1994 to 2005 Grassroots Campaign to win the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act. David Lepofsky, chair, Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance. Delivered at the Osgoode Hall Law School. January 14th, 2014 as a Roy McMurtry Clinical Fellow. Good afternoon, everybody, It's, it's really a privilege and an honor to be able to speak to the introduction introductory course at the York University critical disabilities studies program.

It's fabulous that you've chosen this as your area of academic study. Let me try to offer you some ideas, that may may help you think through challenging issues that face people with disabilities, not just in the area of accessibility, but well beyond. I have to indicate at the outset that I'm speaking in my personal capacity, I'm not speaking on, on behalf of the the government of the province of Ontario.

About 20 years ago this November, 20 people, I was one of them, happened to end up in a room together at Queen's park. Entering that room, we were angry, leaving that room we were the birth of a brand new movement. It was a movement that fought tenaciously with little or no money, Little or no experience but a lot of energy for 10 years.

And it resulted in the enactment of two laws, The Ontarians with Disabilities Act, 2001, and the later Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, 2005. When we started, We didn't have the slightest idea what we were doing, what we wanted or how to get it. And we had no realistic hope of success.

I want to spend my time together with you now, telling you the story. The unfolding narrative of how we got from that room in two thou-, in nine-, pardon me, in 1994, on the 29th of November, all the way up to May 2005, May 10th, 2005, when we celebrated The achievement of a dream that we couldn't have believed possible when we started.

As I go through, I'm not going to spend a lot of time on the detailed and more complicated policy issues that we were dealing with. I'm only going to touch on those in other lectures in the series that I'm I'm going to be delivering this month and that I hope to get posted on YouTube together.

I'll deal more with the details on public policy. What I want to do with you today is to talk about how we did it and what we learned as we went along the way. I want you to know that as we learned. We came up with ideas and strategies, which were not only successful then but which we continue to use to this very day, in 2014, to try to get those two laws, effectively, implemented.

Before I start with that Blustery fall day in November 1994 however. I got to take you back to the 1970s. Just for a couple of minutes. Back in the 1970s, people with disabilities in the province of Ontario or across Canada, as they do now Found that they were disproportionately unemployed or underemployed, disproportionately poor, disproportionately underrepresented among those who graduated from colleges or universities, disproportionately overrepresented among those who collect social assistance.

They were poor, they were weak, they were dis-empowered. They faced barriers everywhere they went. When they tried to get a job, or an education, or buy goods, or services, or just enjoy the things that others take for granted in life. And in the 1970s they were not organized.

There was no aggressive, publicly recognized cross-disability advocacy movement to try to get this changed. Moreover most folks with disabilities Didn't even have advocacy or lobbying on their minds. Just getting by was enough of a challenge. We also didn't have the advantage of things like email, the internet, fax machines, smartphones Twitter.

Facebook, or other social media. We didn't even have. If, if you wanted to write a letter you had to type it on a thing called a typewriter. And if you wanted to send it separately addressed to different members of the legislature or parliament, you had to type it over and over and over again.

And by the way, if you made a mistake, you are allowed to use this weird stuff called white out, or just start from scratch. And then you put it in the mail and waited a couple of days for it to arrive, and then waited days more to see if anybody responded.

Things were very, very, different. There were no telephone conference calls or video conferencing or Skyping for meetings. You had to actually get in the same room. In the same city. At the same time. And folks with disabilities, across a province like Ontario, most part didn't have the capacity to do that.

Costs a lot. Took time. And they were poor and disadvantaged, disproportionately. Despite all of these hurdles, people with disabilities fought two really important battles in the late 1970s and the early 1980s that are the underpinnings Of the Disability Act movement of the 90s and 2000s. I had the privilege of being a part of all of that.

One of many people that worked on what I'm going to describe. What we learned in the 70s, helped dramatically influence what we did from 1994, onward. Back in the 70s, it was not illegal to discriminate because of disability, we didn't have a charter of rights to set our constitutional rights to equality.

Our human rights codes, the laws that make it illegal for public or private sector employers and others not to to discriminate. They've banned discrimination on grounds like religion age, race and sex. But not disability. It was only in the late 1970s that some human rights codes in some provinces were amended to include disability.

But not Ontario. In 1976, the Ontario Human Rights Commission Recommended that the Ontario Human Rights Code be amended to include a ban on discrimination based on physical disability. Didn't even mention mental disability. But the Ontario government took a leisurely three years to study that and related recommendations without action.

Things changed in late 1979 and events unfolded that changed the legal landscape dramatically. Was there a groundswell of people with disabilities going to Queens Park demanding that the human rights code be amended to give them the right to equality? No there wasn't. Was there a ground swell to pressure, the federal government to come up with a new constitution?

That included equality for people with disabilities. No it didn't, there wasn't. The issues actually arose it was government action That brought us together. Two things happened in tandem. First, in the late 1979, the Ontario government, the minister of labor, wonderful man, just died earlier this last year named darm-, Doctor Robert Elgie, came forward with a proposal.

A proposed bill. It was not an amendment to the Human Rights Code. It was proposed to be a separate law called the Handicapped Rights Act and it provided all the rights that the Human Rights Code would provide, though, to people with disabilities And it provided for the Human Rights Commission to enforce it.

But it didn't actually open up and amend the Human Rights Code. The introduction of that bill triggered the formation of a Human Rights Disability Coalition. I eventually got involved in it later. Was one of many who took part in the kind of leadership committee for that, coalition. Of interest, the thing that brought people with disabilities together over that bill was not the fact that its provision of anti-discrimination protection of people with disabilities Was actually weaker than what the human rotes, rights codes gave women, racialized communities, and so on.

That wasn't the thing that got under everybody's skin. Interestingly and, in retrospect, ironically, what really got people angry. Was that disability didn't amend the human rights code. It didn't put disability in the human rights code it didn't make, put us in the mainstream of human rights and instead it was going to provide for people with disabilities through a completely separate law.

That was appalling. Fast forward 20 years and we became a movement fighting for exactly that, a separate law. After action, which predated my personal involvement in late '79. By the disability community. The, the Ontario government, then under pre, conservative Premiere, William Davis and Labor Minister Robert Elgee. With significant support from then Attorney General, Roy McMurtry, after whom my fellowship is named.

