StatsCan't II

From the NS Accessibility Directorate

If you don't see the chart above, go to the webpage

Nova Scotia always comes out on top in the Canadian Survey on Disability.  In this 5 year survey, the target group is composed of all persons aged 15 and over (as of May 10th 2016, Census Day), and who reported having difficulty "Sometimes", "Often" or "Always" to one of the Activities of Daily Living questions on the 2016 Census of Population long form.

To  some of us, this is an opportunity unfolding.  Nova Scotia has an Accessibility Act which will ensure the complete integration of this large cohort into the life of the province.  Others won't see it that way.  You can almost hear the alarms going off:  "How can we possibly afford to support such a steep rise in the number who may not be able to work?"

This is an irrelevant argument, and forgets to account for all the economic and social benefits of increased access.  

Is there anything that will accurately reflect the dimensions of employment?  Here is a more detailed look at employment - a slightly different age group, settled in employment but from the same dataset:

According to StatsCan, the number of people with disabilities not in the workforce is less than the same number for those without disabilities.  It's a bigger proportion, but slightly smaller in absolute terms.

When those not in the workforce are eliminated for both groups, the unemployment percentage is very similar (10.9%, 6.8%):

In sum, people with disabilities are employed, pay taxes, go to restaurants when possible and are generally hard to distinguish from other Nova Scotians. 

BUT

The 'self-reported' angle got me wondering how this survey accounts for people with developmental disabilities.  It turns out that the survey uses one question to identify this category:

1. Has a doctor, psychologist or other health care professional ever said that you had a developmental disability or disorder? This may include Down syndrome, autism, Asperger syndrome, mental impairment due to lack of oxygen at birth, etc.

So does StatsCan call up residents of the Developmental “3” Group Home at CACL in Antigonish and ask this question?

Nope, StatsCan does not survey those living collectively and the survey, with dozens of questions in 45 categories is not geared to those with intellectual disabilities.

Persons living on a First Nations reserve were not included, nor were those living in collective dwellings, such as institutional residences...

This apparently includes many living in homes indirectly financed by Nova Scotia's Department of Community Services like DirectioNS member agencies and l'Arche.  Certainly many hundreds of our most vulnerable Nova Scotians. Adding them to the data might change profiles dramatically.

Although they are theoretically in programs to demonstrate the dignity of work (and they provide employment to staff and administrators), they aren't accorded the dignity of being counted as workers, and we know nothing about their demographics, health, education, work, or income.

Through DCS we spend a lot to help and support these folks.  A survey that doesn't account for such an important cohort is incomplete.  We need to know more, not less

Be Heard

Your voice needs to be heard at the All Party forum on Disability and Accessibility.  If you are unable to attend or simply want to register your concerns, please take a minute to fill out this short questionnaire.  I will hand the results to the moderator before the meeting on October 7th.  Feel free to share the questionnaire.
I apologize in advance for difficulties screen readers may have with the form.  And I rely on your sense of fairness to just submit one form.
Thanks for participating.
Gus Reed
ps here's a separate link to the form.......

How to Lie with Statistics

On Thursday, HalifaxExaminer published this announcement of a Government meeting:

Crosswalk safety advisory committee (10am, City Hall) — there’s been a welcome decline in the number of pedestrians struck:

I don't know if Tim is just pulling our leg, but nothing could be further from the truth. As I have said before on this subject, the police's insistence on viewing the complex world one variable at a time can lead to false conclusions and, most importantly, neglects important information. A simple example:

Rather than looking year-by-year, here is a graph of the complete 3 1/2 years, showing that 2015 has barely nudged off the moving average of 17.1 incidents per month (The lowest moving average, 14.7, occurred in August, 2013):

This can be confirmed by averaging the data by month and comparing it to the first seven months of 2015:
The downward trend of 2015 seems to occur in the first half of every year.

Better yet is a summary by season, which does provide a clue as to what's happening:

You don't suppose that pedestrian collisions are connected to lousy snow clearing? Sounds pretty far fetched......

