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View Hélène LeBlanc Profile
NDP (QC)
I would like to touch on the differences between asset value and enterprise value. Also, what are the consequences of the number of transactions? I think I've seen there would be fewer transactions because the enterprise value would be a little higher than the asset value.
Matthew Dooley
View Matthew Dooley Profile
Matthew Dooley
2013-05-21 16:01
As Paul mentioned earlier, the analysis we did historically was about a 30% reduction once you got to $600 million of enterprise value. So that's the basis we give it on both the increase in the threshold and the switch to enterprise value. So it's all together.
Paul Halucha
View Paul Halucha Profile
Paul Halucha
2013-05-21 16:01
Matt is looking up the technical definition at this point.
But it's to get a better market approximation of the value of the company versus a book value. So, for example, company assets like intellectual property would not necessarily be captured in the asset value but would be much more likely to be factored into the market price of the company.
Paul Halucha
View Paul Halucha Profile
Paul Halucha
2013-05-21 16:02
In terms of the actual mechanics, the proposal is to go back about two months and look at a period of 20 days prior to the bid because you don't want to have a case whereby the bid results in an increase. Market prices jump because of a bid in an acquisition, as often happens, so you go back to a period before the bid. It's a 20-day period prescribed in the regulations. We take an average of that period. We add liabilities because those are costs that the investor would be taking on and that gives us the market value.
Matthew Dooley
View Matthew Dooley Profile
Matthew Dooley
2013-05-21 16:02
Certainly. The calculation for publicly traded companies, as Mr. Halucha just said, is the market capitalization based on our going back two months and over 20 days, plus assumed liabilities. It's a cost that the investor will incur less any cash on hand because it's money the investor is receiving.
For privately held companies, it will be the price to be paid according to the terms of the agreement that the parties enter into plus assumed liabilities less cash on hand.
Kenneth Fredeen
View Kenneth Fredeen Profile
Kenneth Fredeen
2013-04-16 11:02
Thank you very much for having us today. Sitting at this end of the room, I have a better sense of hearing impairment, because I have trouble hearing you. This will be a good opportunity for me to learn a little bit more about that disability.
Mark will need some help. If you're speaking, speak loudly and speak so that he can see your face. It will make it easier for all of us.
I'd like to thank you for having us here today. When we received the call from the ministers last July, all of our reactions were the same—it's an honour to serve the public. People like us don't get this chance very often, and we take it very seriously when the chance presents itself. I know all of you are serving the public, and I'd like to thank you for your leadership, because that's how things work. This was sort of a small tidbit of what we could do to serve the public.
I'd also like to thank you for having us speak before lunch. Usually we have to speak after lunch, so we tend to lose our audience. It's a pleasure to be speaking before lunch. I hope we'll have a more interactive session with you.
My intention was not to speak for long about the report. I assume all of you have read it. I read it on the plane coming up from Toronto this morning, and I have to say that I'm pretty proud of it. I'm proud of it because of how it reads. I'm proud of it because of the group I had the pleasure to work with, which was able to create something quite compelling. I feel good about it. I feel good about the report, and I hope you feel the same. This would never have been accomplished without some absolutely wonderful people, and two of them are here with me today. I'll briefly introduce them. My intention, then, is simply to open up the floor for questions so we can have a dialogue with you about what's on your mind, and maybe you can tap into what's on our minds.
Mark Wafer owns a number of Tim Hortons franchises. We had some good humour about the value of Tim Hortons coffee and Timbits over the course of our six months of working together. He's a great example. Not only does he actually hire people with disabilities, he also talks about it all the time. He gets the message across that hiring people with disabilities is good for business, and it's something he does all the time. He's a small-business owner who is doing an incredible amount on this issue, and we're extremely proud of him.
Gary Birch is a well-known person who has worked long and hard. He's the executive director of the Neil Squire Society, based in Vancouver. It goes without saying that he's the leading specialist in employment and adaptive technology for people with disabilities. Gary was a huge asset to our committee.
The one member who could not make it today is the vice president of human resources at Loblaws, Kathy Martin, who was a phenomenal addition to this. She comes from a different sector of employment, but she has experience in diversity and inclusion.
I'm general counsel with Deloitte. You might wonder how a general counsel from a professional services firm ends up chairing a panel for the ministers. It's a long story. As I said, it was an honour to be asked.
I do a lot of work on inclusion. I chair our firm's diversity council. I'm also the executive sponsor of the gay-lesbian group at Deloitte and have been involved in something called, Legal Leaders for Diversity. It is a group of over 60 general counsels across the country who are supporting inclusive behaviours and an inclusive legal profession. As I said, it's an honour to be here today with you to, more than anything, get your feedback on the report and maybe answer some questions.