The Ontario government decided to withdraw that bill and to come forward, instead. With amendments to the human rights code that would protect discrimin, against discrimination based on disability. I can tell you from being personally involved, it was a very exciting time because we got, we formed our coalition formed a platform, sat down across the table from Dr. Robert Elgie, the labor minister, negotiated clause by clause The amendments that ended up in the Ontario Human Rights code.

They were eventually passed in 1981, and proclaimed in force in 1982. It was very exciting. One of the things we learned back then, is that it's not enough to just talk about, please give us human rights. The devil is in the details.
>> [BLANK_AUDIO]
>> And when I was just finished my law studies.

Hadn't even become a lawyer yet. One of the things I learned early on is, if you wanna fight for legislative rights. You gotta get very much into the very minute details of how the legislation is worded. Or else you could end up with a government smiling saying they gave you what you wanted but finding out that it was far weaker than what you thought you needed.

At the same time as all of this was going on, the successful battle to get disability in the Ontario Human Rights code. In October, or in I, yeah I should say in October of 1980 our then liberal prime minister Pierre Trudeau proposed amending our constitution and including it in a charter of rights.

The Charter of Rights would have an equality provision, Section 15, that would ban discrimination on grounds like race, religion, sex, age and so on. But it did not include disability. At the same time as we were fighting to get into the Ontario Human Rights Code, a number of us got involved in trying to get into the Charter of Rights as well.

Time does not permit me in this lecture to get into the details of that story, but I had the privilege of being one of a number of people who got to appear before a parliamentary committee in Ottawa in the fall of 1980. Those hearings were the first televised public hearings in the history of our parliament And my presentation on December 12, 1980, is now available on YouTube.

Footnote, I had hair back then. Second footnote, don't remind me of that. Ultimately, through the pressure of people with disabilities around the country, Without the benefit of email or faxes or social media or any of that sort of thing the government was persuaded to amend section 15 before it passed the charter of rights to include protection against discrimination based on physical or mental disability.

Canada's was the first western constitution to include an explicit guarantee of equality for people with disabilities. It went into force in April the charter went into force in April of 1982 though the equality provision didn't kick in for three years. Yet another really exciting victory The difference between the fight to get into Human Rights Code in Ontario, and the fight to get in The Charter in Ottawa, was in Ontario the introduction of that Handicap Rights Act triggered the formation of a coalition of folks with disabilities.

In the case of the Charter of Rights, no coalition formed, when is different individuals and different organization went to Ottawa to press the case to amend the charter to include equality for people with disabilities. By the way, in the entire 1980 to 1982 debates over our Constitution The only new right that was added to the charter of rights in that entire debate was equality for people with disabilities.

So where were we at in 1982? We were pretty excited. Won these two major battles, very much against the odds. Great rights, they're on the books. We got what we wanted and what we needed. We were quite excited. Now let's fast forward to November of 1994. Why did twenty people go into a room at Queens Park wanting new disability rights legislation.

Hadn't we won enough? Well, what we had learned over the years between 1982 and 1994 was the good rights on the books don't necessarily translate into, to actual changes in the lives of people with disabilities. In their communities. Around our province or our country. Many people. I was one of many.

Had been involved in writing articles, giving speeches, doing training. Others not me were involved in arguing important court cases. and so on. But what we've found, after, the twelve years. Was that while we'd made some gains. We were still not anywhere near our goal, of being full equals in society And as quickly as we won overcame some barriers, new ones popped up.

This led a small group of folks with disabilities, not organized in any sort of comprehensive way, to decide that we needed something new. We needed something more. Not that the rights we had were inadequate as written, the charter and the human rights code were well drafted. The problem wasn't that the courts weren't effectively interpreting them.

We had great court decisions explaining what they meant that were very favorable to the needs of the people with disability. But what we found was that most government and private sector organizations weren't obeying them. And to enforce your human rights, under the human rights code, or under the charter of rights, you had to litigate them.

You had to get a lawyer and, and, and fight them. Case of human rights at the human rights tribunal, and in the case of the charter, by the way, the human rights commission you didn't necessarily need a lawyer, but in case of charter you did realistically, in court.

And you had to fight one barrier at a time, and most people in with disabilities couldn't take that on The other problem that we realized that we had back in the fall of 1994 is that while the charter and the human rights code were, were good laws, they didn't actually tell organizations what they had to do.

They spoke in grand terms. Provide equality, don't discriminate, do accommodate. But if you ran a restaurant. That didn't tell you you need to have a braille menu. Or if you had a store with one step to get in. That didn't tell you, hey that one step that's a barrier that violates the human rights code.

We've faced all sorts of barriers, that were agains the law But organizations that wanted to obey the law didn't know what they had to do, and organizations that didn't want to obey the law, didn't realistically have to face proceedings to enforce them in most cases. Because of the extraordinary burden of having all fight this barriers one at a time.

So this, that's what motivated a small number of people in the fall of 1994 to want something new. Want something better. A new law, not to replace the charter in the Human Rights Code. And there are guarantees for people with disabilities. But instead, a new law that would effectively implement those rights, that would tell organizations what they gotta do, and that would not require us to individually, personally, fight one barrier at a time in court or before a human rights tribune.

Now, did. And when, while the small group of individuals were thinking about this in the summer and fall of 1994, there was no organized disability act movement to push for it. Moreover, if you had approached anybody, you know, in the media They wouldn't have the slightest idea or if you talk about leaders in the business community.

None of it would have any idea that there was even a problem. Much less that some people were thinking of a new solution. So what got the movement started what got the organized movement started? On November 29th 1994. Well it's an amazing story. A number of people had asked the Ontario government of the day, it was a new Democratic government under then new Democratic Premier, Bob Ray, to bring in this new kind of law that we were seeking.

The name of the law we sought, we called it the Ontarians with Disabilities Act. That name came from the fact that in 1990, the US had passed the Americans with Disabilities Act, so we borrowed the name. And Barbary wasn't prepared to introduce that bill. He was a year away from an election, he didn't want to take it on, whatever.

So what happened is there happened to be A deaf individual who was a member of the Ontario Legislature named Gary Myocowsky, and he was a new Democrat. He was not in cabinet, he was a back bencher, and Gary decided getting feedback, by the way, Gary is the first deaf member of any legislature in the Western world.

It really made history. He decided to introduce his own private members bill. That's a proposed piece of legislation, but not sponsored by the government. And he called it the Ontarians with Disabilities Act. He introduced it early I think in the spring or summer of 1994, and it was Not the organised disability community that lead to the bill.

