The working world doesn’t make it easy for disabled Ontarians like Yvonne Spicer to keep a job. The 46-year-old London resident has plenty of experience: stints at Walmart and Tim Hortons, multiple call centres, a workshop, and countless other places.
But because she is autistic and has an intellectual disability, Spicer needs instructions given to her in accessible, plain language. She needs bosses who are flexible and understanding of her medical needs. This doesn’t always happen. “When it comes to businesses, they say they’re accessible to me, but they’re not,” Spicer tells TVO Today. “They didn’t understand that I need stuff in a certain way for me to do a job. They don’t want to make that accommodation for me.”
Yvonne Spicer (Courtesy of Yvonne Spicer)
For disabled Ontarians, this is unfortunately a common reality. According to Statistics Canada data from 2022, roughly 64 per cent of disabled Ontarians are employed, compared with roughly 80 per cent of Canadians nationwide without disabilities. While some disabled Ontarians are simply unable to work because of their conditions, Statistics Canada says discrimination against disabled workers is also to blame.
Disabled Ontarians unable to work are left to what advocates routinely describe as “legislated poverty”: $1,368 a month for the Ontario Disability Support Program or $733 a month for Ontario Works. Neither program covers the cost of a one-bedroom apartment anywhere in Ontario. And according the 2018 auditor general’s report, Ontario Works wasn’t a great path to employment. It found just 10 to 13 per cent of OW recipients left the program for employment over a five-year period.
In 2019, the Ontario government announced a sweeping overhaul of its social-assistance employment programs. By merging them with programs by Employment Ontario, its network of employment and training agencies, Queen’s Park said it hoped to improve a complicated and fractured system and, as a press release from the time put it, “help the province’s most vulnerable, including people with disabilities, to break free from the poverty cycle.” As of March 2023, the Ontario government claimed that roughly 65,000 clients were on a path to a job. About 40 per cent were described as disabled.
The details of this new system are buried in memos and press releases spanning five years, as well as in a mountain of third-party audits, external reviews, and studies. Through service-system managers — a mix of for-profit and nonprofit organizations hired as middlemen to oversee employment services across Ontario — agencies receive funding to support employment services for jobseekers in need. Yet disabled people and advocates, as well as organizations representing employment agencies across the province, say Ontario’s “integrated employment system” is not the innovative and responsive system it claims to be.
TVO Today reached out to the Ministry of Children, Community and Social Services for comment and was referred to the Ministry of Labour, Immigration, Training and Skills Development, which was unable to respond to detailed questions by publication time.
Interviews with TVO Today, as well as three extensive reports on the IES, suggest that disabled clients are having an even harder time getting the help they need, while agencies are shutting their employment-services programs due to insufficient funding and rising employability targets. While they identify a multitude of problems, advocates and experts come back to a provincial funding model, administered through contracts with service-system managers, that appears to encourage agencies to push as many clients into jobs as quickly as possible.
“The more people they put in new jobs, the more money they get paid,” says Trevor Manson, co-chair of the ODSP Action Coalition, a grassroots advocacy group made up of people receiving social assistance. “They’re focusing on people that are closest to employment. People that are furthest from employment are not receiving the supports they need.”
“I would learn the job alongside them”
If you’re looking for a job in Ontario, there are myriad social-service agencies, nonprofits, and for-profit centres you can turn to. For disabled clients, organizations like March of Dimes, Community Living Ontario, and ACCES Employment do everything from resumé workshops to intensive job coaching. Before she became CEO of the Ontario Disability Employment Network – a group of 140 of the aforementioned agencies, nonprofits, and for-profits – Jeannette Campbell did the latter.
She worked with developmentally disabled clients using a technique called supportive employment, which involved on-the-job guidance. “I would learn the job alongside them,” she says. “We would perform the tasks together.” Slowly, as her client got more comfortable with their job, Campbell would back off — while also staying in touch with the employer to ensure everything continued to go smoothly.
This sort of intense coaching can be invaluable for some disabled jobseekers. Someone with a developmental disability like Down syndrome may be perfectly capable of performing a retail job, for instance, but might find changes — like the start of Black Friday or the end of Christmas shopping — stressful without help. In other cases, disabled jobseekers simply don’t know what to expect on their first day. “Many people with disabilities have had little or no previous employment experience and need help with orientation to the world of work, the fundamentals of employment, and identifying their skills and interests,” reads a June report by ODEN and Community Living Ontario.
However, as ODEN and other experts have pointed out, this intensive job coaching requires a lot of money, and Ontario’s employment-services system isn’t as generous as it used to be. Under Ontario’s employment-services system, agencies receive funding to pay for delivering employment programs, with incentives based on how long a client is able to stay in a job. Most of these incentives are much lower than funding given to agencies in the pre-IES system. The June ODEN report highlighted examples from one unnamed “specialist service provider” which claimed Ontario’s original employment-support system paid out $1,000 per person to cover six weeks of pre-job placement, as well as one month of post-job placement help.
Today, that agency receive $300 per person. By ODEN’s estimate, a year of performance-based funding is worth roughly $5,000 per client today, with no money after a year of client support. Before the IES rolled out, the province paid out $15,125 each and covered job coaching for up to three years post-placement.
“Under the new model,” ODEN’s June report explains, “it has become effectively impossible for agencies to do this work without going into deficit.” By contrast, the IES’s incentive model gives agencies bonuses for every new client they bring into the system — $2,000 per person, according to the report. Faced with higher costs for intensive, long-term coaching support and incentives to bring clients into the system, advocates say agencies have less of a reason to take on more complex cases.
