While Canada has made great strides in equal opportunity employment, companies might still be inadvertently discriminating against disabled individuals.

Many firms continue to engage in practices that shut out individuals with disabilities, often right from the application process, according to experts. And disabled people’s marginalization in the labour market is compounded by the fact that Canada’s public system for disability benefits is essentially a confusing patchwork of programs.

Most disabled Canadians do want to access the labour market, said in an interview Diana McCauley,  at Spinal Cord Injury Ontario.

But as many as 54% of the country’s working-age disabled population are unemployed, according to the Canadian Survey on Disability released by Statistics Canada.

Disability

Canada’s small employers, for example, have been slow to hire disabled people. A recent survey by BMO Financial Group reveals that in 2013, only three in 10 small business owners recruited people with disabilities, the same as the previous year.

Access denied
One reason for the high unemployment rate among people with disabilities are employer practices which essentially exclude them from the workforce.

Assumptions that many employers have about the skills of disabled people is their absence rates and the insurance costs they would pay if they hire those individuals. But many of these assumptions are erroneous—and often, the accommodations an employer has to make are not onerous or costly at all.

Observers point out that disabled people actually bring a lot of positive traits to the table. Some of the main ones are loyalty and diligence, since they’re willing to go the extra mile in order to keep their jobs, given that finding work is hard for them.

Patchwork of policies
Another major reason why Canada’s disabled community is largely on the margins of the labour market is the country’s incoherent set of disability support programs, according to experts. Unlike some other advanced nations, Canada has no uniform, national disability policy. What it has is a number of policies that vary across provinces and territories.

Currently, Canada has seven programs that offer benefits to disabled individuals. Examples of federal programs include the Canada Pension Plan and the Registered Disability Savings Plan. The provinces also offer disability benefits. Provincial workers’ compensation agencies administer benefits, too.

All of these seven programs operate separately from each other, without any coordination. Each has a different definition of disability, eligibility criteria and generosity of benefits. Some are for work-related injuries; others are not.

As a result, two people with the exact same injury can end up being covered by different programs that offer different levels of support.

Navigating this kind of complex system often causes people to fall through the cracks, according to observers.

Apart from being impenetrable and incoherent, Canada’s policies are also based on a narrow view of disability, MacEachen said. “The policy is often focused very strongly on functional ability, which is a very limiting way to understand these issues,” she explained, adding that understanding the social component of disability is also key. This is where employers can play a role, she said.

But in order to better integrate disabled individuals in the workforce, it’s also important establish links between Canada’s disability programs, rather than bringing them into one system, said Tompa.

This issue is a big one due to the many different kinds of disabilities out there, especially the ones that are not visible.

Follow up with this article to see more of what is being said at Benefits Canada.