It was rather the bill that triggered the formation of a disability act coalition. Just like what happened in 1979, when the, Bill Davis conservative government. Introduce proposed new disability act legislation. That triggered the formation of a coalition then. In 1994, the Malceski bill introduced or triggered the formation of a coalition some 15 years later.

How did it happen? I'm summarizing because of time limitations. If you read the article, which I've had published on the first eight years of our movement, in the National Journal of Constitution Law, you can get, more details. But, in summary, what happened was, once the bill got before the legislature, Gary ' bill The government nest doesn't necessarily bring it all the way forward for a final vote.

So a number of us privately, pressured the government to at least bring that bill on for public hearings. Get it before a standing committee of the legislature. Let us come forward and make our case for why we need the bill. Premier Bob Rae and his government decided to do that.

And the hearing started on November 29th, 1994. And they didn't start with us making presentations, but instead they started with the cabinet minister in the Rae government responsible for this area, Lindsay Emba. She got up and made a speech. And her speech didn't really talk about Gary Makowski's Bill and didn't really answer the claim of why we need this legislation.

It was just kind of fluff. All sorts of nice things about Gary Makowski and what, what a great guy he is and of the usual what a great job the government's doing or whatever But no content on the subject that we were there. And there were a number of people in the room, 20 of us from varies aspects of the disability community who heard that this, the hearings were gonna begin, and we wanted to be there to see what happened.

So, our blood pressure was boiling, was going up pretty fast. As the speech droned on, then the hearing's adjourned, and word got out around the c-, room, around the, houses as we were leaving the room, to come down the hall. I think Gary was the one who got this to happen.

But everybody said, like, Go down the hall. There, people are meeting in Room Whatever. At Queens Park. There was some empty committee room. We went in. And it was in that room, 20 of us, angry at what we had just seen going on, before the legislative committee, resolved ourselves to form a coalition to fight for a Disabilities Act.

That's how it started, I had no idea walking in that room that we would walk out with a new coalition. I had no idea that a month later, I would become a co-chair and later, a chair of the coalition and it would gobble up a substantial part of the next 20 years of my volunteer life.

Delighted it has. It's been a wonderful experience. But sometimes, the most amazing events, and the most amazing cascading series of events, start with things that you can't imagine, or you can't imagine where they will lead you, I should say. How do we go from 20 people in a room to two pieces of legislation ten years later.

Let me walk you through just a number in summary from a number of the important steps, how we did it and what happened. The first thing that we had to in early 1995. Is to formalize ourselves. Give ourselves a name. The Ontarians with Disabilities Act Committee. Pick, we had first were three co-chairs but eventually it boiled down to me after the other two, who are good friends, decided that they didn't want to carry on in that role.

And we had to set out an agenda. What do we want? Well, what we did in January of 20 of 1995, was to bring a bunch of people together in a room, and we drafted a list of our principals. There're eleven of them. And they were aimed at saying, essentially, what we want in the legislation.

We said they want the legislation to achieve a barrier free Ontario. We said we want accessibility standards passed to get us there, that we want effective enforcement, and that it's gotta cover the public and private sector. Goods, services, employment, and so on. And that it had to be meaningful and effectively enforced.

And when we wrote those eleven principles, we had a few guiding thoughts in mind which carried us to this very day. The first is That we've gotta speak to all people, regardless of their disability. We've gotta unite our community around these principles. The second thing that we realized as we were writing them is that they've gotta set out a clear vision of where we wanna go.

The third is we want them to appeal to everyone. We wanna write them in a way so that anybody reading them, whether people with disabilities, politicians, journalists, whoever, that they would simply say, well, of course you should have that. So while ambitious, we didn't wanna be controversial. We wanted to appeal to as many people as we could.

And we were an unusual coalition from the start, because in the past, any disability advocacy groups in our community, almost, I shouldn't say any, but most of them were united to speak for one disability group or a cross-disability group or whatever, but they were broad organizations That addressed all issues.

We decided we would only deal with one issue. And that is the fight for a Disability Act. Now from formulating those 11 principles, which by the way, still remain our guarding, guiding principles almost 20 years later. What did we do next? Well we had to pull together at least a base of operations in Toronto.

We were very Toronto centered at this point. We reached out to some of the main disability service providers. we reached out to a small number of individuals. We just wanted a starting critical mass. To get start, and we learned a lesson early on once we got our 11 principles written.

That is also guided us to this very day. What we decided were two things, first, We decided that we would open the work together with anybody who agreed with our agenda. And if you didn't agree with our agenda, we weren't going to fight with you. So there are some folks with disabilities and thought the idea of a disability act was a good idea.

We would join up with them. There are other people who thought it was a bad idea. And we said fine. It's a democracy. You're entitled to believe what you want. But, we're not gonna spend our time arguing with you. We're happy to share our ideas. We're happy to learn about your concerns.

But, life's too short. We're just gonna keep people who agree with our message. And that has worked to this day because one of the things, think about it. It's not possible to get every single person with a disability to agree on anything. People have different views. So our goal was to come up with an agenda that would appeal to enough people and get enough people on board recognizing we would not get everybody.

Unanimity is not possible, harmony is. And that's what we fought for from day one. Or strove for. I said there were two organizing principles from the outset. That was one. The other organizing principle that it carried us through was this: any advocacy community organizing effort is by definition daunting if not overwhelming.

So we found that to keep things moving, we would try from time to time to just set goals for the next couple of months, focus everybody on those goals, get through them. And then when we're finished, sit down and go, All right, what's next? Lets just get through the next couple of months.

Well in February of 1995, what was our major goal? Well it was easy. Once we got people together, enough people together, to at least have a critical mass to get started by enough people. I mean a couple dozen, a few dozen, and a few disability agencies. Our next priority was set by external circumstances.

There was gonna be an election that spring. We all knew it. So our priority, was to raise the disability act issue in the election, and to try to get commitments from the political parties. How did we do it? Well at the time the Bob Rae NDP government was way behind in the polls.

And the liberal party under leader then, the then leader Lynn McLeod was way ahead in the polls. And the third party in that, in the legislature, the conservatives under a new leader named Mike Harris. Nobody was paying much attention to. So we decided to focus, even though we were non-partisan, we focused our efforts on trying to get an election commitment out of the liberals.

