Evidence of meeting #32 for Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was communities.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Conservative
Pierre Poilievre Conservative Carleton, ON
Mr. Wafer from Tim Hortons has said his decision to hire over 150 disabled people was not an act of charity, that it was a 100% business decision driven by profit motive.
Would you say this is a business decision? Can you make a more efficient and more profitable enterprise by including people who in the past have been excluded from the workplace?
As an Individual
Of course. We wouldn't have done it otherwise. All these big companies that have done this haven't been doing it out of charity. They come and see for themselves that it's not only just as good, it makes it better because of this cultural impact.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Bryan May
Thank you very much.
Before we move on, I have an update for committee members. We're in the process of debates for our vote this morning. The bells will begin at 10:39 a.m., from what I've been told, which means we'll probably get this round in but that's it before we have to suspend for some committee business.
We will be rushing you out the door, I'm afraid, in order to get our business done before we have to leave for bells.
Without further ado, we'll have MP Sangha.
Liberal
Ramesh Sangha Liberal Brampton Centre, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
My question is to Laura Cattari. We have to deal with it at all levels to tackle poverty. The definition is very...that we have to deal with poverty as a large team. In your opinion, what should we focus on to improve this strategy?
Campaign Co-ordinator, Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction
I also sit on the income security reform working group for the province. Some of the materials I've come across suggest that very low assistance pre-employment and punitive ideas, such as you must force a job search, aren't working, and they haven't worked for 20 years. What we are finding more and more is that people who are longer term on assistance have multiple barriers that no one's addressing.
When you start dealing with learning disabilities, and when you start dealing with chronic mental health issues that may not be acute, but do impact people's lives and they can't afford the medication for it, or they can't.... There are so many pre-employment barriers that people seem to slip through the net, so to speak.
There are some programs available for newcomers, mainly English as a second language, but beyond that the social inclusion aspect that gets people involved in communities and feeling settled is also important, so that they start to network just like all of us do when we go out to look for employment.
Liberal
Ramesh Sangha Liberal Brampton Centre, ON
You talked about regulating payday agencies and giving more licences to the child care centres and private insurance for low-income people. In all these strategies, do you feel you have suggestions to give to us, so that the committee can take care of and improve on these things?
Campaign Co-ordinator, Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction
Definitely. We need regulations stopping payday lenders from the very high rates and the—I'm going to use this term loosely, and it's totally a personal term—entrapment involved.
They target communities that can't afford these loans.
Campaign Co-ordinator, Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction
It gets to the point that, even if someone's working at an adequate job, so much of their income is going towards maintaining it, that it's creating this cyclical poverty in communities. That's what we're referring to when we suggest lowering the amount of interest and how they rework things. Even with multiple loans, there's no legislation stopping payday lenders or different organizations from giving out more than one loan to an individual at the same time.
With child care, support for more community-based, not private, child care centres is really important. It's not as profitable in low-income areas to put in a child care centre, so definitely supports are necessary.
I'm sorry, I'm trying to remember, the third one was....
November 29th, 2016 / 10:15 a.m.
Campaign Co-ordinator, Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction
Definitely, especially for pharmacare what we have found, in a specific single scenario, a single mother gets sick and can't afford antibiotics. She avoids actually taking time off because she doesn't have sick days. Even the inclusion of sick days would help. She gets so ill that she ends up in the ER with triple pneumonia, has two weeks off, and gets fired. It's crazy-making. It goes in circles over and over again. Yes, affordable pharmacare is really important.
Liberal
Ramesh Sangha Liberal Brampton Centre, ON
Laura, you talked about bringing awareness to communities, and awareness is also mentioned on your website. You had talked about domestic violence in communities and low-income, part-time contracts, small job contracts. These are all having more impacts on poverty.
Liberal
Ramesh Sangha Liberal Brampton Centre, ON
What would you suggest to the committee? What types of steps would you suggest to the committee to bring more awareness to communities?
Campaign Co-ordinator, Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction
Sorry, more awareness around...?
Liberal
Campaign Co-ordinator, Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction
Okay, for us, we do a lot of speaking in the first person. Today we saw Mr. Wood speaking about his story and the impact certain things had on his life. We use the same. We use first-person stories. It's a low-income worker who goes out into the community to talk about what they've experienced. People learn far more from hearing the details of what went wrong than they do from just numbers and figures when we present to them.
Liberal
Conservative
Mark Warawa Conservative Langley—Aldergrove, BC
I also want to thank the witnesses for being here.
I want to ask a question about how hopelessness plays into poverty.
