Human Resources Committee on Nov. 29th, 2016

[Randy Lewis]

Surprisingly, one of the companies that did this is a large company called Meijer that works in six states. About two years ago their CEO called me and said they were going to be opening a place on the border of Illinois. He didn't know how close it was to us but he said he would like one of his first employees to be my son. He's been working there for two years.

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

That's awesome.

[Randy Lewis]

He's the only one in the house who works.

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

It's good somebody is working.

Last week we had a gentleman who owns some Tim Hortons. His name is Mark Wafer. I think 46 of his 250 employees were people with disabilities. He told the story of how he transformed his business that way.

I wanted to talk to you about your journey and how you did it. Obviously we're here to come up with innovative ideas as to how we can reduce poverty and how we can help our department and our minister come up with a national poverty reduction strategy.

Mr. Lewis, with respect to what you did at Walgreens, what adjustments were needed in the workplace to accommodate people with disabilities? How did you start that? I recognize your son, Austin, was what drove you but how did you change the culture and the structure of Walgreens and were there any support initiatives federally?

Can you elaborate on that? How did you start that process?

[Randy Lewis]

When we started, we didn't know anything about this, so we acknowledged that. That was very important. But again, we said we want to be the most efficient, cost-effective, and inclusive, so anything that gets in the way of that, we'll do.

By the way, what did our accommodations cost? I would counsel everybody to never use the word “accommodation”, because when we hear the word “accommodation”, we employers hear “cost” and “risk”. We call them adjustments.

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

That's fair, yes.

[Randy Lewis]

Any time you try a new program and you want to change procedures, there's a secret word we use. Call it a pilot, and then you can do anything.

Our average accommodation was $15 and it was paper and pencil. Mostly it was trying to help the person. We had a technology called ATP—ask the person. Instead of assuming the way the job should be done, we would ask them how they would do it. For example, our requirements say use two hands to do this job, and we would never hire a person with one arm or one hand. We learned to say, “How would you do the job?”, instead of assuming they would not be able to do it because they probably had a lifetime of experience doing that.

We did not have an accommodation fund. We just took issues as they came up. I think the magic happened. Here's one thing about disabilities. It's a prejudice and a bias we have, but it's wrapped in pity and love, and we were able to use that. With a third of your workforce, or 40% of your workforce, you cannot have mascots, so it forced people to make people successful. They didn't want to fire them, so they worked their tails off to make people successful, and in the process the cover was removed from their eyes and they saw a complete person. The stories they talk about at work are not the ones about how productive this place is. It's what I did to make Johnny or Sarah successful.

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

I'll just jump in.

With Walgreens, with respect, it's a big national organization. You're a vice-president, I believe, so you had some top-down pull on that. There are a lot of companies certainly in Saint John—Rothesay, the riding that I'm from, that I think would be very interested in that same kind of model, but they would need potentially some government support.

Can you help us with potential ideas of how our federal government could aid a lot of small businesses to open up their doors to make adjustments for people with disabilities? For example, I have a compelling story about a young man who comes into my office with his parents once a month. He has autism and he's a wonderful young man, and he's just having trouble getting a job. Anyway, I'm trying to open doors for him.

What can we do as a federal government to help companies open up those doors, because I think the stats of unemployment in people with disabilities, when you count the ones who have given up searching, is about 75%. It's a staggering number. How can the federal government help this?

[Randy Lewis]

Its the same problem we have in the U.S. Even if someone decides they're open to the possibility, it's very rare in the United States that somebody can say, “I'll understand your jobs. I'll find you the workforce. I'll train them. I'll help them transit at no extra cost to you.”

There are agencies that do this, that, and that, but they don't work together.

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

Yes.

[Randy Lewis]

That's what we need somebody to do, the federal government to do, to say that if you'll just be open to the possibility, we won't let you fail. But it has to be soup to nuts. Understand the jobs, find the workforce, help screen, and support on the job.

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

A federal program.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Thank you very much.

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

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

For six minutes, we have MP Poilievre.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Thank you very much, everyone.

Mr. Lewis, thank you for being here. We've spoken over the phone a couple of times, and when I asked to have you as a witness, I assumed we'd have you by teleconference. I'm very pleasantly surprised to see you in person. Welcome to Canada.

[Randy Lewis]

I was told Ottawa is really beautiful at this time of year.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

It is actually very beautiful, and so are the roads.

I think we're all amazingly inspired by the success that you've had with Walgreens in employing over 1,000 people. I read your book, and my favourite story was of the elderly parent who came to you. He shook your hand and said, “I want to thank you because I can die now. I know my son is going to be okay.” That's the kind of independence that you've offered thousands of people who would otherwise be cast aside.

What I'm looking for from you today is something like an Ikea instruction manual on how we can replicate what you did with Walgreens right across Canada's job market. You said that the best way to carry this out is to have a group that goes into a workplace, understands what work needs to be done, brings in disabled employees who they believe are capable of doing it, and bridges one to the other.

Could you elaborate on the government policies that enable that to happen?

[Randy Lewis]

There's some money involved in this. The problem, at least in our experience in the United States, is the way the agencies are organized.

First of all, the disability community competes. We've broken it up. You have people who work with autism, people who work with deaf people, and so on. They all view themselves as competitors because they believe it's a world of scarcity.

We were fortunate to start off with. We came across an agency and we said, “We're going to hire 200 people.” They had never placed more than 13 in a year. That was kind of a surprise to us. We said, “You have to form a coalition with all the other groups out there, because we're not going to deal with 14 different groups. You have to be the one to do all these things because we don't understand all this stuff.”

If you look out there and you throw this pile of money into the community, how is it going to be used? Can somebody do it like that?

We were fortunate in South Carolina. We were fortunate in Connecticut, but in a lot of other states we were not. Surprisingly, once you get an employer to even consider this...and to get them to consider it you need to say that it's not going to cost them more money and that they're not going to have to become disability experts. Why would they change if it were going to cost them?

Take that mindset, and ask how you are organized to be able to address an employer that way. I don't think it's happening anywhere. It's a problem we have in the U.S., and I suspect you have it in Canada too.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

What I hear from some employment agencies that do similar work is that they find government funding rules very prescriptive.

“This is how you're going to do your job. This is what we're going to reimburse you for. You get this much for a photocopier, this much for rent, this much for staff.” Would it be better to move towards a model where we pay these organizations based on the results they achieve rather than on the input costs they incur?

[Randy Lewis]

We have a lot of that in the United States. Based on results and not just.... We use 90 days. Agencies don't get paid unless the person has been on the job for 90 days.

Where we fall short is that when that 90 days comes up that person loses all the occasional supports. We found out that there are some people who are initially successful but then an incident happens and we need some support. We need to be able to have the continuing, episodic support too.

Pay them for results, certainly not for processes. I agree with you totally.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Could we then just say that we want longer-term results, that we are going to pay based on the continuous employment of the client for two years, not for 90 days?

[Randy Lewis]

That would be ideal, but they have to be able to do all the things to find, help train, and help show the employers the model.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Do you have the same problem in the States that we have in Canada, with disabled people entering the workforce, beginning to pay taxes, and losing their benefits at such a sharp rate that they're often worse off than they would have been if they had not worked at all?

[Randy Lewis]

Most certainly. The social safety net is so hard to get into that they're afraid of losing it. In our case, we were paying $17 per hour. When you pay a living wage, that helps people to get off of it, but working part time, entire families were facing.... It's an issue. We just dealt with it.