2005 to 2014, progress in Ontario towards full accessibility for people with disabilities. David Lepofsky, Chair, Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance. Delivered at the Osgoode Hall Law School, February 3rd, 2014, as a Roy McMurtry clinical fellow.
>> Good afternoon everyone. In a series of lectures I'm giving during my month here at Osgoode Hall Law School, I'm, I'm trying to give the whole history, background, strategies, and results of a grass roots campaign that's gone on for many years in Ontario to tackle the barriers many people with disabilities face, and to use the law to solve those barriers, to achieve our goal of a barrier-free society.

What I'd like to do today is talk about our results. What have we accomplished. In 2005, the Ontario, Legislature unanimously passed and applauded the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, or AODA. I had the privilege of leading the decade-long nonpartisan fight to win us that legislation. It's now been nine years since it's passed.

What did it guarantee, and how are we doing. What have we accomplished. This is about results. So, before I jump into the results, I gotta tell you a bit about the problems. This is covered elsewhere in some of the lectures in this series, but I'll do it briefly.

We've got at least, 1.7 or 1.8 million people with a physical, or mental, or sensory disability in Ontario right now. That number is growing as the population ages. When those folks try to get a job, or an education, or use transit services, or go buy goods or services, from stores, they face barriers everyday of their lives.

Some of them are physical, the building may be physically inaccessible. Some of them may be technological, their website might be inaccessible to the adaptive technology that a blind person like me uses to read what's on a computer screen. Some of them may be bureaucratic, some may be attitudinal.

They're all illegal since 2000, pardon me, since 1982, they have violated the Ontario Human Rights Code which guarantees, equality for people with disabilities without discrimination in areas like employment, housing, goods, and services. Since two thou, since 1985, in the case of public sector organizations, they violate the Canadian Charter Rights and Freedoms, it's section 15 guaranteed equality.

The problem with those laws that drew, drove many of us to fight for a disabilities act was not that they weren't, were, were poorly worded, or that they were badly interpreted by courts, but rather but to enforce those laws, you had to bring, human rights or, charter claims one barrier at a time.

Individuals had to be the cops, and they could run up against huge battles, if they took on that, by, by, organizations that might be well funded, well oiled, and well lawyered. And, most people with disabilities don't have the time, the resources, and the opportunity to wage those kind of battles, and even if they all did we'd still, we've faced to many barriers to, to, to tear down that way.

So, our solution was a new law. So, what did we win in 2005. They AODA is an important and ground breaking law in Ontario, and the legislature, the governing liberals under then Dalton McGuinty the opposition parties which voted, all voted for it have much to be proud of for their unanimous support.

The first thing it does is it requires Ontario to become fully accessible by 2025. It gave 20 years. Next, it requires the Ontario government to lead us there, not to pay for it, but to lead us there, and it does so by two major roles. The government is required to develop and enact a series of accessibility standards.

An accessibility standard is a regulation, or a law, that speaks to a particular sector of the economy, or a particular area of human activity, and it says, hey folks, you in that sector, you gotta tear down these barriers, you gotta prevent these barriers, and here what, here's what you gotta do, and here's when you gotta do it by.

So they provide clear, they're supposed to provide clear direction and the AODA doesn't just let the government make these standards it requires the government to do so, and to enact enough of them to ensure that we get to the goal of full accessibility. The second thing that the AODA requires is that the government effectively enforce these standards, and it gives the government enforcement powers.

Now, in other lectures in this series, I talk about the fight to get this legislation, the design of the legislation, how accessibility standards are actually made. Today, I'm just jumping to results, but as I address this, results, results, I have to a kind of a concept or a picture in your mind to bear in mind.

If, if you were the victim of an individual act of discrimination, I was when the Toronto Transit Commission refused to consistently announce all subway or bus stops for the benefit of blind people like me, you had bring an individual case, and if the case went to full litigation, there's the opportunity to sit down with the organization on the other side and, and negotiate a resolution.

Now, in those two cases, we weren't able to settle them, I had to go to a full hearing. But many, if not most, human rights claims get settled. Think of the standards development process, the development of an accessibility standard, just like creating one huge negotiating table to settle a bunch of human rights complaints.

So, if you do a transportation standard, it provides an opportunity for the disability community's representatives on one side of the table, and the transportation sector on the other side of the table to work out what are the barriers, what are the problems, what kind of fixes can we do, make recommendations to government, and the Government can decide what to do.

And the advantage of this format is that if they come up with good measures, that's great, but if the measures they come up with are too weak and don't meet the stringent of requirements of accessibility in the Human Rights Code and Charter of Rights, it always remains open to an individual to bring a human rights, or charter case, to enforce their rights, to say those standards under the AODA aren't good enough.

And that was part of our design. We didn't want the government in enacting an accessibility standard to be able to reduce our rights, and this disability act specifically says, if another law provides more accessibility, that's the law that prevails. So how'd we do. The conclusion I'm going to take you to is that we've made, I believe, progress since 2005 that we would not have made without the Disabilities Act.

So, this has been a fruitful and a worthwhile venture. But, we are certainly way behind schedule in achieving full accessibility by 2025. We are not where we should be, nine years into this. And, unless something changes dramatically, we will not reach full accessibility by 2025, or ever. The lecture I'm gonna give tomorrow at York Lanes will go, will review strategies that we are undertaking now to try to kick-start this process to get gov, the government of Ontario back on schedule, where it should be.

