Disability advocates say Ontario is on track to miss its goal of a fully accessible province by 2025.
Thirty years after the launch of a movement that eventually led to Ontario passing accessibility legislation, they also question whether provincewide accessibility will ever happen.
“Ontario will not be accessible to Ontarians with disabilities … as the (Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act) AODA had promised, not even close,” David Lepofsky, chair of the AODA Alliance, said at Queen’s Park on Monday.
The Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, passed in 2005, outlined the goal of achieving “accessibility for Ontarians with disabilities with respect to goods, services, facilities, accommodation, employment, buildings, structures and premises on or before January 1, 2025.”
The act, which applies to all people and organizations in the public and private sectors, requires the government to create accessibility standards for organizations to follow.
“We've been warning government after government and minister after minister that this was going to happen for well over a decade,” said Lepofsky, adding that while there has been some progress, it’s been “glacial.”
“But successively, government after government, minister after minister, slowed down to the point where our current rate of progress can only be described as abysmal,” he continued. “At the rate we are going, not only won't we reach a fully accessible province that we were promised by 2025, we never will.”
Lepofsky and other advocates held a press conference at Queen’s Park on Monday, prior to hosting hearings so that members of the public could share with legislators the barriers that people with disabilities still face and what they believe the government should do.
Representatives from all parties were expected to attend, with the government sending Daisy Wai, parliamentary assistant to Minister for Seniors and Accessibility Raymond Cho.
Lepofsky said it was 30 years ago that about 20 people with disabilities gathered at Queen’s Park for public hearings on a private member’s bill. Frustrated with what Lepofsky called “patronizing lip service,” the group ended up “storming down the hall, somebody found a meeting room, and spontaneously, a new coalition was born.”
“But the fact is, we can't just celebrate because we come here with a mixture of pride and anger,” he said. “We are not dispirited. We are more motivated than ever.”
Lepofsky said around 2.9 million Ontarians with disabilities will “suffer” as a result of the province’s failure to meet its January goal, as will their families and friends and those who get a disability later in life.
“If you total that up, it means every Ontarian will ultimately suffer from the successive failures to effectively implement this law,” Lepofsky said.
Nora Green, a retired special education teacher and member of the Toronto District School Board’s Special Education Advisory Committee, said Ontario’s 300,000 students with disabilities in publicly funded schools “experience far too many barriers.”
Green said it’s not just about “insufficient funding,” and that parents have told the committee it’s hard to find out what services and supports are available for their children at school.
“They must navigate a frustrating, dispiriting maze to try and get action if the school doesn't deliver what it promised,” she said, adding that many students with disabilities are sent home or excluded and are being refused the right to an education.
She said accessibility standards for education haven’t been enacted under the AODA, with Lepofsky adding that neither have standards for health care.
As for how long it could take for the province to reach its goal of being fully accessible, Lepofsky said while target dates are helpful, he thinks the focus should be on “goals that we can achieve individually.”
For example, ensuring hotels have braille room numbers.
“You go to a hotel, one thing you kind of want to know is your room number,” said Lepofsky. “We don't need five years, 10 years to get braille numbers up on hotel room doors, or, dare I say, on elevator buttons. So there are a number of accommodations that could be achieved extremely quickly.”
With speculation of an early provincial election, Lepofsky said the alliance plans to write to all the parties to “seek commitments on what they will do when we don't meet the deadline of 2025 for full accessibility to get us as close to that goal, as quickly after that deadline as they can.”
NDP Leader Marit Stiles said she thinks her party’s proposal for a “New Deal for municipalities” would help them “meet more of the requirements of the AODA.”
“I think these are the ways that the government can actually help support change happening a lot faster than it is,” she said. “When you're underfunding municipalities, you're underfunding school boards … it's really, really hard for folks on the ground to be able to meet these standards.”
Robin Jones, president of the Association of Municipalities of Ontario (AMO), said municipalities have been "at the forefront of removing barriers and making our communities more inclusive."
"AMO continues to focus on improving municipal capacity to fulfill the promise of the Act in a way that is both effective and feasible," said Jones. "There is still more work to do across Ontario to make the province more accessible. A provincial action plan that goes beyond 2025 would ensure that Ontario continues to make progress."
For its part, the government said the province is "exceeding the AODA standards each and every day."
"We have built the standards of the AODA into the Ontario building code. All new GO Transit stations, train platforms and bus stations adhere to the AODA. We have delivered over 2,200 accessible buses to municipalities," said Cho, the accessibility minister, during question period. "The province is making historic investments to make Ontario more accessible today and for the future."
—With files from Jack Hauen
