Thank you.
We offer the expertise of our lived experience as the basis for input and collaboration to increase our opportunity for inclusive attitudes and practices for Canadian women with disabilities in their economic security.
I would like to start by pointing out that women with disabilities are a good investment, and that investment has been very much overlooked.
Women with disabilities are major economic drivers of the economy of this country. Virtually 100% of their income is turned back into the economy to purchase the goods and services required to live with a disability. Health services, disability supports, child care, and transportation that they require are major sources of employment, industry, and retail business. Failure to invest in women with disabilities is a missed economic opportunity and creates barriers for our full participation in advantaged Canada.
People with disabilities are major income earners of their families. Workplace participation is vital for people with disabilities to be fully included in Canadian society and to ensure economic viability of their families.
I ask you to consider these important statistics. Working-age women and men with disabilities find themselves as the only adult providing income to their households a surprisingly high proportion of the time, whether they live in a household of one, as a lone parent, or with other adults. Almost one person in three with disabilities is responsible for 100% of the family income; fewer than one in five women and men without disabilities are in this situation.
The vast majority of female lone parents with and without disabilities bear most of the financial load for their children. About two-thirds of female lone parents over the age of 25 with disabilities are responsible for 100% of their family's income, and that means they do most of the decision-making about what purchases are made. For female lone parents without disabilities, the figure is similar, at 65%. Almost nine out of ten female lone parents with and without disabilities over the age of 25 are responsible for over three-quarters of their family income.
You can imagine the magnitude of the effects on young people living in the resulting poverty. Those effects are well documented in the studies on the CCSD website.
Yet in spite of profound economic challenge, women with disabilities have the majority of purchasing power for their families and make significant contributions to the Canadian economy. It would make great sense that investment in bolstering their economic power would be of great benefit to Canada's economy, both through enhanced purchasing power and through enhanced contribution to the tax base. It would make sense if they got value for their money.
Investing in people with disabilities is one potential solution to Canada's labour shortage. It is time to truly consider the potential of all Canada's people as contributors to Advantage Canada.
I ask each of you to hold this vision while I describe what our reality is really like from a montage of experience I've just had this week. I will conclude with some brief recommendations as to how we might work together to change these circumstances.
We all know the gaps between the vision we hold for Canadians and the hard realities women with disabilities are left to cope with. I'm here to tell you that I'm also directly affected by some of these realities, even as I walk with my sisters and my brothers, for we women also care for the human family and try to help them without resources.
I not only have my own fear; I also have the fear of how it could be worse, and how each day we try to keep from sliding to that edge. There are some gains and some hopeful things. These allow me another day to face the new situations.
The only thing typical is pain--physical, emotional, and spiritual. I ask you to ease this burden on our women. I ask you to use the principles of full cost accounting, which includes the fiscal bottom line, or the financial reality, the environmental reality, and also the full human cost.
First, I'm a woman who's had every human right stripped away. As a survivor of profound abuse, I now suffer from a mental disorder that has no real publicly funded access to treatment and requires special skills to treat, skills that exist more in the arena of a select few private therapists. This mental illness is not treated with medication. My first thousand dollars that I saved for my first RRSP was handed over to my therapist.
Without therapy I would have descended into madness that would have left me homeless and divorced. At least I've been able to achieve a level of stability and a reasonable life, but managing is becoming harder, due to the multiple barriers I face and the lack of access for even simple help.
I cannot access brain injury rehabilitation because I have a mental illness. My doctor and I had a little case conference and thought it might be a good idea to ask the OT department of the hospital for a functional assessment. I was told that I was too sick for the service, and that because of the physical and mental issues, I would require every area of their department. I wrote briefs to my government, briefs demonstrating that treating people with my illness would save $250,000 per patient.
I am still essentially without treatment and without service. I'm denied home care because I have a husband. In my desperation, I approached organizations for help and ended up in the leadership of every one of them.
While I'm humbled by the trust placed in me, will my turn for wellness ever come? As my disabilities worsen, what will happen to me? Will there be money to pay for services? There is no rehabilitation for me.
Then I look at what happened to a woman who is as ill as I am, but had no education, no disability insurance, and two children. Her mother, brother, father, and both her children's fathers ended their lives. She descended into illness and resorted to men for shelter as the rents went up, and when those men abused her and her children, she lost them to care and was homeless for two years.
The last year she spent in my home. Unable to find doctors for her, she eventually moved to another town and was hospitalized for two months. However, she now has a new home with another man. One of her children had a child by a man who was supposed to be caring for her, along with his wife. That child was surrendered for adoption and her sister was adopted by another family.
All of this was precipitated when her physical disabilities made it impossible to live in the types of low-cost housing units they give people on low incomes, with three flights of stairs. When the health unit came—and I was there—they told her that her girls, 8 and 10 at the time, could empty her commode chair in the living room. I spent last summer trying to dry her tears.
Another woman who worked as a cook in the restaurant industry developed the sudden onset of COPD and right-sided heart failure after working a 29-day stretch. She's on welfare awaiting AISH. She had no employment or private benefits. She phoned crying a few months ago, begging me for her to come and live in my home. There isn't any room left in my home. I had to turn her away.
She is paying $600 a month, plus groceries, to live in a basement that has sheets for walls. She is expected by her roommate to care for two young children a disproportionate amount of time in order to cover off the amount of rent she cannot pay.
A Middle Eastern Muslim woman who was working in a bank is now on welfare after being exploited by the Canadian she married, who beat her, raped her, and took her money. She feels that she's not able to approach people in her culture for help. She's too traumatized and ashamed to work, and she still thinks she must forgive her ex-husband, who still repeatedly steals from her.
There is a language barrier. She is always afraid of money issues and is often too poor to buy food. There is a language and culture barrier, and she is afraid on both sides of the cultural divide. I give her what support I can.
Last night, I took a call from a woman who had resources and has been ground down physically and mentally over long years of abuse and litigation. She's been living off her RRSPs and she's afraid she will lose income when she goes off CPPD into disability—and I should say there, on pension, CPP. She has to sell her home because she can't live there and manage financially.
She would like two things: a way to try to build a home business and maintain the nutritional approaches that help her health, and find something she can do in the community, even now, to give to others so she does not lose herself in her problems and become isolated and unhealthy. Her family is unable to help her, and her daughter is estranged from her, as her own issues led to her losing her own child.
I have also, in my role in many organizations, become an employer of women with disabilities who are seeking a return to the workforce. One of them has skills that would, in our Alberta, see her receiving a $100,000 salary, but we can only pay $32,000 in our organization. The benefits will also be similarly limited. This woman, who had worked very hard to earn this education and has years of relevant experience, has been denied work due to the gap in her resumé during her illness.
Some women with disabilities will take work in NGOs to the level of their income support limit, but then are working hours far in excess of that. I have a friend who was fired from her job in the health industry. As an administrative professional—
