Good morning.
On behalf of Lubna and myself, I want to say that we are happy to be here with you today. Having heard other people speak, I'd like to mention right off the top that 99% of the people who work in our organization are people with mental illness or addictions, or people who have experienced poverty or been marginalized in some way in society, which makes us a rather unique organization.
Thank you for the invitation to appear before the committee today and to share the work that we do at Working for Change and the systemic work we undertake around mental health and addictions in regard to employment opportunities, poverty reduction issues, housing, etc. We believe that people with lived experience are experts and need to be consulted in areas of policy development by the federal government.
There is still a serious stigma attached to the words “mental illness” and “addictions”, although society's views around other disabilities have changed somewhat. People from my community are still facing huge barriers to employment, housing, and social inclusion. The unemployment rate for people with disabilities remains extremely high—some believe as high as 70%—and for people with serious mental illness it is as high as 90%. We know that 45% of people entering the Ontario disability support program have mental illness or addiction disabilities. The cost of this program could become unsustainable in the future.
Why is it that we continue to see this increase? Everyone on ODSP lives in poverty, some in very deep poverty that often compounds their inability to recover their health. Many whom we speak with are looking for a way out of poverty, but we have not developed the pathways to help them out.