Human Resources Committee on Nov. 24th, 2016

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Good morning, everybody. I'll give a reminder that we are being televised, so Wayne, be on your best behaviour. You just never know when you're going to be on camera, sir.

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2) and the motion adopted by the committee on Monday, June 13, 2016, the committee is resuming its study of poverty reduction strategies.

I would like to welcome those here with us and also those by video conference. We have with us Mr. Mark Wafer, president, Megleen, operating as Tim Hortons.

Welcome, sir. You didn't bring us any Timbits or coffee or anything.

[Mark Wafer, President, Megleen operating as Tim Hortons, As an Individual]

I noticed a few Starbucks cups around the table, though.

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

It's what they have at the hotel. I'm sorry; we'll hide it over here.

[Wayne Long, Liberal, Saint John—Rothesay, NB]

We're starting off on the wrong foot.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

I know; this is not going well already.

Also here via video conference from Meticulon is Garth Johnson, chief executive officer, and Joy Hewitt, chief employment coach.

Welcome. Can you hear me okay?

[Garth Johnson, Chief Executive Officer, Meticulon]

Yes. Good morning.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

You didn't bring us any Tim Hortons Timbits either.

[Garth Johnson]

No, but we are drinking it.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Okay.

From Metcalf Foundation, also via video conference, we have John Stapleton, a fellow of that organization.

Welcome, sir. Can you hear me okay?

[John Stapleton, Fellow, Metcalf Foundation]

Yes, thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

That's excellent.

Also here with us, from the Peel Poverty Reduction Strategy Committee, are Sonia Pace, co-chair, and Adaoma C. Patterson, adviser. Welcome.

We're going to start with opening comments from each of the organizations. We have seven minutes for each of you. Please try to keep as close to that time as possible. If you see me politely waving or smiling or you see that my mike is on, it means we're pretty much out of time and that you should wrap up.

We'll start with Mark Wafer from Tim Hortons.

Welcome, sir.

[Mark Wafer]

Thank you very much for having me here this morning.

I've been a Tim Hortons franchisee now for the past 21 years. In that time I've employed 145 people with disabilities in meaningful and competitively paid positions. This is every type of disability in every area of my business, from entry level right up to my management team.

What I have discovered is that when we build the capacity of people with disabilities in real jobs for real pay, we create an economic boom for our business. There is a clear business case for being an inclusive employer. Yes, it's the right thing to do, but when we talk about it being the right thing to do, business owners tend to ignore that. What we've discovered is that by building capacity and by including people in real jobs for real pay, we are creating a safer workplace. We are creating a more innovative workplace. We are reducing costs by reducing employee turnover, and much more. There is a clear economic case for being an inclusive employer. I'll give you one brief example.

In my sector, the quick-service sector, the average turnover rate for employees is about 100% to 125%. That's typical, and that's normal for a well-run operation. In my group of six restaurants, for the past 10 years my turnover rate has been under 40%. The only thing I'm doing differently from my colleagues and friends in Tim Hortons across the country is being an inclusive employer.

Typically, people with disabilities don't leave. It took them so long to find that job that they stay with you for a long time, but more profound is the effect that it has on those employees who do not have a disability. I have 200 employees without a disability today, and I have 46 who do. Of the 46 who have a disability, none left last year. That's great. Of the 200 who don't have a disability, the turnover rate last year was 55%. It's still half the norm. Why is that?

If you look at the demographic of disability across the country, 15% of us have a disability. That's equal to the entire population of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta combined. It's a big number. But it's even more profoundly larger were you to add in the direct family members of those people with disabilities; we are now at 53% of the Canadian population. I have 14,000 customers a day walking into my six Tim Hortons stores, and 7,000 of them are directly affected by a disability.

However, the unemployment rate for people with disabilities still remains extremely high, some believe as high as 70%, with a participation rate of around 18% to 20%. Why is that?

It's because employers, hiring managers, and CEOs are still buying into a series of myths and misperceptions. It's the great fear they buy into that, if they hire people with disabilities, they will work slower, take more sick time, require more supervision, require expensive accommodations, and be less innovative. As I have proven, the opposite is true. It's simply good for business.

If we look at the demographics across the country today with students, students leaving school, 447,000 Canadians with a disability have graduated in the last five years. Those 447,000 have never worked a single day. There are others who have graduated and who have found work, but 447,000 have not found work in the last five years, and 270,000 of those have a post-secondary education.

It's a massive talent pool. It's a massive group of talented potential workers that, today, employers are largely ignoring. They're ignoring them because of fear, the fear of hiring people and having to pay large accommodation costs, which simply is not true. Sixty per cent of employees don't need accommodation at all, and 35% need an accommodation that would probably cost an average of about $500 or less.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Thank you very much, sir.