And so, we negotiated with, some of Lid McCloud's senior policy people behind closed doors. And when the election, around the time the election was called that spring, Lynn McCloud wrote us a letter. She was the first political leader to write a letter to the Ontario's with Disabilities Act committee, promising that if elected she would pass an Ontario's with Disabilities Act.

And we didn't even say what it would include, it hadn't gotten that far yet. What do you do with that? Well that was great breakthrough. But you don't stop there. So we took her letter, and sent it on to the two other folks running for premier; Mike Harris conservatives, and Bob Ray NDP.

Bob Ray would not make a commitment to us. He doesn't making any commitments. It was the weirdest political campaign I've ever seen. A lot of respect for Bob Ray, but how he handled that one we never quite fathomed. But on the 24th of May 1995 in the middle of this election campaign, we received a letter from Mike Harris, writing as the leader of the conservatives.

Also promising that, if elected, Mike Caras's government would also pass a disabilities act and that they would work with us to develop it. Mike Caras saw the liberals, no doubt, as their lead opponent, leading in the polls, wanted to be more appealing, so tried to match the promise that we got from the liberals.

Well, the rest of that election is history. The liberals plummeted, Mike Harris won the majority of government, and we went into the next phase of our activity starting in June of 1995, election over, with this election commitment in hand from the new Premier. But before I get to that, I wanna just tell you just one little story about what went on in the election, because it's a really good illustration of how we did what we did.

And this repeats itself over the decade over and over, and over again. During the election campaign in 1995, nobody, but nobody had ever heard of us. Most people with disabilities, most disability organizations, most politicians, all journalists, no idea about the Disabilities Act, what the issues were, and during an election, if you try to raise an issue, the people don't know about, good luck getting coverage.

So we decided we wanted to do something to get some media attention during that election. One of my colleagues, sitting around the table one day, this was when we had a working group of about eight or nine people, nothing more. There are more people in this room right now than we had doing our political strategy.

One of my colleagues, wonderful fellow, said, Why don't we go to an all candidates debate and raise these issues? All responses media don't cover all candidates debates. So the same individual spoke and said what if it's an accessible all candidates debate. Brilliant idea. So we had a couple of our colleagues start phoning around to every single all candidates debate was being advertised.

Find out where it was and ask if it was wheelchair accessible. If it was, we were pissed. We can't go there. We can't make our point. Finally, bingo, we found one of the school down in the beaches that was inaccessible. So once we heard that I said, well we better make sure really isn't accessible before we make a stink about this.

So we had somebody drive by and go in and yes, absolutely, there are stairs, there is no way to get in there without going up stairs. So we arranged for folks to go there, and we gave word to the media that we're gonna go there to that All-Canada Seb-, De-, All-Canada Debate that night with folks with wheelchairs, in wheelchairs, and others, to raise an issue about the inaccessibility of their event.

What a great way to show why you need new accessibility laws. In fact, we said we wanted to complain about inaccessible schools but we can't go to your inaccessible school where you're holding the all candidates' debate to complain about it because it's inaccessible. And, the media loves photographs, they love pictures, so off we go to this event.

Well, one of the things we learned early on is that as well, is that things never unfold as you plan, and sometimes they unfold way better. We get to this event, and we are outside. There's about a dozen of us, of I think, I don't know, four or five people in wheelchairs, a few people who could walk, I don't even remember all of But we were a small group and we're outside.

Everybody else is streaming in and we couldn't get I shouldn't mention these but the initials are 680 dues to come to cover it. So I filmed the story in and they put me on the air. You know I'm standing in front of this suburban school house. There are people with disabilities they can't get in they put it on the air You can't get the reporters to come to you, become the reporter.

So, that alone would be a great story but it gets better. One member of our group without consulting with any of us, I don't even remember who it was, went inside, this was someone who could walk, went upstairs to the all candidates debate. And shamed the politicians. What are you doing up here?

There are people with disabilities that can't, can't come in. Why don't you come downstairs? So the politicians came down. TV cameras are running. And they talked to us outside. Out comes my cell phone. Back on 680 News: Breaking developments. They put it on the air! After the politicians, entirely embarrassed Finished high to us, they said they gotta go back in.

Somebody from my group, again, none of this was rehearsed.
>> [LAUGH]
>> Said, You can't go back in and leave us out here! Meanwhile, while the, while we were talking out front, some of the individuals at the All Canada's Debate upstairs got bored waiting, so they came downstairs to outside the building Where we were st, standing or sitting.

Then the organizers ran in and started bringing out chairs. And next thing you know the rest of the all candidates debate was held outside on the sidewalk in front of the inaccessible school. So what does do? Out comes the cell phone. More late breaking developments. We were on radio, we were on TV, and we were in the newspapers the next day.

There was maybe 12 of us, on an issue fighting for a disability act that nobody knew anything about. This was a huge lesson about the ability to make a difference. And to make it up as you go along. So, what do you do? The election is over we got this letter in hand from Mike Harris, promising us a disabilities act and Premier Harris said he would keep all his promises or he would resign.

So we had to get to work. And we're nonpartisan, we'll, we'll work with anyone. But people understandably were skeptical of whether he would keep this commitment, because his government was committed to an, to deregulating business, and they didn't think it'd be, too readily, too willing to a pass a law that would add any obligations or requirements on business.

So we tried to organize, tried to get meetings with the cabinet minister responsible for this area or with the premier, nobody would meet us so new strategy kicks in in early 1996, we decided to go to Queens Park to bring people with disabilites with us. And to get an opposition member of the legislature to introduce a resolution to be voted on in the legislature.

Now, resolutions in the legislature are not legally binding, nobody has to do anything, but it became a great focus for activity. This is yet another illustration of our early strategy that's become our "always" strategy of Focus people on a narrow range of activities within our community so that they can all try to work together rather than getting sidetracked and divided into a million different things that all peter out.

So, what do you put in this resolution? Well, one idea was why don't we put in a condemnation of the government whereas Mike Harris promised he would pass a disabilities act, whereas he promised he would work with us And whereas he's refused to meet us and whereas they haven't done anything, therefore we condemn the government.

Well you put in a resolution like that, the government's gonna defeat it. So what's the point? So one suggestion that was given to us from within our group was, why don't you pass a reso, write, draft a resolution, that the Mike Harris Government itself can't vote against? And that's what we did.