I promise you that the number of collisions will soon rebound to the 15-20 range, peaking in the winter months.  As a wheelchair user, I take this personally because I'm not very agile in avoiding hurtling autos.  

The chart of Vehicle-Pedestrian Collisions is entirely inconclusive as to any trend and further demonstrates HRM Police’s confusion of ‘counting’ with ‘analysis’. The stubborn reliance on considering one variable at a time means that important questions go unanswered.

• Which intersections have accidents during peak commuter times?
• Are there intersections that are dangerous for under 25-year-olds on weekends?
• Do lighting conditions make a difference?
• How about the pattern of paint?

Intersections are complex, and the problem will persist until the complexities are accounted for.  Arithmetic just isn”t enough.

Aging in place

Take it with a grain of salt, but this is your future

According to the Chronicle-Herald, there are 7,821 Long Term Care beds in the province and 2,551 on the waitlist. That's 10,372.

Health and Wellness budgets $566,971,000 for its Long Term Care Program, a daily rate of $198.61 for the 7,821. That's quite a lot more than the $135 Ontario claims, so it probably includes a mix of Nursing Homes and Residential Care services. It's probably even more per bed, as some of the 7821 are self-pay

If there is a need for 2,551 more beds, that represents a further $184,930,702 or 32%

As a wheelchair user and Practical Pig, I'm very conscious of what will happen to me at the end of my life. I'm very lucky to have already considered accessibility issues. I have level access, wide doors, a roll-in shower and feel pretty confident that I can spend most of my remaining days here.

Both Health and Wellness and I are excited about this, as we won't be spending the $198.61 on me every day. In order to avoid that expense, Health and Wellness will provide in-home services at $12.65/hr, with some income-based subsidy available. For the $198.61, you'd get more than 15 hours of home care. This will work for me, hopefully for a while.  I'll need some help with the Activities of Daily Living, as they are called, but can easily see getting by on 4 hours/day or less.

• The Province can save money if homes are retrofitted.  
• Homeowners would prefer to stay home
• Homebuilders can make money

Sounds like an opportunity.......

Suppose the province would subsidize your renovations (or new construction) up to, say, $6000 (30 days @ $200) on the certain bet that they will save money.  Capital and operating.  Your renovation would need to include a level entrance, a ground floor bath and bedroom, and 36" doors in between.  You'd have a good shot at doing that for $6000, and any extra would serve you well for nursing-home avoidance.

Some similar incentive can be imagined for landlords.

The Province would need to develop some minimum standards, but this is a no-brainer that will benefit the province, the construction industry, but most of all people who just want to stay at home.

**********************************

An employee at CHI Franciscan Health's telemedicine center monitors far-flung patients' vital signs in Tacoma, Wash. The New York Times

By 2015, a short 10 years, the internet will become an important, if not the dominant way of delivering primary health care.  The next generation of activity trackers like Fitbits will morph into health trackers.  Home video monitoring will become ubiquitous.   Here's a recent New York Times Article.

In their accessible homes, elders avoiding institutionalization will access a range of services, from simple check-in all the way to remote physician visits and diagnosis.  Your wrist-worn health tracker will call 911 when your heart rate is out of control, and your GPS will be aware of our location if you go wandering.

Cost pressures, wider availability of broadband, increased patient loads and the uneven distribution of specialists all make this inevitable.  There will be arguments back and forth about cost and outcomes, but the horse has already left the stable.

Rather than playing catch-up-ball, Health and Wellness, Doctors Nova Scotia and The College of Physicians and Surgeons should be ahead of this trend.  It'll save money and lives.

Improving on Nova Scotia Business, Inc.

Laurel Broten, president and CEO, at Nova Scotia Business Inc. said in the Chronicle-Herald that a year of talks with the Royal Bank produced the following deal:

NSBI will provide payroll rebates of $22,000,000 over 10 years if RBC's new cheque processing centre produces 500 new jobs.

Here's the math:

$22,000,000 / 500 / 10 = $4,400/job/year

If RBC creates 500 new jobs in the next 10 years, the company would add an estimated $240 million in salaries and benefits to the Nova Scotia economy, according to Nova Scotia Business Inc.

