Pushing Training and Labour Development for Ontarians with Disabilities

By Helen Wagle

(PUSH Ontario is COPOH’s Ontario affiliate. For more than a decade, PUSH has advocated for change in every field from transportation to human rights to long-term care. Over the course of the past year, PUSH has begun work in two new fields: training, the subject of the following article, and youth issues, which you are invited to learn about in the next issue of ABILITIES courtesy of Lucy Costa. Helen Wagle works from the PUSH Ontario office as provincial co-ordinator of The Steering Committee of Persons with Disabilities of The Ontario Training Adjustment Board.)

In terms of employment, people with disabilities have never really been included in any decision making related to training, labour adjustment, apprenticeship or economic development. This is not a new situation.

Currently, those of us with disabilities who need training or re-training have to face what is generally a confusing, fragmented array of programs and services. These are provided by various levels of government, community colleges, vocational schools and the like.

This is about to change. As the result of strong and very recent advocacy efforts, people with disabilities have managed to exert a major influence on how Ontario’s new training and re-training system is to be set up and what its purpose will be.

The new system includes the Ontario Training and Adjustment Board (OTAB). There is also a proposed network of 22 local boards throughout the province. OTAB, the provincial government, the Canadian Labour Force Development Board, and Employment and Immigration Canada will work together to develop criteria for the establishment of these Local Boards.

The OTAB Governing Board and the Local Boards will consist of representatives of business, labour, education and trainers, and the equity-seeking groups, which include women, visible minorities, Francophones and people with disabilities. Together they will decide what types of training will be purchased, co-ordinate these training and adjustment programs, and allocate the necessary funding to each community.

With the creation of OTAB, we hope that people with disabilities will have easier access to a single co-ordinated training and adjustment system. Not only does this mean improvements to necessary accommodations they might need to participate in training programs, it also means we should acquire more worthwhile and appropriate training -- in other words, training that will lead to real jobs and a more promising future. For people with disabilities, the opportunity afforded by OTAB allows us to define for ourselves what sort of training system we want and need.

To date, people with disabilities have been very effective at keeping our concerns on the OTAB agenda. A voting seat has been secured on the OTAB Governing Board for a consumer representative for disability issues. We have won the right for any person with a disability, who sits on OTAB or any of its councils, to choose an alternate who would vote at meetings in the absence of the representative. We have also secured ongoing funding to develop a Reference Group of People with Disabilities to support our representative on the Governing Board. Finally, we have been able to influence the wording of the OTAB mandate and respective legislation to include the terms "access", "equity" and "accommodation". The inclusion of these words is very important in order for OTAB to be effective in addressing the needs of people with disabilities.

By way of preparing consumers for the implementation of OTAB and Local Boards, PUSH Ontario is sponsoring the OTAB Project on Disability Issues. Its primary purposes are to provide information on OTAB and the proposed Local Boards and to facilitate consumer involvement.

The project has produced a reference book entitled Working for a Change! People with Disabilities and Local Boards.

The project also sponsored a two-day provincial consultation meeting in September. This conference brought together over 40 consumers from 20 proposed Local Board areas. The event may well have been the largest gathering of people with disabilities in training issues in the history of the province. Indeed, it was certainly one of the few times in Canadian history when the opinions of people with disabilities themselves, concerning how they should be trained, were given centre-stage at a provincial conference.

Neither OTAB nor the Local Boards are up and running yet. There are still many issues to be resolved. However, that means we have time to get informed, time to discuss the issues that we feel are most important to our community, time to influence what OTAB and Local Board structures will look like.

The bottom line here is that as consumers, we all want and have a right to quality training. It is up to us to see that this new system of training and employment programs will be sensitive to our needs and to disability issues as a whole.