I would like to read to you only one small paragraph from the report. It's in “The Challenge”. This is what we had set out to do, and I think this is what we've accomplished.
By connecting directly with employers, our panel set out to discover what can be done about the unemployment and under-employment of qualified people with disabilities in Canada. We explored the barriers – some physical and many attitudinal – but chose to focus on the positive. Our goal is to shine the light on best practices and successes among Canadian employers who have welcomed people with disabilities into their ranks. Their examples can help us learn and do better.
The important thing from our report is that hiring people with disabilities is good for business. It's good for the economy. This is an approach most people don't take on this topic. We firmly believe it's true. The evidence we were able to collect from employers proved this to us time and time again. The research work done by our friends from human resources, who are here with us today, was incredible. Again, it proved that point.
We believe we're on the cusp of something great within Canada, and that's why all of us have committed to carry on in our roles to talk about this issue, starting today with this committee.
Again, on behalf of the panel, thank you very much for your support.
Kenneth Fredeen
View Kenneth Fredeen Profile
Kenneth Fredeen
2013-04-16 11:25
I'll say a few words, but I would like Mr. Wafer to comment on that because he has the first-hand experience.
When we did our consultations with companies in Canada...and some of us were fortunate to tour the Walgreens distribution centre in Connecticut, where over half of the people are people with disabilities. That's its most successful, most productive, best distribution centre, and we saw first-hand how it works. We understand the power of the business from that.
It comes down to the fact that there's a huge talent pool out there that we have not tapped into in ways that maximize the abilities these people have. We focus too much on the disabilities and barriers to them. What we learned from the great corporations in Canada—and I won't name them—is that the ones we saw that really got it right were some of our most successful businesses in Canada. We think it's quite clear that if you develop a strong strategy of inclusion within your organization, you're going to be a more successful business.
We tapped into research done, by a Canadian actually, who lives in New York. Rich Donovan has done a lot of work on that. There's actually proof now of the importance to your business of getting this right. We think it's better understood, but we need to do a better job of educating businesses in particular that this is good for your business.
In terms of the economy, whenever you have somebody working and paying taxes rather than accepting government funding to stay at home and not work, it's a no-brainer. It's good for your economy. If you add into that all of the people who support that individual who is at home not working, and the drain on society in general, it's kind of a no-brainer that everybody benefits by this if we get it right.
Mark, you have some direct experience.
Mark Wafer
View Mark Wafer Profile
Mark Wafer
2013-04-16 11:27
Your original comment about quick service restaurants, or fast food restaurants, bringing in people from other countries through the foreign worker program is a very good one because in Alberta we do have issues. Even in my business at Tim Hortons we have problems finding staff, yet in Alberta the unemployment rate for people with disabilities is 70%. It's 47% according to StatsCan, but we know the number to be much larger.
It all comes down to the same thing. What do employers believe? Either they buy into the series of myths and misperceptions, or they don't. They're enlightened. The only way they're going to do that is to have people with disabilities actually work for them. I own six Tim Hortons stores and one Cold Stone ice cream shop. In the last 18 years I've hired 85 people with disabilities. Every single one of those was in a meaningful and competitively paid position. Today 36 of my 210 employees have a disability, and that's in every department.
If you look at the benefits from my operation, first of all, I have the lowest turnover rate of any Tim Hortons operation in the GTA. I have 35% turnover rate versus 75% for anybody who is doing just as good a job as I am. It's not because I'm a great operator. I like to think I am, but it's because I hire people with disabilities.
You see the key—and this is what Walgreens really picked up on—is that I have 180 employees who do not have a disability so what happens is it changes the mindset of the other employees by being inclusive. It actually changes the way that your employees think about who they're working for, or what they're working for.
If you look at the other benefits, you have absenteeism, which we've now found to be 86% lower than for people who don't have a disability. You have innovation. I can assure you that we would not have had a police escort up to the front door of this house of Parliament today if it wasn't for this very innovative man here in a wheelchair who managed to do that. I couldn't have done that and Ken couldn't have done that, but if I have a person with a wheelchair with an innovative spirit working in one of the drive-throughs of one of my stores, I can guarantee you I am going to have more sales and I'm going to have more crowds coming through there because that innovative spirit is brought over into the workforce.
