Thank you for the question.
Before I took on this job, I was the deputy minister champion for public servants with disabilities. In fact, I was the first deputy minister with an actual disability to serve as the champion for public servants with disabilities. One of the things I wanted to do when I took on that job was to actually try to understand the status quo.
We now do an annual—it used to be triannual—public service employee survey, and I wanted to understand the data. Carl, my colleague in OCHRO, and his team do an excellent analysis of that, and you can actually disaggregate the data by how people have self-identified. You can do it by gender, by language group and by occupational group, and by people who have self-identified as having a disability.
In successive surveys, we see that people with disabilities report much higher levels of harassment and discrimination than the norm for other public servants. When you try to unpack that a little bit and actually talk to public servants about what could be driving that, one of the key issues is a feeling that the environment isn't designed to support people with disabilities, so whether our buildings are not accessible, whether washroom facilities are not accessible, or whether our technology works for employees....
If it takes you six months to get access to a piece of technology that can actually help you do your job properly, we can understand your response when that annual survey comes around and asks if you feel you've been discriminated against, if you feel harassed. That might help to explain a little bit about that.
In thinking about the strategy we're designing, we're trying to understand how we could change that. Do we need to put a first focus on building a welcoming environment? How do we then track the changes? The good thing is we do annual surveys, because they will allow us to measure our progress and ask whether the actions we're taking are making the difference we need. We're using that data piece to actually help us measure our results.
Thank you.