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—
:
Good afternoon, committee members. Thank you for having us.
SPHERE-Québec, Soutien à la personne handicapée en route vers l'emploi au Québec, is a provincially-incorporated, non-profit organization created by its partners out of their concern for employment and training of persons with disabilities.
The goal of SPHERE-Québec is to encourage active participation in economic and social life by a greater number of persons with disabilities who are out of the work force. To achieve this goal, since 1997, SPHERE-Québec has received funding from the Department of Human Resources and Social Development in order to implement employment activities for individuals within the Opportunities Fund for Persons with Disabilities.
Thus, to assist in the integration and reintegration and maintenance in the work force of all persons with functional limitations, SPHERE-Québec encourages and provides financial and other forms of support for the introduction of high-quality adapted jobs. It also participates in and contributes to the network of experts for the transfer of knowledge and practices.
SPHERE-Québec provides its services from four offices, centrally located in the main regions across the province. SPHERE-Québec's board of directors brings together representatives of employers, unions, and leading organizations that work to ensure the well-being of disabled persons across the province. At the national level, SPHERE-Québec representatives participate in the efforts of the Canadian Council on Rehabilitation and Work.
Now I'm going to present some characteristics of the employment profile of women in Quebec. According to the 2001 Participation and Activity Limitation Survey, 63% of women with disabilities in Quebec live on annual personal incomes under $15,000, 39% of Quebec women with disabilities had no high school diploma, and 36% had a high school diploma as their highest academic level. This means that 75% of women with disabilities in Quebec had little or no formal schooling. In addition, 31% of women with disabilities in Quebec were employed and 64% had left the work force, which means that they had abandoned any attempt to find a job.
Now I'm going to outline some characteristics of SPHERE-Québec's clientele. We serve persons with all types of disabilities who need assistance in their efforts to find employment. They are out of the work force because they have little or no training and little or no work experience. We can cross-reference our female clientele with the aid of the PALS statistics previously cited. In particular, women represent 45% of our clientele, and 79% of that number have little or no schooling. In addition, 36% of the female clientele had never worked before receiving assistance from us.
Based on this overall analysis, we see that women with disabilities must overcome numerous obstacles to entering the labour force. Even with an assistance measure, they have difficulty staying employed. Some even make the decision to withdraw from the work force. Since 1997, the SPHERE-Québec team has developed solid expertise in managing programs and in employability for persons with disabilities in Quebec. Together with community partners, SPHERE-Québec takes part in the implementation of projects designed to develop new action models that address clientele needs.
Now I'm going to turn the floor over to Ms. Vincent, who will give you a few concrete examples.
I'm going to present three examples of innovative projects that have enabled a number of persons with disabilities to find a job.
The first project is horticultural training. Five groups in Montérégie took part in this training for horticultural assistants, which enables persons with disabilities to occupy positions in this sector. The training portion was provided by the school boards of the regions concerned, and SPHERE-Québec sponsored the adjustment component.
The second project is training to become warehouse display designers. Three groups in the Eastern Townships have already taken part in this project, which enables persons with disabilities to occupy positions in department store businesses. The training portion is provided by the school board of the region concerned, and SPHERE-Québec sponsored the adjustment component.
The third project is on-the-job training in the restaurants of Les Rôtisseries St-Hubert. This training enables persons with disabilities to occupy various positions in St-Hubert restaurants. The training is provided by St-Hubert staff, and SPHERE-Québec sponsored the adjustment component.
These projects have four major elements in common, that is to say that they meet the needs of persons with disabilities looking for employment and the needs of the work force of the businesses in those three sectors. They are supported by regional players and provide the necessary supervision to promote the success of participants by providing them with adequate support. This supervision is often provided by an assistant. In the three projects I told you about, SPHERE-Québec provided the assistance portion.
