Mr. Speaker, I want to resume by noting that in my prior work experience I worked for the Association for Persons with Physical Disabilities. We worked quite well with Human Resources Development Canada at that time. I particularly would like to note Yvonne Renaud and Irene Kent, two wonderful public servants who helped to participate in creating the opportunities fund for our area.
The opportunities fund is a good example to show how, if the government does have political will to push an issue forward and appropriate resources are put there, we actually can change lives. More important, we can also even the playing field for people who have traditionally had a lot of barriers put in front of them in regard to being able to reach their fullest potential in Canadian society.
The opportunities fund was an initiative to help persons with disabilities find employment or start a business. What was interesting about this approach, and I do give the government of the day credit for it, is that the government actually did go down to the grassroots levels and talk to all the different associations and groups related to persons with disabilities. We were asked whether we wanted to apply for individual funding or look at a special program that encompassed all of us. We worked with Essex and Kent counties so we covered a lot of geography in southern Ontario. To start with, we had over 20 organizations serving persons with disabilities.
What we were able to come up with, through negotiations with public servants who did their due diligence and also up the line, was support to create two programs.
One program assisted persons to use an incentive program to maximize their opportunities to take advantage of employment opportunities and get employment. The employer got a small dividend to assist a person with a disability get into the employment stream. That would dissipate over time and the person would be taken on as a full time employee. We had a lot of accountability built into the model. The hours were provided first, we checked to make sure that full and gainful employment was happening and then the incentive would follow. That then would dissipate over time as this permanent employment was fixed.
It was a good opportunity for some flexibility at the local level in being able to assist people to actually get to the positions and for them to be effective as individuals, marketing themselves to employers to get positions. We ran a program out of APPD called “Equal Ability”, in which we assisted people in doing that.
At the beginning, there was also a small program to assist persons with disabilities in starting their own businesses. I am proud to say that some of those businesses are still operating today, several years later. Brian Fitzsimmons, for example, is one of our former clients who was very much involved in creating a disc jockey service that now has gone into a full-fledged business. He has now had an opportunity to start a family. This is someone who, before this program, wanted to chase after a dream and had the capabilities to do so, but he needed the structure in place just to help give that push.
Therefore, when we create this agency it is very important to have an understanding that this should be for the facilitation of the not for profit sector. If we get into a mandate that is going to be very constrained, with no flexibility, what we are going to see is the lessening of local involvement and also the elimination of solutions that would otherwise seem palatable to local people and also to local organizations.
I give some credit to the Bloc for being concerned about this interfering in terms of provincial jurisdiction. I think there is some merit there. That is why it is very important for this structure to have not only the provincial flexibility but also the regional flexibility, so we can deal with these social issues in ways that are very important to those local communities and so local problem solving will be influential.
Similarly, following that, I had a chance to work for the Multicultural Council as a youth coordinator. It was a very good program. I would once again like to mention Yvonne Renaud, who helped set it up, as well as Glen Shuba. Once again, those two individuals were very influential at the local level in facilitating the local not for profit sector in being able to bid or to be part of a practice to acquire a Youth Service Canada project. We had over 90% success ratios with those projects in regard to getting young people off the streets and either back to employment or to school.
The problem we had with these programs, which a lot of not for profit organizations are facing with the way the government is handling its initiatives right now, was a lack of sustainability. What the government is requesting from the not for profit sector is unreasonable in the sense that it wants them to get partners, it provides little operational support for ongoing funding, and there are also very short windows. One ends up doing a lot of research, which is fine, and a lot of partner building, which is fine, but the problem is that the programs complete themselves far too quickly and the renewal process is very difficult.
So even when we have those high degrees of success ratios and greater accountability than many private sector organizations as well as government sector organizations, because there is such a limited pool of resources available, it is right down to the penny and it is very bureaucratic to renew those successful programs.
Therefore, my colleagues in the New Democratic Party and I are interested in seeing how this is going to evolve in terms of the actual policies related to the new organization. If the social development Canada act leads to a larger bureaucratic structure that has no connection to and is not going to address the big issues that not for profits are facing or the sustainability of funding for the programs Social Development Canada wants to roll out, then we really will not have done much anyway. That is really important, because we have had very successful programs.