The resolution in effect said, whereas the government, I'm paraphrasing, Mike Harris' government promised a, a Disabilities Act, therefore this House resolves that the government should pass a Disabilities Act and should work with the disability community to develop it. So the government was put in a bit of a pickle.

If they vote against it what they're really doing is saying, yes, we should break our own promise. But this was a Premier who said he would keep all his promises or resign. The strategy worked, because we got to Queens Park and folks with disabilities came to knock on doors and try to get this resolution passed.

The opposition, obviously, the liberals and new democrats, obviously voted for it. The PCs spoke against it, but voted for it, and it passed unanimously. After that, the cabinet minister responsible had to meet us. The, she couldn't not. The House had just unanimously resolved they should work with us on this.

This. But there was no real action, so what did we do? What was our next priority after this resolution passed? Well we decided we would work on one thing. And we decided counter intuitively we would not work on another thing that you probably think we should work on.

What we decided not to work on is what we want In the details of a disabilities act. Why shouldn't we work on that early on? Because we didn't have a government at the table that was ready to roll up its sleeves and really talk policy. So, we figured for us to spend our time debating policy over, how should you define disability and which enforcement procedure should you use, and, and what should be in The Act and so on.

It'll eat, gobble up our time, probably divide people within the community, and meanwhile we'll be no further ahead. We decided no, we're gonna set that one aside until there's time, we reach a time when the government was ready to really talk to us about the contents of a disabilities act.

So instead of the thing we decide not to work on, the thing we did decide to work on was organizing people with disabilities. When we started out, we were just Toronto based. So we decided to go community to community. It was all volunteer efforts or voluntary agencies supporting it and to organize people.

How did we do it? Put simply here's how it worked, you go to a community, you find out who are the well respected, major individuals with folks with disabilities or organizations with good roots there. Ask them if they'll pull an event together, you don't ask them if they're gonna head up some new committee or whatever no, everybody will say, No, I'm too busy.

So Look, all I want you to do is Can you pull an event together? We'll come in and we'll give the speeches and so on. And variably, somebody is prepared to do it, and they did. And then, when you get to the event, the event really took part, took had three parts to it.

We did this in about 20 or more communities around the country, around the province. And they are great fun. The first thing you do is have a, a welcome speech explaining the history, what we're here for and so on. Why we need a disabilities act, what the government promised, what the, why they're not talking to us, and so on.

And that usually got people pretty motivated. But then, the core of the meeting was the second part. We played a game called, 'What's My Barrier', wasn't really a game. We had everybody sit at tables, around tables. We had everybody go around and talk, go around the table and talk about barriers.

What barriers do you face, or what barriers do people with disabilities you know face? Let's, and we had people keep a list, and we compiled this huge inventory of barriers. And, got ideas on what could be done about it. What should be done to fix them. By doing this, we got people thinking in terms of barriers.

And this was a hugely important strategy for us. See, up until the ODA movement came along and the Disability Act movement came along, people usually talked in terms within the disability community, in terms of discrimination. And these barriers we face, whether it steps to get into a bus, or a lack of sign language interpretation at a hospital, or no braille on your elevator buttons, those are a of the human rights code.

They are discriminatory in legal terms. However, the term discrimination tends to alienate some people. Or at, you know, get people get their backs up and so on. So we decided, why don't we just talk about barriers. Cause like, who's in favor of barriers? Nobody likes them. Businesses think.

If you go to a business and you got barriers to customers spending money, oh no, I don't want those. Let's get rid of them. I want customers spending money on me. In my store, and so on. So the game, the activity, what's my barrier, got people thinking in terms of barriers as touching their lives.

The other reason it worked really well is because in the past, folks with disabilities had tended, not always, but quite often, to focus on their own disability. So you'd have deaf folks advocating for more sign language, or blind people advocating for more Braille, or whatever it may be.

And governments love that, cuz then they can say, well, we'd love to give you more sign language, but those blind people have demanded more Braille. And they play you off against each other. But by defining our strategy in terms of barriers, by having people sitting around the table talking about what, what's my barrier, what do I face, we got people thinking that what they were all facing was the same thing, barriers.

Whether it's lack of sign language interpretation in a hospital, or steps to get into a bus Or whatever it may be, they're all barriers. It became the common language that united us. And it's what prevented the government from dividing us. And as our movement grew, what we found was that we were talking about each other's barriers.

So you might have a deaf person before a standing committee at Queens Park talking about why it's wrong to have steps to get into a bus. Or a blind person who can handle spoken language just fine, talking about the need for sign language. It was a form of cross-disability unity or harmony.

To talk in terms of barriers. The third thing we did at these events, after you got the people interested in the topic, you talk about what's my barrier? You get up at the end, and I or whoever's leading it, we would get up and say, Okay. Would you like to join, I propose that we form a, a, a, regional group for the with disabilities act in your community.

All in favor Is always unanimous. And then we'd say, anybody wanna help us organize? We're not gonna have elections. We're not gonna have big, formal structured bureaucracy. Anybody interested in helping organize, sign up. And people signed up. And then to finish the process, we always wanted the AODA committee, wanted to have a couple of people that they could use as their point people in each community.

Now if you give them a fancy title, president, chairperson, leader, everybody's gonna compete for it. So we decided to come up with the un-title, we called them regional contact, sounds like something on top of a battery. And we had absolutely no political strife in any community Why is he the regional contact?

Why am I not the regional contact? It's sometimes, you know, two people, sometimes somebody else would come along, say, miffed, I wanna be one! Why isn't there, okay, fine, we'll have three.
>> [LAUGH]
>> Who cares? Three of you? That means more people to handle the work. And it worked!

And we left each community to kind of do their own grass roots organizing. And we would liaise with these regional contacts, and so on. And we went community after community. And the movement just grew. It was really exciting to see. The next. Okay, so that's, that's 1990 6, 1997.

Let me now race through the next years. Because everything I've just said is the groundwork. The problem of course at this 19, as 1997 rolls around is, how do you reach out to people, and how do you communicate with people, especially if you don't have any, any budget?

You've got all these people who, what they have in common is, they agree with our 11 principles. They've formed these regional groups. You need to be able to communicate with them. Well, thankfully what was now starting to blossom was email and the internet. And starting, really in '98, we started harnessing that power dramatically and have been using it to this day as our way to reach out.