You have about two more minutes. I don't know if there is anything else you'd like to add.

Maybe I can ask you something, just very briefly. As the chair, I don't usually take advantage of this, but you've given me a little bit of time. I'm really intrigued with what you're doing.

Have you made any efforts to try to scale this up within the Tim Hortons organization, and have you seen much uptake from your colleagues across Canada?

[Mark Wafer]

Very much so. There are a couple of things that I've done. I'm an advocate and I'm an activist. I started talking about this about 10 years ago. I went to a conference as a delegate and the keynote speaker didn't show up and they asked me to speak. The rest is history.

My message is one that was resonating. Tim Hortons, as a corporation, has done some great things, and you can talk about this, but they're like any other large Canadian corporation. It's very slow to make change. Where we have had some success is at the franchise level. Tim Hortons franchisees across the country have embraced the hiring of people with disabilities, more at the entry level, intellectual types of disabilities, people doing entry-level jobs.

We really need to move away from that. We need to look at our businesses critically, look at every position, and then fill those positions with people with disabilities.

In 2012 I was a member of the federal panel on opportunity for people with disabilities in the workplace. This was set up by former finance minister Jim Flaherty. We did come out with a report that resonated with the business community, but more importantly we were provided resources to start an organization called Canadian Business SenseAbility.

That's a membership-driven organization. It's based in Toronto but it's national in scope, and the idea is to bring in Canadian corporations as members and make them disability confident. We have 28 Canadian corporations now as members of our association, and that began right here in Ottawa with the former minister of finance. Of the 28 corporations, 16 are multinationals, and they represent 800,000 employees.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

That's fantastic.

[Mark Wafer]

So things are moving; things are changing. The message is resonating, and the message is resonating because we're focusing on the economics of it. We've always talked about the right thing to do. We've always talked about legislative compliance.

We have a paradigm shift coming in attitudes towards people with disabilities. If you look back 20, 30, or 40 years and to the Jerry Lewis syndrome, where we had poor Timmy and poor Tammy sitting on Jerry's lap, it taught us that we should only view people with disabilities with pity.

Now we're asking CEOs and hiring managers to look at people with disabilities as contributors—contributors to society, to themselves, and to the economy at large.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

That's excellent. I look forward to hearing more from you today, sir. Thank you.

Now we have the presentation from Meticulon—and I said that right this time, I think.

[Garth Johnson]

Yes, just think of Battlestar Galactica and you'll get there.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

From Meticulon, we have chief executive officer Garth Johnson, and chief employment coach Joy Hewitt, coming to us via Calgary, Alberta. Welcome, the next seven minutes are all yours.

[Garth Johnson]

Thank you very much for having us here today. We're very privileged to be here.

Meticulon is an IT consulting firm. We do three of the toughest jobs to be good at in the IT sector. We do quality assurance in the software testing field. We do big data analysis for large datasets, and we do data security and verification work. That's integration and the really hard parts of compliance.

Since we began in 2013, we have worked with 174 people with autism. We employ exclusively people with autism to do the actual work. We have typically abled people who handle some of the other roles in the company, but when it comes to executing the contracts that we take, all of them are on the autism spectrum. They are incredibly bright people.

As you probably know, in Canada, more than 80% of people with autism who want to work and are capable of working do not have a job. Every time we run an intake for potential employees into our process, we receive over 40 applications, sometimes over 60, from people who are advocating for themselves. Most of them are university educated and most have never worked. So far, 85% of the people who have worked for us have never had a job in what they were trained to do. The other 15% of the people who work for us and come through our process had a subsistence level, retail type job. Nevertheless, these people come through our process, become our employees, and we are a minimum of 60% better, more productive, more efficient, more accurate than their typically abled counterparts who they work with.

We work on site, and we offer remote services work to our customers. The biggest challenge we currently have as a business is that in this economic downturn that we're facing in Calgary, our staff are consistently being poached by our customers because they are so good at what they do. The question we have is, why is this the case? Why is it the case that across the country....

We've helped others replicate this. We've created a thing called the Meticulon tool kit, which is basically a small franchise kit that Joy and I work people through on how to replicate our business. It's been done successfully in Vancouver and in the interior of B.C. Winnipeg is about to launch, and we've spent a copious amount of time in Dallas, Texas, working with AT&T because they want to replicate it internally. We know that these people are excellent employees. We have a very hard time getting into businesses in the beginning. Most of our customers are SMEs, because we can sit at the table with the decision-maker, and we can talk to them about the value proposition they're going to get, and we can prove it.

Since we began, we have literally done dozens and dozens of contracts and have never failed on a single one. I've worked in tech for most of my career, and I can tell you that never happens. One in 60 Canadians being born right now will be diagnosed on the autism spectrum, yet we're not seeing a lot of change. Why is that?

