Doors slowly closing on controversial sheltered workshops
Minister vows no new admissions for ‘employment training’ practice
Ontario is moving to stop new admissions to the provincially funded sheltered workshops where people with intellectual disabilities labour for pennies a day, says the Minister of Community and Social Services.
“I don’t ever want to see someone who has not been involved in a sheltered workshop move into one,” Minister Helena Jaczek said. “That would not, in my view, be acceptable at all.”
Jaczek was responding to the Star’s series on the segregated workshops, where people with intellectual disabilities spend decades getting “employment training” even though most never leave.
Many enjoy the social life and a place to go during the day, but miss out on opportunities for real employment and legitimate wages, the Star found. Instead, they live on Ontario Disability Support Program benefits of roughly $850 a month and, critics say, they do menial labour that provides negligible job training.
Asked how she will ensure the workshops will stop admitting new clients, Jaczek said the ministry could add specific directives to the contracts of agencies that get provincial money to run the workshops.
“I’m going to talk to our officials in the ministry about how we tailor the contracts — the service agreements that we have with transfer payment agencies,” she said.
“Perhaps we can bring a greater degree of specificity as to what we expect.”
In the United States, new federal legislation limits youth with disabilities from working for low wages. Individual states, such as Vermont, eliminated workshops more than a decade ago. Others, such as New York, are discussing similar action now. In Oregon, workshops will be phased out as part of a court settlement from a class-action lawsuit.
Ontario advocates pushing for legitimate employment applauded Jaczek’s promise to stop admissions, saying until now there has been no significant commitment for change.
“Wow. That’s pretty significant,” said Mark Wafer, a multiple Tim Hortons franchise owner who has employed 122 people with disabilities during the last 20 years. “It’s a first step. A small step, but a very important one.
“This shows that the government has realized that sheltered workshops are no longer valid,” Wafer said.
Jaczek said her ministry will “look very closely” at legislative changes.
“Let’s face it. The (Star’s) attention to the issue is very useful. It makes everyone stop and think. I want to thank you for this because it does bring the mind to bear on the subject. And we’re going to be looking at this.”
Jaczek said she wants to end the sheltered workshop model, which was set up to retrain injured soldiers in the early 1900s, but must ensure that “nobody is left high and dry . . . we want to do it in a really thoughtful way.
“We want to eliminate sheltered workshops. No question about that. How we move forward, how we do it, with all of the interests of the people involved at the heart of what we are doing is going to take some time, but I see steady progress.”
There’s no need for a long period of study, said Michael Bach, executive vice-president of the Canadian Association for Community Living.
“We’ve been talking about getting out of sheltered workshops for 40 years,” Bach said. “It’s hard to believe the ministry is saying it’s going to take time to look at this.”
He said the government must get tougher on the agencies. That means making no new admissions a ministry policy, as Jaczek suggested. And, it must force agencies to respond to ministry efforts for data collection on workshops and day programs.
The Star reported that the ministry has no idea how many people with intellectual disabilities are in workshops or day programs. In 2014, the ministry sent out a survey asking for detailed information but less than half — 170 — of the 370 agencies responded.
Based on those limited responses, the ministry said that 3,463 individuals were participating in “52 simulated work settings, including training centres, day programs, vocational training and sheltered workshop-like programs, across the province.”
“I find that extremely troubling,” Bach said. “The fact that the ministry can send out a survey and have a (less than) 50-per-cent response and not even know the services that are being provided, much less the actual numbers. They can’t tell us what people are actually getting for tax dollars.”
In order to create governmentwide “employment first” policies to replace workshops, Ontario must use empirical evidence from data, he said.
“The fact that we can’t get the data is a real problem.”