For a number of persons with disabilities, adjustment is often synonymous with assistance. But what is an assistant? The assistant's role consists in supporting the person with disabilities in solving various problems that may compromise his or her entry into the labour market, or act on behaviour that my jeopardize that entry.
In concrete terms, depending on the person's disability, an assistant may help that person in looking for housing, for example, or in solving transportation, child care or living expense problems while that person is in training. The assistant may also help the instructor solve problems or the supervisor on the job. He or she may also work, as necessary, with the families, foster families, or rehabilitation centres, on all kinds of problems that may emerge and undermine entry into the labour force.
As Nancy said, 43% of women who use the Opportunities Fund for Persons with Disabilities do not keep their jobs at the end of our intervention. We can't identify the causes of that. However, we can say that action taken through adequate assistance guarantees success. The success rate of women and men who have taken part in these three projects is excellent. We think that success is directly related to the quality of follow-up of the participants.
Basically, it's to ensure that women with disabilities are empowered to protect themselves from abuse and discrimination, and that public policy matches the stated value through legislation with impact and regulatory powers.
The recommendations I listed came from the report, “Bringing Down the Barriers: The Labour Market and Women with Disabilities in Ontario”. I think they are very good and apply pretty much across Canada.
One recommendation is to separate income programs from disability-related supports and services. Often, one of the greatest barriers to work is that if we don't have access to our medication or if we don't have access to our home care, we don't have access to those supports that are linked to income. When the income becomes too high, the supports are gone, and then the person can't participate in the workforce. That's kind of shooting ourselves in the foot all the way around.
Creating a stable environment in which persons can be moved between paid employment and income support programs with ease is another recommendation. Those refer to things like rapid reinstatement from CPP disability. Age has that same component.
Next is improving opportunities for better-paying jobs for women with disabilities, and also women all across the workforce. This is an issue for both disabled and non-disabled women.
Another recommendation is extending the definition of employment supports and accommodations to the domestic sphere, so that we're not doing only personal care but home support as well, because without adequate home support a person cannot have the necessary energy to participate in the workforce.
Forums for information exchange and support groups provide a valuable resource for women with disabilities trying to enter the labour market, as your colleagues across the table have said.
Social attitudes I think are very important as well. We can't legislate those, but we can certainly raise awareness and we can certainly check ourselves at the policy table about what our social attitudes are.
Ensure an intersectionality lens is used to ensure that women with disabilities as a diverse group are given relevant support for their situation. I mentioned the cultural and some of the cross-barrier disabilities. Even when I made a commitment that I would go to the OT department around each place like a clock, that I would do that, they still wouldn't accept me.
Basically, the other thing I did want to say about social attitudes is the fact that while Anita said she didn't feel she made a contribution, she did so by her presence. Even by going and spending the time with those women, you give them hope. Even if you did nothing else, the fact that you sat and listened to them at least gave them hope. And I hope that will also translate into legislative action, and I encourage all the colleagues around the table to avail themselves of those opportunities when they arise.
Thank you.
:
Thank you—no pressure there.
Basically, to sum up, we've talked a lot about the need for economic security of women. Women are basically the caregivers and nurturers, even now, of families.
There are many anecdotes. One that struck me in particular was a Photovoices project, which I will include in a later brief. It shows a woman and her home. There aren't even doors on her cupboards, she's in low-rental housing, trying to care for a schizophrenic son, and she herself has no legs.
These are the kinds of things that are happening. Even in my household, I have my husband, who lives with ADHD and depression. We also had another roommate whom we took in, a man who was living in the only accommodation he could afford, which was a basement suite in an apartment. It was in an actual apartment building, but the sewer kept backing up in it. It took us five years to convince him to come up out of that and live in light and decent surroundings.
Those are the kinds of supports that disabled women need: housing, child care, transportation—think of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Those basic investments will lead people to explore and will empower them to try to make something different happen.
I think there's no better investment than the investment in the Canadian people, and that includes the disabled women of this country.
Thank you.