Footnote, or pause for a moment, shameless promotion right now. If you don't get our email updates and would like to, we'd like to sign you up. Jeff, if you could, Jeffery if you could pass around a list. We're passing around a list, just print, don't write, print your email address.

If somebody's watching this on YouTube, you want to get our updates, updates, just send an email request to aodafeedback@gmail.com aodafeedback@gmail.com. Passing around the list is how we've compiled more and more and more supporters, what I couldn't say back then But I can say to you right now, before this commercial break is over, that you can also follow us on Twitter.

Alas, there was no Twitter back then. @DavidLepofsky, D-A-V-I-D L-E-P-O-F-S-K-Y. Or @AODAalliance. That's our new coalition. Same tweets from both, I encourage you to follow us. I don't hear any smart phones coming out.
>> [LAUGH]
>> I encourage you to follow us, and to retweet our tweets. If you're on Facebook, we have a fan page.

Please like and retweet, and share, pardon me, and share our, our page. It's called Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance. And our tweets go out not only on Twitter but on our Facebook page. If only we had that 20 years ago. End of commercial. Back to our regularly scheduled program.

So, it's 1997, 1998 we started harnessing the power of the internet. We created a website to start posting information and started sending out Ontarian's With Disabilities Act committee updates to start spreading the news. That activity, which was brand new then, Has become a bedrock for our activity today.

And I will tell you, happily, that the website of the Ontarians with Disabilities Act committee, even though that coalition wound up in 2005 when the legislation was passed, we've preserved the website online. As a legacy of all our work. So if you go to ODAcommittee.net, you can read all our updates, starting back in 1998.

So what's next? 1997 rolls around. You've been doing the community organizing. You got this resolution passed in 1996 what's the next phase? Well in the summer of 1997 we started getting a glimmer of indication from the Ontario government that they might be ready to talk to us about the contents of the disabilities act.

Just a glimmer. They said they might hold it. They, they started talking about holding a public consultation and so on. That triggered for us our next priority over the next year. We needed at that point to say, okay. Time for us to take off the em, to end the embargo on talking policy.

We've got to start developing concrete proposals and so we launched a year long strategy. I don't have time in this lecture to get into the contents of the policy but let me tell you how we reached out. We continue holding these public forums and engaging in this what's my barrier activity.

And we compiled all those barriers into a major list. We then circulated a goals paper where we asked people what their goals were for a disabilities act and started gathering ideas from people. And eventually, this culminated in our preparing a blueprint for the disabilities act. Which we made public in 1998.

It explained in general terms what we wanted based on our 11 principles. It made the case for it. And attached to it was an appendix Living in a Province Full of Barriers, which actually summarized or synthesized All the barriers we'd been hearing about at these public forums. We did this so that our community could look to this blueprint and see that it reflected the very input we'd been receiving over the past three years.

Moreover, while we had an, had not been having a major policy discussion within the community before this. We did float ideas and our blueprint reflected those ideas as they developed over time. Some of the input we got came from cross disability community forums. Some were sent in by individual organizations.

Pardon me and some, one fabulous initiative was undertaken by Gary Makowsky now no longer in the legislature, working for the Canadian Hearing Society. And Chris Konopik who was then President of the Ontario Association of the Deaf. They held a bunch of, a series of public forums around the province.

For the deaf community and sent in very specific proposals from their community's perspective, which were very helpful as we developed our blueprint. So we made our blueprint public in the spring of 1998 so that the government had some idea of where we were coming from, and as we put it, since the government wouldn't give us ideas of what they thought should be done, We thought we'd put out a, our blueprint as a discussion paper ahead of them.

So, that was an enormous amount of effort by a lot of people to pull that together. And it's still up on the ODA committee website, you can read it. Along comes the summer Of 1998, and that starts the next phase in our activity. And, as with many other phases in our activity, external events define them for us.

In the Summer of 1998, the Ontario government, 3 years after taking office under Mike Harris, Finally decided to announce a public consultation on a disabilities act. They didn't do so by a news conference, they did so by posting a discussion paper on the internet to low profile it as much as possible.

We were ready. We immediately leapt on their announcement. And went public with it and rallied to organized people who dispel this take part. We had a couple of major concerns about their consultation. Their discussion paper actually rather than being a basis for discussion tried to foreclose discussion on a number of important, important points.

It decided that any provisions in the act regarding employment would be voluntary, not mandatory. There'd be no new enforcement agency. So went public, criticizing that. You don't have a consultation to find out what should be put in a law by first announcing what you refuse to put in the law.

The second problem with their consultation was that it was, it was closed and it was invitation only. They weren't going to hold public meetings. They were going to have private consultations with the minister or other government officials would invite who they wanted to hear from into a room behind closed doors.

We thought that wasn't good enough. So what did we do? We swung into action again. We said that if the government wouldn't hold public hearings, we would. So on August 4th of 1998, we used two, two or three committee rooms at the legislature to invite people with disabilities to come in and say what they think should be in a disabilities act.

And we invited all three political parties to send members of the legislature to sit in and participate in these hearings. In other words, we called the hearings. And we held them in the very rooms at Queens Park where the government usually holds hearings. Well, the opposition NDP and liberals were prepared to send MPPs obviously be there, obviously because they're in the opposition.

They agreed with us, and they also, had, it had tactical advantage for them. But even, I think, one conservative MPP came, at least one, and if you were at Queens Park that night, you would have seen what looked and sounded and tasted like public legislative hearings. Only legislature didn't call them, the government didn't call them, we did.

We also used every avenue we could to encourage people to pitch their position to the government and to propose what was, to support our blueprint that we had release earlier that year. So what does the government do? Or what, what do we do when that consultation is all over?

We knew the government was gonna come forward with a Bill. We were worried it wasn't gonna be very good. And so we decided to preempt it and to get ahead of the game, by coming forward with another Legislative resolution. The person who introduced this one was a liberal back bencher opposition member from Windsor named Dwight Duncan.

He was later to become Ontario's finance minister and a strong supporter of the Disabilities Act movement. He came to us offering to do something. We asked for a resolution. He said what should be in it, we said our eleven principles. We'd already gotten a resolution passed in 1996 saying hey government, will you pass the dis, a disabilities act.