If you look at productivity it's a huge one because businesses believe that if they hire somebody with a disability, productivity is going to be lower. I know that productivity is at least the same, but in many cases productivity is higher. I have one particular instance that I tell everybody about because it's so profound. I have a deaf person who is working as a baker who replaced a person who was working for nine years. Her productivity is 18.4% better than the person she replaced.
There are so many benefits. There is no downside to disability employment. We have to get business owners to understand those benefits. Once they do, when they get it, believe me they're not going to go back.
Mark Wafer
View Mark Wafer Profile
Mark Wafer
2013-04-16 11:34
I would like to answer the first question. That is, you talk about the stories and that you've heard them for many years. You have, but you haven't heard them from businesses. You've been hearing them from the sector. Business owners want to hear from business owners in a peer-to-peer fashion.
In the last 40 years the unemployment rate for people with disabilities hasn't changed. Percentage-wise, it's been at 47% to 50% since 1970. That hasn't changed. Yes, there have been a lot of reports done. Yes, there have been a lot of committees struck, but every single one of those was sector. This is the first time that the report has actually been business mandated and business driven. This is why the national strategy, when we do get it off the ground, will be business driven and business membership only. Business owners are going to listen to business owners.
I started a program four years ago called the “Rotary at work” program. I'm a Rotarian, and all I do is speak to other Rotarians about hiring people with disabilities. I speak to them as a business owner to a business owner. In the last four years we have found work for 189 people with disabilities—full-time, permanent, competitively paid, meaningful jobs.
Yes, in the past we were probably spinning our wheels. What we're seeing now is a lot more momentum by speaking from a business point of view. In fact, in Toronto, where I'm quite close to many of the community partners, the community partners come to me when they have a new business in town. They come to me as the business champion and say, “Mark, would you phone on our behalf? They'll listen to you. They won't listen to us.” That's exactly what we need to do going forward. You need business champions to step up and say, “Hey, I'm making money doing this. I'm not losing money. It's affecting my bottom line positively.” I think that's the difference now going forward.
Kenneth Fredeen
View Kenneth Fredeen Profile
Kenneth Fredeen
2013-04-16 11:50
It's difficult to ram something like this down somebody's throat. This is something where I think education is hugely important. I think more collaboration by the various groups involved—in particular, employers taking a lead, which is going to happen through this newly funded employers' network—is going to be very important for employers to develop best practices around training, around approaches that can occur.
We learned there isn't a great cost in terms of accommodation. It's simply opening your mind to possibilities that you wouldn't have thought of before. Usually there's no cost to accommodate 57% of the people who are disabled. The rest of the cost is $500, on average. It's a small investment. I think it's really around education.
Again, I think employers listen to employers. When they see success in business coming from hiring people with disabilities, others are going to want to know how they can do that, how it works, and share best practices. When you do that, you'll simply ratchet up the best practices that employers will employ.
Cameron Crawford
View Cameron Crawford Profile
Cameron Crawford
2013-04-16 11:51
I have two responses in terms of whether or not programs work.
Programs are often played broadly in terms of how they're designed. They're created to create incentives and wiggle room for an array of organizations to do all kinds of things. I believe there was an evaluation done in Newfoundland and Labrador a couple of years ago on several organizations that have been involved in the kind of work that you raise the question about. The result, as I recall in the research, was that it depends. It depends on the organization and how they're structured, their organizational culture, the skill of the staff, and their values. There are a lot of ingredients that can lead some organizations to be more effective at getting people with disabilities embedded in the local economy than other organizations.
In terms of who does the work as an employer, employers have many levels. You have the CEO, the owner, the manager, people working in human resources, and so on. A person going out and being like a champion is one thing and it gets people established in a comfort level. You can get some informal connections and maybe some questions answered. In terms of where the rubber really hits the road, sometimes it's people who are focusing more on the personnel in an organization that really understands how that works.
An idea that we floated at the Roeher Institute a number of years ago was to make it possible for people working in organizations that are doing a good job at helping to integrate disabled workers and keep them there once employed, to get out and share that knowledge with other people in business. In order to do that it means that whoever runs the company has to free that person up. The thought was that perhaps some funding could be there for organizations to enter into that sort of altruistic work to help their other labour market partners do a better job of integrating people. It's just one idea.
Mark Wafer
View Mark Wafer Profile
Mark Wafer
2013-04-16 11:56
First of all, education is going to be massive. If you look at all the people with disabilities who are participating in the workforce today, only 7% are working for large corporations, 93% are working for small to medium-sized businesses, and there are significant reasons for that.
