities—more than 2.5 million working-age people, based on the participation and activity limitation survey of 2006. Depending on the survey you look at, that number is even higher. It is more than five million working-age people, based on the survey of labour and income dynamics, or SLID. So we're talking about a lot of people.
We're also talking about an employment rate that has lagged behind that of non-disabled Canadians for many years. Based on the most recent version I could get my hands on, which has data for 2010, the SLID shows that 47% or thereabouts of people with disabilities were employed full-time all year in 2010, compared with 67.2% of people without disabilities. The lag has consistently been at about three-quarters of the employment rate for people without disabilities.
While there have been some improvements over the last number of years for people with disabilities, in the very recent few years, coming out of the recession, there has actually been a fall-off in the employment rate of people with disabilities. So there is a struggle.
That struggle is particularly difficult for people with some types of disabilities. I'm thinking here of disabilities in the area of the cognitive and the emotional domains. People with developmental disability, communication disability, learning disability, or mental health issues have had very low employment rates for many years, and lots of people want jobs.
Why don't they have them? Well, there are many factors external to individuals that help account for this. There is an education gap and limited access to training, which has persisted, although there have been some improvements on that front. There is a lack of the supports needed on the job, whether human support or technological support—built environmental factors, accessible transportation—and a lack of employer awareness and comfort level in dealing with disability in the workplace, whether of new recruits or of people who become disabled and need some sort of attention in order to be retained in employment.
There are problems with income security systems at the provincial level that can create real penalties for people who even consider working, such as loss of drug benefits, housing, and basic income security, which can be very difficult to achieve in a highly volatile labour market. Differences in local economies can make it hard to find jobs for anyone, especially if you have a disability. Information may not be available to people who need it in accessible formats. Community transportation may not be there. It goes on and on. It's a complex challenge to sort out, and there is no one silver bullet.
Then there are things that are internal or intrinsic to individuals, such as their age, their gender, whether they're aboriginal people or visible minorities, and the particular type of disability they may have. We can't do anything to change those factors, but those factors are definitely associated with lower than usual levels of employment.
Despite all the doom and gloom, there are lots of people who have jobs and have had them for a long time, and they make decent money. How do we account for that?
A long-standing interest of mine has been in explaining how it is that we manage to pull a rabbit out of a hat despite the obstacles to doing so. When I look at the research and listen to stories, I think there are essentially three key things being done that we need to do more of.
One is to strengthen the capacity of individuals in terms of their opportunities to participate in paid employment. If we were to look at training and education in particular—this is a huge issue and has been for a long time—although the education and training gap between those with and without disabilities has been narrowing in recent years, and that is good news, a gap persists, and there is a significant gap.
The better educated people are and the better their access to training, the more likely it is that they're going to have jobs. This suggests to me that we need to place some focus on making sure that people get those kinds of developmental opportunities to ensure not only that barriers are removed to accessing education and training but that people who are in post-secondary institutions know what they're doing with respect to disability and have the resources they need. We need skilled people, with the resources they require.
Also, at the elementary and secondary school level, often parents don't have much of a vision, and educators may not know what to do with people when they leave school and how to prepare them for that point. Parents and educators need to be engaged in good, effective transition planning that has a view to futures with employment for people.
I've spoken with provincial officials who have indicated that just getting that vision in the minds of young people is a challenge and without that vision, young people aren't going to go for it. Creating practical pathways that enable young people to achieve that vision is another area that requires priority attention.
The second major area would be strengthening the capacity of employers to hire, retain, and promote people with disabilities.
A lot of things are required in the workplace in order to make it possible for people to work, such as modified work hours, work duties, and so on. These are procedural matters, but other things can cost money. I'm thinking here of built environmental modifications, assistive technologies, ramps and all that kind of stuff. These can be real deterrents, especially for small and mid-sized employers, to not only making the outlays needed to bring more people with disabilities in as employees but also to better serve their disabled customers. Something is needed to make it possible for small to mid-sized employers to access low-hassle, low-grief financing so they can make investments in the modifications required to bring and keep people in employment who have disabilities and to do the same for their customer base of disabled people.
Employers often lack knowledge, comfort, and expertise, although there is a lot of knowledge out there among employers. So how do we employ that knowledge so that employers can network with employers and listen to the success stories and hear about how challenges were overcome? That's another area for priority attention: enable the knowledge there in our companies to get out and circulate more fluidly within the community of stakeholders who can do something to improve the employment situation of disabled people.
Third, strengthen the capacity of community organizations doing a good job on the employment front. Without my going into all the difficulties community organizations face, I'm sure you've heard more than your fair share of a lot of those. The funding for these organizations—even for very good ones—can be highly tenuous, which creates real disincentives for people to stay in the sector and to keep the brain trust alive and growing.
So how do we keep people attracted to this work, which can be very challenging? One way is to ensure that they have a job over the long term. Those funds can't be completely unconditional, and one understands that, but there are ways of reorganizing the funding so that accountability can be achieved with a measure of stability in the supply of the good quality supports that employers and disabled individuals need.
We also need to create incentives for organizations to work with people who face complex challenges in the labour market. Right now, a great many organizations find incentives to work with people who actually don't need much effort and who are fairly straightforward to place. Then they get their quotas up and everybody's funded and everybody's happy, except for people—and there are a lot of them—who have a significant level of disability and face a myriad of labour-market challenges, who get set to one side and therefore the low-employment rates continue on and on.
There are other considerations on top of those three, which probably as a federal group there is not much that can be done. Provincially, however, we can build on the successes of income security programs and social assistance programs, increase the earnings level exemptions, remove some of the penalties, and encourage and support individuals who want to make the transition from social assistance into the paid labour force.
Another measure is to extend access to health and dental benefits and those sorts of things, once people leave the social assistance system. Doing that for a few months is maybe not enough for people with complex needs.
We can't do much about changing age and gender in particular, but we can design programs that are more responsive to the needs of folks who present multiple challenges.
So a range of things can be done and are being done, where good practice is in evidence. I think we just need to roll up our sleeves and find ways of working together to do more of the good that is already being done.