Now we were going further. We were saying hey government would you pass a disabilities act Did, it fulfills these principles. Then he went to work again, lobbying one member of the legislature at a time, and encouraging individuals to do the same across the province. October 29, 1998 was a decisive day in our In our campaign for accessibility.

Because on October 29th, 1998, Dwight Duncan formally introduced his resolution. The liberals and NDP supported it. People with disabilities were on the watch the, the debate and to go door to door to campaign even in the building to get NDPs to show up and vote. The, again, the conservatives spoke against it but unanimously voted for it.

That resolution passed unanimously. To this day, how many years later over fifteen years later, to this day That resolution is treated as the yardstick for measuring success or progress under disability legislation in Ontario. It was an amazingly exciting day. But we learned another very important lesson that day.

And it's a surprising one, perhaps, for some of you. Right after that resolution passed we went to the Queens Park Media Studio to hold a news conference. And speaking at that news conference, I had the privilege of speaking as chair of the Ontarians with Disabilities Act Committee. But sitting beside me was a gentleman named Dalton McGuinty.

The newly elected leader of the liberal party. And he said that if he is elected premier, his government will pass a law that will fulfill this resolution. We got it on videotape. It was a huge step forward for us, but what was amazing was not one single news outlet covered any of it, none.

There was no coverage of the resolution. There was no coverage of the debate. There was no coverage of the vote, and there was no coverage of Pre, Dalton McGinty's Than opposition leader Dolt McGinty's promise to us. And yet this was the most decisive moment, in years of advocacy.

What was the lesson we learned? We learned that sometimes, the media just missed the most important stories. And just don't get upset about it. Carry on. It's very easy to get all riled up, agitated, frustrated and hopeless when a major breakthrough happens or a major issue comes forward and you don't get media coverage.

But we learned then And I've learned over and over again, that there are times we get tons of media coverage when we least expect it, and there are times when we think we should get tons of it, and we get none. Just carry on. That, that has carried us, again, for the past 15 years.

Because as I said, you look back on one of the most important dates, and we got no coverage at all. And yet that victory that day still continues to serve us very well. Well, what did the government do about it? Government asked voted for the resolution. But, about three weeks later, on November 23rd 1998.

The government brought forward its first disabilities act that it proposed, the Ontarians with Disabilities Act 1998. It was a complete. Disgrace. It was only three pages long, including the preamble. It did not require a single barrier to be removed anywhere, ever. It was a joke. The opposition, and by the way, we didn't get any heads up it was coming.

The opposition in DP and liberals Blasted the government over it. The media slammed it. The newspapers ran editorials against it. We got a ton of attention on it. If you go to our, the ODA Committee website from back then, you'll see, there's just a ton of media attention at this, as being a slap in the face to people with disabilities.

17 days after it was introduced, as a result of our opposition to this bill, the government let it simply die in the order paper. So let me turn to 1999. You're gonna wonder how in the next ten minutes I'm gonna get you from 1999 to 2005. But I'm gonna do it.

1999 rolls around. We just continue doing our city by city lobbying and organizing. The government still came forward with no goals, so in, in November of 1999, a year after the date. When the government introduced its first bill we got the opposition to introduce a third resolution calling for the disabilities act to be passed within two years.

Yet again something the government couldn't say no to. And that, leg, that resolution passed unanimously. Earlier that year, 1999, the I'm a little out of sequence, there was a provincial election. We went into, this was our second provincial election in raising our issues. The first, 1995, we were tiny.

This time we were much more organized. And we went out raising disability issues. Non-partisan, we don't tell people who to vote for, or who to vote against, but we simply talk about the records of the parties and the commitment of the parties. Both opposition parties promised the Disabilities Act in the 1999 election that complies with our, our, our 11 principles.

The Conservatives promised nothing. And the Conservatives won another majority. One of the things we learned in that election, was a lesson that's carried us forward dramatically as well. Or a significant lesson that we has informed our work later on. Believe it or not, one of the hardest times to raise a provincial political issue, is during a provincial election.

You would think it should be the easiest time, but it isn't, because the media and the parties are all focused on the party leaders and their platforms and who's ahead and who's behind. You come along with an issue that they're not raising it's very hard to get attention.

We did our best. But we learn not to be frustrated if you don't get a ton of attention and a ton of coverage. We decided to carry on our activities door to door at our grass roots. The government got reelected and as I said a couple of minutes ago.

Sorry I was a little out of sequence. November 1999 we got the opportunity to introduce and unanimously got passed the resolution said. Disability's Act to be passed within two years. We then started to count down. 2000 rolls around, government shows no sign of doing anything. So, at our suggestion, the Opposition Liberals, again we'll work with any party, but the liberals took up this idea Decided to hold their own shadow public hearings and they traveled to I think 15 cities around the province holding public forums themselves.

Reiterating our and expanding upon our message. This kept the momentum going. The fall of 2000 the government the opposition liberals leaked to the media. They didn't get this from us. They leaked to the media that the government planned another Disabilities Act that sounded like it was only going to be slightly better than the three page disgrace that was offered to us in 1998.

The media gave that front page coverage. We went into action, saying don't give us another weak bill. And the government backed down. 2001 rolls around and we get our, one, two, three, fourth cabinet minister on this file for the Mike Harris government, a gentleman named Cam Jackson. And Cam Jackson was the first minister who seemed to be ready to take this file seriously.

He went out and talked to folks with disabilities in 2001 in various communities. And he put together a bill that he introduced on the 5th of November, 2001. That bill was to be passed by the end of the year and was called the Ontarians with Disabilities Act 2001.

It's still the law of the province of Ontario. That law was inadequate. it didn't meet, even remotely meet all our needs. But it was to play an important role. Let me tell you first what we did that fall to mount our campaign, and what the law contained. What we did, we realized, once we realized we had a bill that was gonna be really coming, and that we were gonna have to be face to face with it in the legislature, going through the three votes, they're called three readings in the legislature, and possibly public hearings.

The first thing we realized Is that we needed to educate our community on how a bill gets through the legislature. Most people don't know this. So we released a short guide, step by step, to explain what's first reading, what's second reading, what's a private members bill. What are amendments, what are hearings, what's clause by clause debate, and so on.

And the second thing we did is, before the bill was introduced, is we released check list. Here's what to look for in the bill. If it meets these requirements, it's good. If it doesn't, it's not. So, the two tools we gave our community. And now we're using e-mail and the internet to spread the word cuz it's 2001 And reaching a lot of people.