Here's the math:

$240,000,000 / 500 /10 = $48,000 average salary (this depends a little on how fast jobs are added and the nature of benefits, but it's a useable estimate).  

Annual provincial income tax on $48000 = $4608

Net gain to province = 10 yrs * ($4608 - $4400) =$2,080

$2,080 * 500 employees = $1,040,000

Here's some more math:
Broten's salary is $210,000/year, so over the life of the Royal Bank deal. we'll be paying her $2,100,000 - a little more than twice the savings to taxpayers.  Not much of a deal for us, eh?

Contrast that with my plan for incentives to employ workers with disabilities receiving assistance, which nets $14,133 per job in new revenues and program savings.  Depending on how you spend that, it's something less.  I was thinking $7,133 in savings was a nice round number.

Oh, and that's ANNUALLY, so $71,330 per job.  A lot more if you only incentivise the first year.

Here's the math:

Net gain for Laurel / Gus' net gain for each new disabled worker = How many disabled workers you'd need to hire to be better than Broten's deal with Royal Bank.

$1,040,000 / $71,330 = 14.58

Hiring 15 Nova Scotians with disabilities is a better deal than hiring 500 Royal Bankers.  People with disabilities would say this is obvious.

I freely admit that my plan does not create NEW jobs, but because it eliminates large government expenses and doesn't involve subsidies, each new hire has a much bigger impact. 

Like Broten's plan, there is little risk:

We prefer this arrangement because no rebate money is paid unless and until a company first meets employment and salary targets. This guarantees that we have a positive return on investment (ROI). In other words, Nova Scotia gets paid first.

Unlike Broten's plan, mine estimates a 10 year return of over a billion dollars.  Roughly 1000 times better.  And it is completely scalable - it works for 10 or 100 or 1,000 or 10,000.

My estimates rely on my interpretation of aggregate data.  The actual numbers are not available to mere taxpayers, but Laurel would have them.  I've been wrong before, but never by a factor of 1000.  If Broten is interested in real savings, real change and real innovation, she should take a look.

I know this is threatening to vested interests.  As an experiment, let's try it out on 15 people without delay.

Gus Reed

PS  James McGregor Stewart, after whom this society is named, was a director of the Royal Bank.  He saved their bacon on many occasions, proving that a person with a disability can be useful as well as ornamental.....

New Math

Thanks to Sandra McFadyen at the Disabled Persons Commission, I learned that StatsCanada has a new survey on disability, which is presented on fact sheets at the Disabled Persons Commission, so herewith some revised estimates.  I left the original post.

My friend Contrarian challenged me to get serious about the economics of accessibility.

I'm just a wheelchair user, so I tend to think about accessibility in terms of ramps and washrooms. Let's make some informed estimates.

I like restaurants, but many are in inaccessible buildings.  They've been restaurants for a long time, so under the provincial building code, they're grandfathered as to inaccessibility.  What would it cost to make them accessible, would there be any benefits and what would be a good way to make it happen?  Here are some numbers:

According to Restaurants Canada, 60.6% of Canadians eat at a restaurant once a week or more.

The population of Nova Scotia, age 15 and over is 765,100.  I was using the total population.

Here is some figuring on disability:

Category	Factor	Running Total
Nova Scotians age 15+	100%	765,100
With a disability	18.8%	143,839
Mobility	53.0%	76,235
Moderate	21.7%	16,543
Dine out at least once a week	60.6%	10,025
Meals per year	52	521,300

The subjective variable here is severity of disability.  StatsCan is cautious:

....disability severity is a strong predictor of the reduced participation of people with disabilities in several domains of everyday life (Federal Disability Report, 2010). People with severe disabilities are less likely than their counterparts with milder disabilities to participate in the labour force, to attend and complete post-secondary education programs, and to participate in community activities. 

Here's my interpretation:

Severity of disability	Likelihood of dining out
mild	Probably could go to any restaurant, though it might be a nuisance.
moderate	Probably can't do steps and needs some washroom amenities, but would love to dine out.
severe	Might go to a restaurant, but probably would rather not.
very severe	Wouldn't go.