Akosua Alagaratnam, executive director of First Work, an employment-services membership organization, stresses that agencies do their best to help clients who face significant challenges landing a job. Unfortunately, she says, agencies also need to keep their budgets healthy. “When your funding is tied to meeting a metric, and this is the new funding system you need to work within,” she says, “you’re obviously going to try to make sure that you can at least meet your funding.”
“Do you want me to work with people?”
After years of watching Ontario’s new employment-services model unfold across the province, agency staff have plenty to say about it. In anonymous surveys commissioned by both First Work and ODEN, dozens of agencies say the model is far from being a streamlined and innovative approach. Instead, rigid rules around which clients “count” as worthy of provincial funding are forcing agencies to make tough decisions.
One of those is a requirement for all clients to work a minimum of 20 hours a week for their case to be considered successful — and, therefore, for agencies to receive funding from the provincial government to support them. For some disabled people, working 20 hours a week simply isn’t possible. “When you put a one-size-fits-all system to these individuals, you have those furthest away trying to fit the average metrics,” Alagaratnam says. “That’s where you leave people behind.”
According to Goss Gilroy, a third-party firm hired by the Ontario government in 2021 to evaluate the IES’s implementation in its early stages, 87 per cent of clients were working 20 hours a week or more within one year of entering the program. But numerous agencies questioned whether many disabled job seekers, who are among the most vulnerable, were capable of meeting this threshold, especially in the long-term.
“A person has to be able to work 20 hours a week to be considered a successful target. This will eliminate candidates who would prefer to work less hours in order to lead a balanced life," said one agency worker in ODEN’s report. Another agency was blunter: “The ministry’s guidelines for funding and outcomes of 20+hrs/week are discriminatory and do not support people with disabilities.”
Life can be harsh for disabled people who cannot meet these requirements or who simply cannot work enough hours to afford rent, food, or other necessities. That’s true even for clients on ODSP, Ontario Works, or federal social-assistance programs. “They’re more worried about going to meal programs and making sure they have enough to eat,” Manson says. “After they pay rent, there’s nothing left.”
Trevor Manson is co-chair of the ODSP Action Coalition. (Trevor Manson)
Meanwhile, agencies themselves are forced to deal with what staff describe as overwhelming caseloads and administrative paperwork, leaving them less time to work with clients in a productive way. After Ontario’s auditor general called out Ontario Works and other social-assistance agencies for shoddy oversight in 2018, Alagaratnam says, the reaction has been to over-account for every dime spent on clients. Every purchase made by a client as part of the program needs to be logged. “Think about your day-to-day, and imagine collecting all of those receipts, and then giving them to me,” Alagaratnam says. “I’d have to make sense of all those receipts for you in the system.”
And social workers have a lot of clients to track. Alagaratnam says the average caseload used to be around 30 clients per worker. Today, she says, it can fall between 60 and as many as 100 clients each. This very high case load, she says, is leading to staff burnout and getting in the way of clients who need a lot of help. In ODEN and Community Living Ontario’s report, every agency surveyed said their contract had either significantly or somewhat decreased the amount of time caseworkers spend with clients.
“There’s a saying: ‘Do you want me to work with people, or do you want me to work with paper?’” Campbell says. “This increase in administration is also then impacting the amount of time that staff have to actually work with job seekers.”
“They’re going into deficit”
Having a job coach hasn’t always been enough for Spicer to keep a job. In the past, she’s been let go in spite of a job coach speaking up for her. But these days, advocates say, a lack of base funding for programming, plus the mountain of administrative paperwork, means agencies are finding it harder and harder to retain job coaches in the first place.
In spite of advocacy campaigns like #5ToSurvive, a call for the Ontario government to boost base funding for developmental-disability programming by 5 per cent, Spicer says the result — a 2 per cent hike — hit hard. “A lot of different organizations have had to close their different programs for employment because of it,” Spicer says. She recently applied to a London-based agency for help, and they turned her down. “I qualified, but they said no because they’ve had to lay off staff,” she says. “They’ve literally had to reduce the number of hours people get.”
One small agency that spoke to ODEN and Community Living Ontario reported that its budget for cases was reduced to roughly $80,000. Its caseload, which wasn’t specified in the report, doubled. “This means as we do not have a way of receiving other funding we have had to lay off 1 position and try to think of other ways to get funding to be able to pay for the 2 remaining staff,” the agency said in the report. “We are attempting 1 year to see if this is feasible or if we will need to close the department."
Agenda segment, September 23, 2022: Getting by on social assistance in Ontario
Some agencies are turning elsewhere for money. “Organizations are trying to fundraise,” Campbell says. “Organizations are, potentially, using funding from other contracts they have to try and make up the shortfall. For a lot of them, they’re going into deficit. So we’ve seen organizations closing.” She is aware of seven Ontario organizations that no longer provide support to disabled job seekers. The organizations might still exist — they simply aren’t running employment programming.
It isn’t all doom and gloom. Experts like First Work, Community Living Ontario, and ODEN believe the Ontario government, as well as service-system managers and agencies themselves, can learn from some of the lessons of the past five years. But they say the 20-hour rule needs to be reconsidered. Investing in supports for clients with barriers, including those with disabilities, should also be a priority, they stress. And performance-based incentives should be reconfigured to boost rewards for agencies who keep clients employed long-term.
Most important, Spicer says, the provincial government should listen to disabled people and their concerns. She recalls a 2023 press conference during which Premier Doug Ford claimed that as many as 400,000 people on Ontario Works were sitting at home collecting tax dollars. He suggested “that we are lazy,” Spicer says. “We are not lazy. For us to go and get a job — well, good luck. It’s very hard out there to get a job and also to retain it.”
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