Would equip them to understand, both, how the process works and what to look for. November 5th, the government introduces a bill, and that bill was run through the legislature in a mere sixweeks. First reading, second reasing, reading. Public hearings, third reading, unbelievably fast. We had to be ready.

It was an amazingly trying time. What we did was we analyzed the bill, released our concern about it, which were many, proposed amendments, and released a brief So that our community could learn what our concerns were and could go and raise them if they agreed with them before the standing committee of the legislature.

So, what did the bills say and what were our concerns. The bills said that any organization in the public sector, meaning the provincial government, municipalities, colleges, universities. School boards, public transit, hospitals. Every year they would have to make an accessibility plan and make it public. And it also said that any city with 10,000 people or more have to have a disability accessibility advisory comity.

So, what's our problem with it? Well, for one thing, this bill would not require a single barrier to be removed ever. Nothing, ever. And, the second problem was, that it only applied to the public sector, not the private sector. It didn't address barriers in stores, Or in a doctor's office or a lawyer's office.

All sorts of important things, places we might want to go. But which are not in a public sector. It did provide for accessibility plans made by an organization like this university, but it didn't require them to be any good. They can have an accessibility plan that was three sentences long.

We have a curb out front, we'll put in a piece of wood on it. Done. You obey the law. Moreover, the law didn't pro, require an organization that has an accessibility plan, to actually fulfill what they put in their accessibility plan. Ever. It was great that it provided for each municipality with 10,000 people or more to have a disability-accessibility advisory committee but it didn't require the municipality to ever listen to a word they say.

Or if they disagree with them, or their advice, to ever give them reasons For not following their recommendations. So, he said, this is just way too weak. So we put forward proposals to make accessibility plans stronger. To make them mandatory. To make them enforceable and to extend this beyond the public sector.

To provide for enforcement. And so on. The bill had other requirements, it allowed the government to create, create accessibility standards, to detail what organizations need to do, but it didn't require the government ever to make an accessibility standard under that power. So what happened? It was fabulous experience at one way and a frustrating one, in another way.

The fabulous part was, the individuals with disabilities, or disability organizations from around this province came forward and made presentations at these public hearings. The presentations were fabulous. They're up on the ODA Committe website and you can read them. They're great. They read, studied our proposals, borrowed some of them, rejected others, came up with their own, and offered rich, diverse, and good ideas.

That's the good news. The frustrating news is that the government didn't listen to virtually a word we said. And ultimately, they made a few tinkering amendments. And then they rammed the bill through. Last law that was passed under Mike Harris's leadership, before he stepped down as premier, was the Ontarians with Disabilities Act, 2001.

Let me take you from 2001 to 2005. In literally three minutes. From 2001 to 2003 we pressed the government to effectively implement their weak bill. And they did very little. 2003 there was a new provincial election. We urged all the parties to commit To a stronger disabilities act that complied with our 11 principles.

The NDP agreed, the liberals agreed, the conservatives did not. And in October of 2003, Dalton McGuinty was elected Ontario's liberal Premier. From 2003 to 2005, We didn't have to engage in the kind of grass-roots advocacy that I've been talking about for the past hour to work with the liberals.

Because when they took power, they made it clear from the beginning that they meant business. And they assigned a new minister new, a minister to handle the family Marie Butriani. Who sat down and got active very quickly on this issue. She held public consultations around the province, with people with disabilities, with business and others.

She came forward with a bill within a year, 2004, while not everything we wanted, was a substantial improvement. She held meetings with the community and her staff did, to hear what their concerns were about the bill. They had televised public hearings around the Province on the bill. We came forward with proposals for how to strengthened it.

While not all of our proposals were taken by far, a number were, and the bill was passed in 2005 May 10th of 2005. In a nutshell, the bill was as substantial improvement over the Ontarians with Disabilities Act 2001. It applied to the public and private sectors, it requires Ontario to become fully accessible by 2025.

It requires the government to create and act, and enforce accessibility standards. Indeed, all the accessibility standards needed to get to the goal of full accessibility, by 2025, and it has a series of powers for enforcement. The day it passed Two miracles happened. On the floor of the legislature, all three parties voted for it and all three applauded it with a standing ovation.

That does not happen in Queen's Park very often. And second, right after it passed, in the Queen's Park media studio, speaking in support of the bill at a press conference For the government, Dr. Butriani, no surprise. For the disability perspective, me for the Disabilities Act Committee and a representative of the Retail Council of Canada, To have Liberal, Conservative and NDP, disability community and business voices united at the same time and place.

Was quite an accomplishment and was something that those of us a decade earlier, the 20 of us in that room that I talked about earlier, would not have foreseen. Let me conclude by telling you about a fortune cookie. Wanna summarize everything I've said, I've told you about Leading up to the enactment of this legislation with a fortune cookie.

The day, May 10, the day the law was going to pass. And we knew it was going to pass that day. I went to lunch with a friend and we went to a Chinese restaurant. They brought us fortune cookies at the end. I regret the fortune was not in Braille.

I would need a fortune cake, not a fortune cookie, to fit a Braille fortune in it. But I opened the cookie, ate it quickly, and passed the fortune over to a friend of mine. The words on that fortune summarized the ten years' advocacy by the Disability Committee that I've had the privilege of serving.

Those ten years of work summarized in the words on that fortune, which were simply this. Every great accomplishment is, at first, impossible. What we set out to do back in November of 1994 was by any measure impossible. But with the efforts of individuals from around the province, liberals, conservatives, NDP, young and old, men and women, every kind of disability or no disability.

We were able to accomplish the passage of this legislation. Now, it's for later lectures for me to talk about that I'll be doing in Osgood, Holland, which you're invited. Talk about what's happened since 2005. Why we're disappointed that we aren't further ahead, and what we're trying to do to make it better.

To learn more about our activities, you can visit the website of the the, Ontarians with Disabilities Act Committee would up, in the Summer of 2005, cuz it existed to get these laws passed. A new coalition took over its function, called the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act. The law that was passed in 2005.

Liberals call it the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities, Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act or AODA. The new coalition that took over became known as the AODA Alliance. To learn more about it, you can email at AODAfeedback@gmail.com, or visit www.AODAalliance.org. But I, I conclude with the words of that fortune cookie, every great accomplishment is, at first, impossible.

Thank you very much.