Thank you, Mr. Chair.
We'll try to be very brief to allow for a more lengthy Q and A session.
Some of you may be familiar with the Mental Health Commission of Canada. We were created out of a Senate committee study and received all-party support. We were capitalized with a 10-year mandate through to 2017 to deliver in four areas: to deliver the country's first-ever mental health strategy; to pursue work in the area of anti-stigma across the country; to provide capacity for knowledge exchange in the area of mental health and mental illness; and we also added to our mandate a very large research demonstration project in the area of housing and homelessness.
We advise and make recommendations to leaders and decision-makers, including government. Just yesterday our president was presenting to another standing committee here in Parliament. Unfortunately, Louise isn't able to be here today due to prior commitments, but we're very pleased to have with us Dr. Eckerle Curwood, from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, to share her expertise with this committee on the study you have.
The Mental Health Commission works with experts in the mental health field and service providers and community leaders across the country, as well as people with a lived experience of mental illness. This is how we get our work done.
The commission, early in its mandate, struck eight advisory committees to help us generate the knowledge that would be required to catalyze change across this country.
The former workforce advisory committee of the Mental Health Commission of Canada worked on several initiatives to help employers change the way mental health is addressed in the workplace and saw the need for comprehensive research into solutions for helping people with severe mental illness find inclusion in the workforce. Among Canadians experiencing serious mental illness, up to 90% are not in the labour market.
This led to the development of the Aspiring Workforce project for employment and income support for people with serious mental illness. This is research led by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, and it's in partnership with the University of Toronto and Queen's University. This project will launch in the spring. A report will be provided in the spring, but we thought it would be prudent to come here today and provide Dr. Eckerle Curwood's particular expertise to the study you are currently undertaking.
The Aspiring Workforce project will provide recommendations aimed at helping reduce the high rates of unemployment among Canadians with serious mental illness.
The research addresses five key questions, which I will lay out for you, and then I'll pass it over to Dr. Eckerle Curwood, as time is of the essence.
The five key questions guiding this project are: one, how to effectively provide supports and services for people who want to work, and what services are likely to be most helpful; two, what systematic incentives and disincentives exist in returning to work; three, how to develop social businesses that, as part of their mission, provide jobs to people with mental illness; four, how to provide disability pensions that also focus on a person's capacities and abilities to work; and five, the key things people with mental illness need to know about succeeding at work.
This project will also provide a national inventory of social businesses across the country.
While we hope to be able to provide the committee with the full report prior to the conclusion of your study, we thought that in the interim it would be beneficial for Dr. Eckerle Curwood to come here today and offer some insight on particular aspects of the report.