If you look at a bank, for example, a Canadian bank can have 100,000-plus employees. The CEO and the senior executive, they do get it. They don't always get it for the right reason, but they do get it, because it comes back on them from a society point of view. The bank manager on the street corner, he gets it, because people with disabilities are using his bank, so he hires people who have disabilities, somebody who may be deaf or somebody who is in a wheelchair. But there are 96,000 employees in the middle and they are the people I call the permafrost because they are the ones who are very hard to change. Education is going to be key.
Like Ken says, if you are a small-business owner like me, I make all the decisions. I can make a decision today and have everything changed tomorrow, whereas BMO and TD, they make a decision today, and it's like turning the Titanic around. It's three years before they even get started.
Frank Smith
View Frank Smith Profile
Frank Smith
2013-04-16 12:29
Thank you very much for the opportunity to appear before the committee today to discuss the employment of persons with disabilities in Canada.
This is an important issue for our organization. It's of fundamental importance to the work that we do. Since its founding in 1986, the National Educational Association of Disabled Students has had the mandate to support full access to education and employment for post-secondary students and graduates with disabilities across Canada. We represent the more than 100,000 persons with disabilities studying in Canadian colleges and universities.
The organization is consumer-controlled and cross-disability-focused, and it responds in all the work that it does to the educational and employment needs of post-secondary students and recent graduates with disabilities, through a variety of projects, resources, research, publications, and partnerships. The organization is governed by a board of directors that represents all the provinces and territories. We are an autonomous organization, but we are also a member group of the Council of Canadians with Disabilities, the CCD.
We focus on three important areas for our constituents: student debt reduction, student experience in class and on campus, and student and graduate employment both after post-secondary education and while in school. Within the mandate we have, the organization functions collaboratively with post-secondary stakeholders, other non-governmental organizations, employers, disability service providers, and the various communities that improve opportunities in higher education and the workforce for persons with disabilities.
We as an organization provide ongoing expert advice to Human Resources and Skills Development Canada and to provincial and territorial governments. The association's primary activities include maintaining a website, which is fully accessible, and we have developed a financial aid portal, which is a unique resource.
Our financial aid portal includes comprehensive information on national, provincial, and territorial government funding programs offered, with around 350 disability-specific bursaries, scholarships, and awards, and on other funding sources through colleges and universities, private sector funders, and non-governmental organizations. We are trying to do our part to support information sharing on funding programs.
It is important to note that NEADS serves as a member of the Human Resources and Skills Development Canada national advisory group on student financial assistance, along with other stakeholder organizations, to advise the federal government on the Canada student loans program.
NEADS provides information referrals to hundreds of post-secondary students with disabilities through its national office each year. We also respond to requests for information and advice from employers, provincial and federal government departments, service providers, and faculty members—teachers on college and university campuses.
Since 2005, it's important to note, we have held 25 transition from school to work forums across Canada. These were first called “job search strategies” forums and were delivered through a funding partnership with BMO Capital Markets. In the last two years, we've been calling them “strategies to employment” events. These interactive conferences have included the participation of some 2,000 college and university students and graduates with disabilities, private sector employers, career professionals in the post-secondary community, employment agencies, and other non-governmental organizations.
More recently, through another private sector partnership, with Enbridge, we delivered a strategies to employment forum in Edmonton in 2012. In the last fiscal year we have also, with Service Canada funding, delivered employment or transition from school to work events in British Columbia—three events in British Columbia—and we partnered with a number of community organizations and the provincial government in Nova Scotia to help deliver the symposium on inclusive education and employment last December in Halifax, which attracted more than 300 delegates.
The other thing we're doing as an organization with respect to financial assistance is that we have our own national student awards program. It's important to note that this program, which receives funding from many private sector companies, has given out 57 scholarships of $3,000 to outstanding Canadian college and university students with disabilities in undergraduate, diploma, and graduate programs.
This program is funded by corporate supporters representing various sectors of the Canadian employment market. It is our hope that if a company gives out a scholarship to a student with a disability for outstanding academic and community achievements, that same employer may look to hire the scholarship recipient when they graduate.
In the past two years we have been engaged in a project to consult career and employment centre professionals who work at Canadian colleges and universities in order to find out how they support and accommodate students through their centres and what could be done to improve these centres as they serve the unique needs of this population. This career centres initiative has been funded by TD Canada Trust.
So we're trying to partner with a number of private sector companies and with employment agencies to do our work as an organization.
