Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you for being witnesses.
I too am a visitor to this committee today, but I do have some questions I would like to ask.
Until October of 2008 I ran a company that specializes in disability management, and we have worked with some major corporations across Canada putting return-to-work programs in place for them, focusing on rehabilitating injured workers, and getting them back into the workplace. So although what we're doing is not exactly the same, because we're dealing with physically disabled people, there are some principles that I think apply in this case.
What we have seen in our work is that if a person is put back into a job where they are earning less income than they were in their previous employment, the rate of re-injury is much higher and there's much more potential for them to end up on benefits once again. So in our work we try, whether it's through retraining or reorganization or new ergonomic equipment, to help that person back into a place of employment where they are returned to their previous full income.
Would you agree that having a person earning a profitable income significantly lessens the likelihood of them re-offending?