Hey Ontarians! This one’s for you. Don’t make the mistake of believing that your most influential action in provincial politics for 2018 will be your vote in the provincial election (although I do understand the temptation to think just that, given that your vote either went toward electing or keeping out a Premier with a demonstrated record of ableism and of disdain for the social security net in general). Your comment is needed on Aoda Review 2018; you just might not have known it. I didn’t.

Content Warning:  Ableism, Exclusion, Lack of Accessibility, Politics

At the beginning of 2018, months before the Ontario election was called, the Honourable David Onley, former Ontario Lieutenant Governor and current Senior Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Toronto, undertook Aoda Review 2018. This is the the third scheduled review of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, which became law in 2005. The process includes getting feedback about the AODA from the public. A number of public hearings were scheduled to facilitate this, including one online Hearing.

Nothing to take issue with there, right? Disabled people want accessibility legislation that works for them, and in order for that to happen, we need to be a part of the planning process – especially since Ontario’s goal of being totally accessible by 2025 seems further away than ever.  Does the government  finally understand that disabled people need to be asked about what they need? Perhaps, according to this sentence on the AODA Review 2018 website:

“The review includes consulting with the public, in particular people with disabilities, in order to make recommendations.”

But, before we get too carried away, let’s take a closer look.

AODA Review 2018 Hearings: Will Onley Hear From Everyone?

The public hearings are pretty much over at this point. They were only held in big cities, mainly in the Greater Toronto Area: Scarborough, York Region, and Toronto itself. Ottawa and Thunder Bay were also included, and London was added apparently at the last minute. The inclusion of Thunder Bay is positive, since the experience of a disabled person in this northern Ontario city is potentially quite different than a disabled person in Scarborough, which is situated in southern Ontario.

However, my experience as a disabled person in a very small central Ontario county, spread out over a great distance with no public transportation, is going to be different than that of a disabled person who lives in either of those places, or in, say, the very northern small town of Moose Factory. Where is the chance for those from rural and/or isolated communities to speak? While I suspect that some of what disabled Ontarians have to say about the AODA is likely the same across the province (such as, even a fully-AODA compliant built space isn’t necessarily truly accessible), there are bound to be differences in how effectively people experience the legislation working according to variables like community size and location (and how these things dictate what sort of resources are available.)

Yes, there was an online hearing in which presumably anyone from anywhere in the province could participate.  But one online hearing (even if it was 3 hours long) isn’t sufficient to appreciate the full scope of issues  in a  province as large as Ontario with such diverse communities. And this brings up another issue: By the time I found out about the online hearing (the easiest one in which I could participate, given that the nearest physical hearing was over three hours away by bus), it had already happened, and I’d been working that day anyway.

The AODA Review Hearings: Did People Know About Them?

I don’t know what publicity was like in the towns where the hearings were held (radio, print media, event calendars, etc.) but I could find very little about the AODA reviews in general on Twitter, and even found several tweets criticizing how publicity was handled for the last two hearings:

“The David Onley AODA Independent Review Schedules Two More Public Hearings, in Toronto and London, With Insufficient Publicity and No Outreach to the AODA Alliance to Help Publicize Them”

Apparently some organizations only found out about these hearings through the grapevine.

I only found out the entire AODA Review 2018 process by accident last week, when a friend sent me a link to the website.

Not that I hear about all disability-related news in Canada, or even Ontario.  But between Twitter, my network, and the CBC, I stay fairly in the loop, and learning that influential Ontario disability organizations only found out about some of the hearings through the grapevine (and that Thunder Bay’s recent hearing was cancelled due to “low registration”), makes me suspicious about how well-publicized these public hearings actually were.

Especially since this is not the first time I’ve seen something like this.

When the Honourable Carla Qualtrough, Canada’s Minister of Sport and Persons with Disabilities,  scheduled consultations across the country to speak with disabled Canadians and their loved ones about their feelings about nation-wide disability legislation, I heard about the Ontario consultations too late to attend any of them.

“Did you know that any of this was going on?” I asked my father, amazed that I’d heard nothing about any of it.

“Nope,” he said.

Now, I don’t know much about David Onley, so I took a look at his Twitter feed.  A disabled man himself, and an accessibility consultant, he seems very involved in Canadian disability advocacy and knowledgable about the issues disabled people face, follows many advocates that I follow, and consistently retweets useful and interesting information about disability in Canada and around the world – but there’s almost nothing in the way of publicity about the AODA Review 2018 public hearings over the summer.

I’m sure he knows about the importance of designing public hearings so that they’re as accessible to as many people as possible, including the importance of making sure as many people know about them as possible (as I’m sure Minister Qualtrough did when she designed public hearings for the Trudeau government on creating a Canadians with Disabilities Act). I don’t like to think that “We want to hear from disabled people!” is just lip service, although discovering it is wouldn’t be terribly shocking.

Not even terribly surprising, really.

But here’s the thing, Ontarians – even if it is lip service, even if the online hearing is over and the last of the public hearings will be over by the time I publish this, you can call the Review Committee’s bluff and still give them all the input on the AODA and Ontario 2025 that you want, because they are accepting written comments from the public until November 2.

Make Your Voice Heard in AODA Review 2018

It’s a little more work, yes. But the AODA should ideally ensure that disabled people get to experience Ontario communities in the same way that non-disabled people do, and if there’s something in the legislation that’s keeping that from happening, the government needs to hear it, and not just from disabled people. Also from:

• Friends and families
• Support people (paid and unpaid)
• Support agencies (in education, health care, housing, social services…you get the idea)
• Businesses and organizations affected by the 2025 goals
• Politicians
• Concerned community members

Anyone could become disabled at any time, so we all have a stake in this, fellow Ontarians. Please take this opportunity to talk to policy makers about the AODA:

• What’s working, and why you like it
• What’s not working, and why and how you’d change it
• What worries you and why.  What would have to change to make you feel less worried?
• How you feel about the Ontario 2025 goals. Do you think Ontario will be fully accessible by 2025? Why or why not?

Here’s some information to guide you:

The Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, 2005 

About Accessibility Laws (Ontario)

Comments will be accepted until November 2. Visit the AODA Review 2018 website to submit your comment.

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