This much is indisputably correct:  According to Statistics Canada and Restaurants Canada the potential for dining out among Nova Scotians age 15 and over with moderate mobility disabilities is 521,300 meals per year.  

I can personally testify that some of that demand is already being met, though none of it at inaccessible restaurants.  Let's say two-thirds of those meals don't happen presently, leaving a new business potential of 347,533 meals.  I made this 2/3 instead of 1/2, being reminded by Elizabeth Braid that few eat alone.

Hold that thought.  Now let's turn our attention to restaurants.

According to Statistics Canada there are 1540 full-service restaurants and limited-service eating places in Nova Scotia as of January 2015.

Some of them will need extensive renovations to become accessible.  Some already are accessible. Others, like Hali-Deli just got a free portable ramp.  Some have a useful washroom, some have no washroom at all.  Here's a table to help think about it:

		Cost to make accessible
Proportion of restaurants	# of restaurants	$500	$2,500	$5,000	$7,500	$10,000	$15,000
25%	385	$192,500	$962,500	$1,925,000	$2,887,500	$3,850,000	$5,775,000
50%	770	$385,000	$1,925,000	$3,850,000	$5,775,000	$7,700,000	$11,550,000
75%	1155	$577,500	$2,887,500	$5,775,000	$8,662,500	$11,550,000	$17,325,000
100%	1540	$770,000	$3,850,000	$7,700,000	$11,550,000	$15,400,000	$23,100,000

If all 1540 restaurants had to spend $15,000 to become accessible, it would cost $23,100,000.  My estimate is that about half of restaurants are inaccessible, and that $7500 would go a long way towards fixing the problem.  Here are my figures:

16 foot ramp	$2,687
32" prehung door	$189
Raised Toilet	$168
Pedestal sink	$151
Labour	$1,000
Plumber	$750
Carpenter	$750
Fixtures: Grab Bars, Lever handles, Braille sign, etc.	$500
Total	$6,196

Way under $7500.  The ramp is very nice and comes ready-to-assemble - meets code.  Covers 2 steps.  Fixtures are Home Depot prices.  Labour is extremely generous, probably way too much.  This assumes the restaurant already has a  bathroom, at least 2X2 meters, that needs renovating.

So a $7,500 upgrade of 770 restaurants would cost $5,775,000.

Suppose the Province made a grant for the renovation.  What's the payback?  Well, It depends on the price of a meal:

Cost of a meal	Annual Business Increase	Per Restaurant	Provincial HST portion	Years to recoup $7500 grant to 50% of restaurants
$10	$3,475,333	$2,257	$347,533	16.6
$25	$8,688,333	$5,642	$868,833	6.6
$50	$17,376,667	$11,284	$1,737,667	3.3
$75	$26,065,000	$16,925	$2,606,500	2.2
$100	$34,753,333	$22,567	$3,475,333	1.7

My favorite meal on the planet is clams & chips and a chocolate shake at John's Lunch in Dartmouth, which runs $23.23 tax included.  Let's take $25 for an average price - I think $30 is more realistic but $25 will do.

So here's the bottom line:

10,025 Nova Scotians with moderate mobility disabilities might represent a new customer base of 347,533 meals at the province's restaurants.  If the Province gave $7500 grants to 770 restaurants to make them accessible, it would recoup the investment through HST in 6.6 years at an average meal cost of $25.


The 770 restaurants each increase business $5,642 per year.

Gus Reed

PS this doesn't account for the HST on what the grant is used for, any increased income taxes from new employees, increases in property taxes, whatever.

Food Math

My friend Contrarian challenged me to get serious about the economics of accessibility.

I'm just a wheelchair user, so I tend to think about accessibility in terms of ramps and washrooms. Let's make some informed estimates.

I like restaurants, but many are in inaccessible buildings.  They've been restaurants for a long time, so under the provincial building code, they're grandfathered as to inaccessibility.  What would it cost to make them accessible, would there be any benefits and what would be a good way to make it happen?  Here are some numbers:

According to Restaurants Canada, 60.6% of Canadians eat at a restaurant once a week or more.