I listened intently to your personal story, Mr. Wood. Your father, you said, lost his foot in an industrial accident, then was not able to work and had a very minimal amount of disability pension through workers' compensation. That affected a family setting—disastrously, apparently. If somebody is not able to work and they don't see any hope in the future, it affects their vision of hope.
Mr. Lewis, you also shared that there were people who had tried for a long time to get a job, had gone through training and were skilled, but couldn't get a job, and how hopelessness played into that. How important is it that we have people who encourage, professional counsellors, to help guide somebody who has reached the end? They feel stuck, that there is no hope. Mr. Wood touched on that. Then there's goal-setting. These are people who engaged with you within your life, encouraged you to set goals, and that there was hope, there was opportunity, if....
Maybe, Mr. Wood, Mr. Lewis, you could comment on that, starting with Mr. Lewis.
As an Individual
I think you hit right on the issue. If I could have my way about it...what I've observed over time is that the future is here, it's just unevenly distributed. I see different programs in different places. If I could put them all together, they would be along as follows. What we need to do in an early childhood program in the school system is set the expectation that there's going to be employment. Too many kids with disabilities get shuttled, put aside. Say that the expectation of our school system for success is for you to be fully integrated citizen, let's say at age 25, and everything we're going to do aims toward that.
You have IEPs in Canada. In Michigan there's a program called the START project. It engages parents, and they have their part of the IEP. They have tests that they have to do that would get the executive skills, the decision-making skills, the self-advocacy skills.... The parents start to do that and engage in the home.
You have a program here in Ontario, in Sarnia, starting at age 16. The community has internships, and they use returning college students as job coaches, and they get the experience, every summer, for eight weeks, age 16 to age 25. Then through that experience, 85% of the people who go through that in Sarnia are employed.
We could have those intern programs and then create the employment programs for the pool, like we've done. I think it's soup to nuts, but it starts at the earliest age, where the expectation is that you're going to be fully integrated in society. Once we have that mindset, all the ideas come together.
You have an army here of all these witnesses. It's surprising; once you announce something big, the world will move to it.
President, Kikinaw Energy Services
I'll touch on something that I didn't talk about before. My dad, when he couldn't afford to provide for himself and the family, turned to dealing drugs. He was in and out of jail for that. Now, there were a lot of social effects for me as a child growing up, because when you live in a small town, everyone knows that your dad is a drug dealer, right?
When he had his workplace injury back in the 1970s, I don't know how much mental health was on the forefront for a young man at the time. I think mental health is a very important part of the rehabilitation process. My better half is an occupational therapist, and we have a lot of discussions about this. I think mental health is a very important part of the process for people who are rehabilitating themselves to get back into the workplace.
There's a lot of talk about raising minimum wages and whatnot. As an employer, that concerns me, because sometimes our margins are so thin that we can't afford to bring people on. Mr. Lewis talked about how it needs to be profitable for us, and it needs to make sense for our business so we can feel good about developing people's skill sets. I don't know if putting a band-aid on the problem is the best way to go. I think that's the core root of the issue. Not everyone wants to go to work, so the wage is irrelevant.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Bryan May
Thank you very much.
We'll go over to MP Ashton for three minutes, please.
NDP
Niki Ashton NDP Churchill—Keewatinook Aski, MB
Mr. Neepin, I want to come back to you and talk to you about one of the points you made earlier. You've clearly made the case for the need for increased funding for K-to-12 education and for post-secondary education. You also highlighted how the cut to funding for the Keewatin Tribal Council—and, of course, for tribal councils across the country—has severely limited your ability to support first nations in ensuring adequate education for their youth, and of course, for adults who are interested.
Do you see the need to increase funding for tribal councils? Perhaps you could speak to that for the remaining time.
Executive Director, Keewatin Tribal Council
The level of funding that was cut from the Keewatin Tribal Council was about two-thirds of its funding. We were the second most-hit council in terms of the funding cut. The Prince Albert tribal council was number one; we were second. It appears that the ones who were hit the most were the ones serving the more isolated communities.
We've been unable to provide support to our member communities in terms of their ability to maintain their financials and record-keeping. There's a definite need in that area. Of course, for governance, we've been unable to provide the support they require in that area.
Our tribal council, as I've said, serves eight of the remote communities. Our priorities include providing all-weather roads to our communities, which would greatly reduce the cost of living in our communities. Many of our community members come to Thompson for their basic services such as justice and medical services. A lot of our community members have to leave our communities to come to Thompson because our communities cannot maintain the service levels that many of our people require.
Our tribal council does provide an essential service. We consider ourselves an extension of the bands in terms of administration and management. If that support is not there, many of the bands will continue to struggle.