Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee, for the opportunity to be here today.
The Canadian Association for Community Living is a national federation of over 200 local associations, provincial and territorial associations, and our national organization. Our mission is to advance the inclusion of people with intellectual disabilities, and we work closely with the cross-disability community.
We are very encouraged by this committee's study on poverty reduction strategies. This has been a primary area of concern for us, given that over 70% of adults with intellectual disabilities who do not live with their families live in poverty. At the outset of your study, we encourage some consideration of what we mean by “poverty”. I appreciate the deputy mayor's comments on the need for a multi-sectoral approach.
What do we mean by poverty? We're guided by the definition in the Quebec act through a study we did with the cross-disability community—“Disabling Poverty/Enabling Citizenship”—to combat poverty and social exclusion. I'd like to read for you the definition in that act. Poverty is defined as:
the condition of a human being who is deprived of the resources, means, choices and power necessary to acquire and maintain economic self-sufficiency or to facilitate integration and participation in society.
As a starting point, we would encourage a comprehensive definition of poverty, which would then take us to thinking about what kinds of investments are required to give people the capabilities and opportunities they need in order to participate. As an overarching frame, we would suggest a capabilities approach developed by Amartya Sen and adopted by the UN development index. Before we get into the details, let's be clear about what we're trying to accomplish, which is to provide people greater power over their own lives so they can participate in the social, economic, and cultural lives of their communities in a way that gives them well-being.
I don't need to go into the details. Our brief will leave you with the details of the realities facing people with disabilities, particularly intellectual disabilities. I'll give you just a couple of highlights.
We're talking about 13% to 14% of the population, or over four million Canadians. Seven out of 10 need help with daily activities. Caregiving of people with disabilities is part of the lives of over eight million Canadians.
Parents who have children with disabilities are much more likely to have to downscale their participation in the labour market or leave it altogether. Consequently, we're seeing that families who have family members with disabilities are more likely to live in poverty as well. This doesn't just affect individuals; it affects families as well.
Almost 700,000 people with disabilities also give care to other people with disabilities. More and more, this is going to be the case with the dramatic aging of the population and the increase in our population of people with cognitive disabilities, traumatic brain injury, etc. All those numbers are going up. That's who we're going to be. Despite how we think of ourselves, despite our ideal of intellectual and physical prowess, more of us are never going to meet that, and certainly, at some point in our lives, we will be nowhere near meeting that. We're an increasingly disabled population, so we need to accept disability as part of the fabric of our personal lives, our families, and our communities.
Because this is a study on poverty reduction strategies, while we have our list of what a strategy for people with disabilities might look like, we are more interested at this point in leaving you with some ways of framing this issue overall. In starting with a broad definition of poverty, and then in terms of a framework for thinking about what poverty means and how it happens, it's very important to start with the outcomes of vulnerable groups. I appreciate that in your terms of reference you've referenced that we should focus on particularly vulnerable groups.
What does “vulnerability” mean when it comes to people with intellectual disabilities? We've identified six key dimensions of exclusion. If we take the starting point in terms of the definition, we're trying to address exclusion. What do we mean by “exclusion”? People are lonely, stigmatized, and isolated.
Up to 50% of people with intellectual disabilities experience chronic loneliness and isolation compared to 15% to 30% of the general population. Over 50% of people with intellectual disabilities experience mental health issues. When the experiences of isolation are combined with low income or a disability, these things start to get compounded. When you add gender into it, you add refugee or immigrant status into it, you add racialized status, or you add indigenous status into this, the issues of exclusion grow.
People with intellectual and cognitive disabilities are four times more likely than the general population to experience violence and victimization. These things start to compound. In terms of income, as I've indicated, over 70% of adults with intellectual disabilities are living in low-income situations. Another dimension is people who lack personal and communication supports at home. More than 50% of children with disabilities do not have access to the needed aids and devices they require.
In terms of homelessness and lack of affordable and adequate housing, we know that on any given night, 35,000 people are homeless in Canada, and the evidence points to a much higher proportion of people with intellectual and other disabilities. Almost 30,000 adults are currently placed in congregate residential facilities, which means they don't have power over their own lives. While in one sense they may have basic needs met in congregate facilities, if we stake our starting point of what poverty means in terms of being socially excluded or not having power over your own life, those people need to be part of a poverty reduction strategy because they don't have power over their own lives.
In Ontario alone, there are 10,000 to 12,000 people on waiting lists for residential services. Their families, according to a report released by the ombudsman of Ontario last year, had absolutely nowhere to turn, which leads to the institutionalization by default because families don't have support. We have a basic sort of infrastructure system in this country that relies on families to provide all caring responsibilities, and it's becoming increasingly unsustainable.
The final dimension of exclusion is that people are powerless. Just yesterday the Law Commission of Ontario released its report on decision-making capacity and legal guardianship, and despite years of advancing proposals to recognize the legal capacity of people with intellectual disabilities and the support they need, the Law Commission has refused to go down that path and has continued to press for guardianship systems despite the United Nations calling Canada out on this.
Our approach is to start with exclusion and those realities of exclusion and then to begin to think about the kinds of areas in which we need to make investments, to understand what those core barriers that result in that kind of exclusion are. From the perspective of disability, perceptions and attitudes of others are critical. Access to communication support is critical. Deaf Canadians in Canada don't have access to the basic interpretive services they require to access health care.
As far as social infrastructure goes, we've talked about social infrastructure in terms of a housing strategy being absolutely critical as well as for indigenous and first nations communities. We would really encourage extending an understanding of social infrastructure to families and investing in family support.
Finally, we need to invest in and ensure that people have basic legal status in this country. The federal government has a role in that, as do the provincial and territorial governments.
I'll leave it there.