The population of Nova Scotia is 940,592

The Disabled Persons Commission says 16% of Nova Scotians have a mobility disability (2006 data)
and 26.9% of disabilities are moderate.

Nova Scotians	940,592
16% Mobility disability	150,495
26.9% moderate	40,483
60.6% dine out at least once a week	24,533
Annual restaurant visits	1,275,703

The subjective variable here is severity of disability.  I can't find a good description, but here's my interpretation of the StatsCan categories:

Severity of disability	Likelihood of dining out
mild	Probably could go to any restaurant, though it might be a nuisance
moderate	Probably can't do steps and needs some washroom amenities, but would love to dine out
severe	Might go to a restaurant, but probably would rather not
very severe	Wouldn't go

This  is indisputably correct:  According to Statistics Canada and Restaurants Canada the potential for dining out among those with moderate mobility disabilities is 1,275,703 meals per year.  I can personally testify that some of that demand is already being met, though none of it at inaccessible restaurants.  Let's say half of those meals don't happen presently, leaving a new business potential of 637,851 meals.

Hold that thought.  Now let's turn our attention to restaurants.

According to Statistics Canada there are 1540 full-service restaurants and limited-service eating places in Nova Scotia as of January 2015.

Some of them will need extensive renovations to become accessible.  Some already are accessible. Others, like Hali-Deli just got a free portable ramp.  Some have a useful washroom, some have no washroom at all.  Here's a table to help think about it:

		Cost to make accessible
Proportion of restaurants	# of restaurants	$500	$2,500	$5,000	$7,500	$10,000	$15,000
25%	385	$192,500	$962,500	$1,925,000	$2,887,500	$3,850,000	$5,775,000
50%	770	$385,000	$1,925,000	$3,850,000	$5,775,000	$7,700,000	$11,550,000
75%	1155	$577,500	$2,887,500	$5,775,000	$8,662,500	$11,550,000	$17,325,000
100%	1540	$770,000	$3,850,000	$7,700,000	$11,550,000	$15,400,000	$23,100,000

If all 1540 restaurants had to spend $15,000 to become accessible, it would cost $23,100,000.  My estimate is that about half of restaurants are inaccessible, and that $7500 would go a long way towards fixing the problem.  Here are my figures:

16 foot aluminum ramp	$2,687
32" prehung door	$189
Raised Toilet	$168
Pedestal sink	$151
Labour	$1,000
Plumber	$1,000
Carpenter	$1,000
TOTAL	$6,196

The ramp is very nice and comes ready-to-assemble - meets code.  Covers 2 steps.  Fixtures are Home Depot prices.  Labour is extremely generous, probably way too much.  This assumes the restaurant already has a  bathroom, at least 2X2 meters, that needs renovating.

So a $7,500 upgrade of 770 restaurants would cost $5,775,000.

Suppose the Province made a grant for the renovation.  What's the payback?  Well, It depends on the price of a meal:

Cost of a meal	Annual Business Increase	Per Restaurant	Provincial HST portion	Years to recoup $7500 grant to 50% of restaurants
$10	$6,378,514	$4,142	$637,851	9.1
$25	$15,946,285	$10,355	$1,594,629	3.6
$50	$31,892,570	$20,709	$3,189,257	1.8
$75	$47,838,855	$31,064	$4,783,886	1.2
$100	$63,785,140	$41,419	$6,378,514	0.9

My favorite meal on the planet is clams & chips and a chocolate shake at John's Lunch in Dartmouth, which runs $23.23 tax included.  Let's take $25 for an average price - I think $30 is more realistic but $25 will do.

So here's the bottom line:

24,533 Nova Scotians with moderate mobility disabilities might represent a new customer base of 637,851 meals at the province's restaurants.  If the Province gave $7500 grants to 770 restaurants to make them accessible, it would recoup the investment through HST in 3.6 years at an average meal cost of $25.


The 770 restaurants each increase business $10,355.

Gus Reed