For example, on the homelessness issue in our community we put together a number of initiatives with partners and groups. It was not enough and it still is not enough to deal with the problems we have in my constituency in Windsor and Essex County. Our local groups have done the research and have been very supportive, but due to the way the program has been rolled out we actually had funding delayed, so that announcements and things came later and passed into the area where people were vulnerable in the wintertime.
Those were inappropriate measures when we first rolled out that program. That type of stuff has to stop. There has to be greater sustainability and there have to be more resources available.
I think it is important to look at this context of our social policy and framework as an opportunity to seize the improvement of Canadians' lives. Once again, that has to be done with the prioritization of this department. If it is not provided with the appropriate resources or if it is just going to get the leftovers at the end of the day, then it is not going to be able to fulfill its mandate.
We are looking at very significant opportunities to help different individuals move forward. For example, I know that the environment and some of our Kyoto commitments today provide wonderful opportunities for retraining and also for new employment for some of these different groups and organizations that traditionally have had difficulty in finding employment. That is the type of ingenuity we are going to need.
I would like to point out that it is very important for us to look at some of the categories that the department is going to work on. This is very significant in terms of where the Canadian economy is going and also our demographics.
One of the issues is seniors. This country has yet to address seniors' issues. This is very significant in terms of what is happening to our seniors right now. They have fixed disposable incomes. In Ontario, for example, many municipalities have had to raise property taxes because of downloading by the provincial and federal governments. That really squeezes people on fixed incomes. If their property values have risen as well during that time their taxation would have increased. They really get pinched. As well, oil and home heating costs have gone up, as have insurance costs.
All of those things have really pressed on seniors' disposable incomes, let alone drug costs and health care. We now have a huge population that is moving into the category of vulnerable seniors. The proposed act is also going to have involvement with caregivers. There is another opportunity to alleviate some of the burden on our system if we actually are going to be proactive on it.
However, once again I have seen very little from the government in regard to dealing with those issues and, more important, in regard to tying together all the things necessary to ensure that the disposable income is there for seniors. It is going to be very important to ensure that we have a full-fledged plan. I am not yet convinced that there is the realization of our aging population.
One of the things I am getting support on is my private member's bill to eliminate the notice of compliance, the automatic injunction, for the drug companies. Without any type of evidence whatsoever, without providing anything, the drug companies can get this. After 20 years, they are supposed to have the generic for a drug available for the market, but after 20 years and without any proof they can get an automatic stay for 24 months at a minimum. That prevents another drug from getting into the market, it raises the price of pharmaceuticals and seniors get pinched again.
Are these issues going to be discussed? Is there going to be the mandate for the government to deal with the complications on a broader range of issues? Will the government actually roll out the programs that are going to be sustainable and comprehensive enough to deal with the issues? I have some reservations about that.
At the beginning of my speech, I mentioned the issue of disabilities and my past personal experience with that. It will be interesting to see if this legislation is going to lead to a mandate to create a very upfront and accountable persons with disabilities act that will be effective for Canadians, one that is going to bring us up to standard with the United States and provide for greater rights and access. It also relates to other seniors' issues because mobility and the way we actually go about inclusion in our society are related to an aging population. As people age, they acquire different types of disabilities.
Last, I do want to touch briefly on child care. We New Democrats feel that this is very much a part of our social economy. The member for Sault Ste. Marie has been working on the file very diligently for us. He got out in the summertime to start his campaign across Canada. He started to consult with people.
We believe this is a great opportunity to have the demonstration of an effective program for Canada, a program that will provide some improvements for women and children in our country especially and that also will be very much an important part of our industrial strategy. This has been played out by other OECD nations that have taken advantage of providing better day care to move their economies forward.
I will conclude by saying that I do have some reservations on how the government is going to prioritize the department. That is a big thing, which I am going to be watching. Aside from that, it does leave us with the opportunity to be able to discuss very serious issues that need to be changed for our social economy.