The recent federal report, “Rethinking disAbility in the Private Sector”, from the Panel on Labour Market Opportunities for Persons with Disabilities, identified an alarming statistic:
...of the 795 000 people with disabilities who could be – but aren’t – contributing to our economy, almost half (340 000) have post-secondary education.... These qualified, capable people can play an important role in filling the forecasted two-thirds of all jobs requiring higher education.
At the same time, the overall labour force participation rate for working-age adults with disabilities is around 60%, compared with around 80% for those without disabilities. Yet, according to the 2006 participation and activity limitation survey, persons with disabilities are better educated than in the past, and their educational profile is generally similar to that of those without disabilities. We notice, however, a slight decrease in the percentage of persons with disabilities who are acquiring certificates, degrees, or diplomas. It is 3% less than for the rest of the population. As well, persons with disabilities are more likely to possess an apprenticeship or trade certificate or diploma by 4%. Of course we know that there's a demand in the economy in the skilled trades.
About 14% of persons with disabilities had a university certificate, degree, or diploma, compared with about 20% of the total population. Additionally, 23% of persons with disabilities had less than a high school education, while 23% had some post-secondary level of education, equal to the level for the total population.
I note that in their earlier presentations to this committee, the Council of Canadians with Disabilities cited a series of relevant statistics pertaining to education rate, employment, and poverty. To quote the CCD brief:
For example, 28.7% of people with disabilities who don’t have a high school graduation certificate are in low-income households, compared with 14.2% of their counterparts without disabilities. The two to one spread in low income rates between people with vs. without disabilities is similar for people with a high school graduation certificate (20.2% vs. 11.1%), trades certificate or diploma (17.8% vs. 9.2%) and a college certificate or diploma (17.0% vs. 8.3%). However, the spread decreases where people with disabilities earn a degree, diploma or other certificate from a university. Here, 12.4% of people with disabilities and 8.2% without live on low incomes, a spread of 1.5 times instead of twice the rate of poverty.
These statistics are important.
View Kennedy Stewart Profile
NDP (BC)
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
And thank you to all the witnesses for coming today and the great discussion here.
Most of my comments will be aimed at Professor Middleton.
Thanks very much for taking the time to be with us today. I really enjoy your work, and I think we really need the kind of help you have to offer on our broadband and Internet in Canada.
You're saying we don't have a digital strategy. Well, I have a goal perhaps we can start with, and that is to increase the productivity of our largest cities, to make sure that our cities are competitive when businesses are looking around the world where they might locate, to make sure Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver are attractive sites to locate business from the perspective of broadband and Internet.
I'm struck by your article, “An Exploration of User-Generated Wireless Broadband Infrastructures in Digital Cities”. You give us four criteria by which we might evaluate, things that companies might find important: usability, reliability, security, and affordability.
I'm wondering about two questions. The first is, when we're thinking maybe from a company's perspective, how do our cities stack up against other cities around the world, perhaps using your four criteria, all of them, or one or two of them? And how can the federal government help to make things better?
I'll turn it over to you and maybe prod as we go along.
Catherine Middleton
View Catherine Middleton Profile
Catherine Middleton
2013-03-26 16:02
Okay.
The answer to how we stack up against the world isn't an easy one. I'm not aware of a good source of data to measure that. Akamai, which is the contribution distribution network, broadly speaking, produces the report each quarter on the state of the Internet. They used to look at cities, so they measured broadband speed in cities, and the last time they did that was 2011. They've stopped doing it because it's just too complicated, I think.
But at that time, of the top 100 cities with broadband speeds around the world, there were two Canadian cities on that list: Victoria was in 81st position, with average speeds of 7.5 megabits per second, and Oakville was in 97th. That's really the only hard data point we have from 2011.
More recently, their 2012 third-quarter data shows that 70% of Canadian connections are above 4 megabits per second, but we're not in the top 10 internationally for average or peak connection speeds. Much of this data is consumer data, but it's still measuring the ability to connect into businesses, and so on. It seems that we don't have really good data, but the data we have suggests that Canadian cities are not world leading in terms of speeds of broadband. If you look at some places that are, they're places like Chattanooga, in Tennessee, where the municipal utility has built out a gigabit-per-second broadband network there. What that has done is it's become a huge hub for regional development. Companies from across the U.S. are moving into Chattanooga because there's this broadband connectivity there.
The question becomes, how could we do something similar here? What would be needed? Clearly, there are opportunities to build particular spaces, so build industry, industrial parks, build networks, build regions...providing this high-speed symmetrical fibre connectivity, and drawing business into that.
To the extent that municipalities can help with planning, it's not so clear exactly how the federal government drives that at the municipal level, but, clearly, any initiative that it can do to help foster that would be good.
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