Status of Women Committee on June 13th, 2017

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

Thank you very much.

I want to thank all of our witnesses for being here today.

My questions are for Mr. Vansickle in Sarnia.

I can't tell you what a privilege it is to have you here today. I've had many conversations with the Ontario Partnership Council on Employment Opportunities for People with Disabilities, which speaks about Sarnia being the leader in the province of Ontario for employment opportunities. I applaud your efforts there. I know there's still so much more we can do.

You mentioned the example of Walgreens. I look more locally to the example of Tim Hortons franchisee Mark Wafer, who has been employing people with disabilities for over 20 years. I've spoken with him at length. He says exactly what you said, that it's not just the right thing to do, but it's good for the bottom line. The original employee that he hired 20 years ago is still with him and has just recently purchased a condo.

In my riding, Julia Hanna, a local restaurateur, has made a commitment, following a round table that I held, to employ a percentage of people living with disabilities. So, it certainly is possible. I think one of the most important things is that we're providing meaningful paid employment. I've noticed that people living with disabilities are the last segment of our society where we consider it okay to have them work for free or to volunteer without paying them.

I also want to say that the bottom line the Ontario Partnership Council had was that everyone should be considered employable until proven otherwise. I think all of us need to hold that as a mantra when looking at this issue.

I understand that you get 60% of your funding from the provincial government. Do you get any federal funding, or do you get any grants from the federal government for what you're doing?

[Bob Vansickle]

We do, absolutely, through the federal opportunities fund. As part of our model in Sarnia, we have a pre-employment workshop called jobPath. It assists people with a disability to.... Because many people who have a disability have never worked, there's a certain amount of trying to figure out what they're good at, career exploration and those sorts of things.

We also really focus on employability skills or the “how not to get fired” skills. It allows us as a service provider to get to really know people in order to make good job matches. When you're working with the business community, that's really what it's all about: making a good job fit for folks.

That's funded through the federal government through the opportunities fund. It has become more difficult as of late because, for 60% of the funding, we're now required to come up with in-kind funding or in-kind donations. That's something that has changed.

What we've been able to do is to get business folks in Sarnia to sign on as partners and say they would hire people without using wage subsidies. In fact, this is where it's really difficult because the majority, if not all, of our employers tell us that they prefer not to use the wage subsidies, and that they don't want the paperwork, the hassle, and all this other business of dealing with them. On the other hand, the way the model is set up, we are actually penalized in terms of our funding if we don't use wage subsidies. That's something again. If we could move away from that....

There is also our summer jobs model. That's the one we went to Vienna with. We were at the United Nations presenting on that one, and we won an award for it. We're funded through the federal summer career placement. We hire college and university students, and the college and university students act as peer role models and mentors. They actually go out and find the jobs for these students who have the disabilities, and then they provide them with supports.

That model is now being adopted in other places in the world and the reason it's so critical is that, as two very important U.S. studies in the last couple have years have stated, the most important indicator for workforce attachment is whether someone with a disability had a summer job or student employment while they were going to school. So it is critical.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

That's something I've heard as well, that so often people living with disabilities don't get that early high school type of training opportunity.

We have a very successful Canada summer jobs program for students who are at school, but people living with disabilities don't qualify for that generally. Some do, but not generally, because they're not in full-time school. I wonder whether you would see a role for the federal government to play in a similar type of program that would allow for the work experience that particularly younger people don't get when they're in high school or in their early twenties?

[Bob Vansickle]

Yes, definitely I do, but in my document I noted that there are many activities currently funded by the federal government that could be expanded upon to fit into a model like that. I think that could work very well.

I would caution, however, that we stay away from work experience and wage subsidies and those kinds of things for transitioning people into real jobs. One thing I've noticed is that quite often what will happen is that a person or persons with a disability will be hired in temporary employment or through a wage subsidy or a training subsidy. At the end of the subsidy or at the end of the placement, the value is then gone and the employer then lets that person go.

We see many people who have had perhaps a lot of failures and tough things happening in their lives. After these happen a couple of times and they have rotated through a couple of those scenarios, they will simply drop out of the workforce and not try.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

I think David Onley called it a “perpetual depression”, whereby they have given up on looking for work.

[Bob Vansickle]

Yes.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

I only have about 30 seconds left. Could you quickly tell us whether you have any advice on what we could do to educate employers about the benefits to their business of hiring people living with disabilities?

[Bob Vansickle]

You may want to engage in Ontario here with the Ontario Disability Employment Network. They are definitely a leader in the country in dealing with that issue.

People such as Mark Wafer and Mayor Mike Bradley and others are champions who are part of that group. Many of them were on the partnership council and have done a lot of great work in promoting to the business sector the value and the return on investment from hiring people with disabilities. I would suggest engaging with them.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

I know my time is up, but I want to sincerely thank you for what you're doing in Sarnia. I'm trying to make Halton overtake you as the leader in employment of those with disabilities—no offence—but I think all of us could be doing a better job in our communities of hiring people with disabilities.

Thank you for what you're doing.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Very good. We're out of time for today.

I want to thank all of our witnesses for being here and the work you're doing.

Thank you for your input to the committee. If you think of something that the committee could benefit from, feel free to send that information to the clerk.

I look forward to seeing all of you at our next meeting.

The meeting is adjourned.