We think it comes down to one thing. What Mark said about the economic case is absolutely correct. We say to people all the time, “Don't hire us to do good, hire us because we are good.” In the beginning of our business, I can tell you that the reason people engaged us was because they wanted to do good. The fact that we were exceptionally good at what we do was a big surprise, a good surprise, but they did not expect that.

We think it comes down to fit. We think that one of the challenges that's happening in the world of disability employment that we've seen is that there's a lot of “warm body principle” practice still going on. An employer has a job, and they want to put someone into it. An agency has a person they want to place, and they just sort of ram a square peg into a round hole and hope it works out.

Our process for on-boarding people is about three months long and includes the training that we do with them for software testing. One month of that is just building out a skills and capacity grid, which tells us who they are, what they're capable of, what their challenges are, and what their interests are. It's a collaborative process that the potential employee goes through with us. We build a very detailed mind map of what they are capable of, specifically related to the jobs. We use that to sit down with employers.

We all know that soft questions get hard answers in the autism world from people, and the on-boarding and interview process is broken. Job descriptions don't really talk about what the jobs are about. They don't talk about what you really need to do those jobs. We have created this process, which we're also hoping to give away and franchise down into a model that allows businesses and employees and self-advocates to more effectively create that fit until we get to the point where we're meeting business needs.

Why did we succeed at Meticulon? It is because we started from the business perspective first. We said, “Where do people with autism have tremendous gifts and abilities so that we can address real business problems and leverage them?” In tech, we knew that was jobs that require precise attention to detail, an exceptional ability to focus with accuracy over the long haul, diligence, the need to be thorough and complete, and a love of doing repetitious and highly structured testing. That is key but it is often not done well, because you and I start seeing what should be there.

We screen for people in our process who don't. We screen for people who have visually eidetic memory skills. We screen for people who can absolutely immediately see problematic flows in test code, and we've had a successful business enterprise so far. We want to see that replicated, and we think that one of the things that needs to happen is that we need to take step back and start convincing employers to do this because it's good for their business, and not because it's a good thing to do. We need to look at what their real problems are, and then go and look at the real gifts and abilities that Mark talked about, which are loyalty and a lack of turnover.

I tell you, there are jobs that these people on our staff are better at than you or I will ever be. We need to take more time in a conversation with employers to talk about fit and when that's right. We've never had a failed placement. I've never had a business where I've placed every single person I've hired into something that's successful. Why? It's because we took the time to build it out. We think that's part of the conversation that needs to happen.

We want to replicate our business. We're looking at moving into Ontario and the Maritimes because we know we are onto something, but we're onto something not to do good alone. We're onto something because we want to make a profit, and we want to help these people build sustainable careers.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

You're very welcome, and thank you very much for the work that you're doing and for your time today.

I'd like to welcome Bilan Arte, the national chairperson for the Canadian Federation of Students.

I'm glad you could join us today, and the next seven minutes are yours.

[Bilan Arte, National Chairperson, Canadian Federation of Students]

Thank you very much.

Good morning, members of the committee, and thank you for inviting me to speak before you. My name is Bilan Arte and I'm the national chairperson of the Canadian Federation of Students.

The Canadian Federation of Students is Canada's oldest and largest national students' union, representing more than 650,000 students from coast to coast. Our organization advocates for a public high-quality system of post-secondary education for our country. Today, I am happy to speak, not only on behalf of my generation of students and youth but also out of hope for generations to come.

I'm incredibly grateful for the opportunity to address this committee, and I'm excited to share students' vision for universal access to post-secondary education in Canada. In response to decades of government inaction on skyrocketing tuition fees and mounting student debt, students across the country held actions in 36 cities and 58 campuses for a national day of action for free education this past November 2. We have built a historic coalition for free education, and we believe the time for government action is now.

Students, educators, workers, administrators, policy-makers, and communities are all in agreement that a strong system of post-secondary education is key to Canada's current and future success. Investments in post-secondary education generate billions in annual income activity, drive growth and innovation, and train and retrain a skilled workforce who can compete globally, foster civic literacy, and promote responsible citizenship.

All students have a right to education, no matter their families' incomes, and all of us benefit directly from the skills and training our population gains through access to education. I believe that we need universal access without upfront cost. By eliminating tuition fees and fully funding indigenous learners, we can build a strong foundation for growth and ensure access to education for everyone, no matter what province they are born in or their parents' income.

I believe that it is time. We need a new approach to post-secondary education because, in 2017, a college diploma or university degree is required for a decent income and a just society. Today, 70% of new jobs require some form of post-secondary education, and for the precarious employment predominant in the remaining 30% of jobs, people want pathways to a better future.

Today's system is failing young people. In 2011, 42% of Canadians between 20 and 29 years old lived in their parents' homes, up from 27% in 1981.