But we are so, on the one hand, the good news is, this has been worth pressing because we've made, we're creating more activity to remove and prevent barriers against people with disabilities than, than we would have if we'd just left it to individuals to litigate them, and didn't have the AODA.

But, the AODA has not lived up to its promise, anywhere near it. So, to the results. The first thing I need to focus on is where the government started. In 2005, the government decided that it would make five accessibility standards first. We thought the choices were good. One was in the area of customer service, second was in the area of transportation, third in the area of employment, fourth in the area of information communication, and fifth in the area of the built environment.

Let me tell you what we've gained so far. They were all good choices. They don't cover the whole waterfront, we need more standards now, but at least as the first five to tackle, they were a good choice. First, the Customer Service Accessibility Standard. It was the first to be enacted, it was passed in 2007, it is limited in scope.

The idea of an accessibility standard was that it would list barriers you've gotta remove or prevent, and tell you when you've gotta do it by. For the most part, this standard, only eight pages long, didn't. It tells organizations, to provide goods or services to the public that they must develop an accessibility policy, that they've got to train their employees on it, that they've got to have a customer feedback system for people to file complaints if things aren't going well.

Now, those are useful things to do, but we wanted a standard that actually told those who provide goods and services, not just have a policy, but here are the barriers you should be fixing, or preventing. So, it served as an icebreaker, that's good. Got organizations talking about accessibility, that's good.

If they deliver goods or services. But on the other, and it did actually motivate some organizations to actually do what they're told. And it did lead some organizations to go even beyond what the specific standard requires. That's all good, but the three major flaws with it, the first I've already identified is that it did not actually specify the range of barriers it should have so that organizations would know exactly what they've gotta do.

The whole idea of standards is so that each organization doesn't have to reinvent the wheel, and so that we folk, folks with disabilities know what we are entitled to get. The second flaw, oh, is that the standard, and this applies with all of the standards, with only a couple exceptions in them, had crazy long timelines.

They gave the public sector, government, school boards, and cities and so on, universities, til 2010, just to come up with a policy that they could have devised within a few weeks, trained their staff in in a few weeks, and, setup a feedback mech, mechanism. They got three years.

Even more crazy, they gave the private sector up til 20, the end of 2012, which is way too long, way too close the end of the 20 year, hor, event horizon for this legislation. The final problem with the Customer Service Standard is it actually, and we would say wrongly and impermissibly, purported to authorize the creation of a barrier.

It provides that an organization that provides goods or services can decide that you with a disability are essentially a danger to yourself or others if you come into their, their, place of business alone, and to require you to bring a support person, and to be also free to charge a second fee, or admission fee if there is one, for that support person.

We say that shouldn't have been there in the first place, that the accessibility standards are there to get rid of barriers, not authorize or create them. Nevertheless, it was an icebreaker, it was the first, the start. What about the other areas. Well three of the areas I've listed, that they dealt with, transportation, employment, and information communications, were all regulated in June of 2011.

A single regulation was passed, it's called The Integrated Accessibility Standard Regulation to address all three of those areas. Let me tell you what we've gained. I'm summarizing, there's a lot more detail in them, more than I can cover in the time of this, of this lecture. First, before it delves into the specifics of either of any of those three important areas of activity, it's set some important general requirements.

Any organization that provides transportation, or has employees, or that, could need or provide information communication, or use those, they've gotta, number one, create an accessibility policy to deal both with the requirements of the Act, of this regulation, and generally, to get to full accessibility. Second, they've gotta develop, in the case particularly of large organizations, an accessibility plan.

And it's gotta have detail on how they're gonna implement their policy. It's also, gotta be implemented. It's not enough to just have a plan, they've got to implement their plan. And finally, after a certain amount of time, those plans are multi-year plans, like five year plans, but every year after they establish that plan, for large organizations, they've got to, excuse me, develop and make available on, to the public, an annual status report.

How are they doing. Now, these three measures together force an organization in effect, to look at their accessibility problems or issues within their organizations. And that's really important because when we present bar, or we identify barriers, the person with a disability goes to a, agovernment office, or a private office, or whatever, and says, hey, I, I can't work here, or I can't benefit from, from the services you provide, I'm facing a barrier, the common answer we got, we get is, oh, we never thought of that.

And, requiring organizations to have a policy, have a plan, do status reports and implement their plan, in an sense says, think about it. And it targets one of the inherent problems that leads to the barriers we face. So, all of that's good. There's some more general requirements organizations within certain, government and, and, and, particularly have to make sure that when they use public money to buy goods and services, that they take into account accessibility so they buy things that, we can use.

When they set up electronic kiosks for us to, to, access services, they should be, include accessibility features, too. These are all steps forward. These, like other requirements in the standard, have exceptions that we think are too broad, but they, that concern is tempered by the fact that the Human Rights Code still prevails.

And an organization, we always caution, that thinks that they can rely on the, broad exceptions in these regulations is taking a huge risk because they may not, they may think that they're complying with the AODA standard, but they're not necessarily complying with the requirements of the Human Rights Code.

Any organization that's going to try and do work in these, this area of accessibility is going to wanna do what they need to do to make sure they're on the right side of the law. And to the extent these standards fall short of the Human Rights Code, and believe me, they do, we think they're a missed opportunity.

Helpful, but a missed opportunity, and they generate the risk that an organization may say, hey, wait a minute, I thought I complied with that standard, I did all I gotta do, what do you mean I now face a human rights complaint. And an organization that is that frustrated is entitled to be that frustrated.

We'd like to see the standards strengthened, or at least an organization be warned of how far they've gotta go to comply with the Human Rights Code, not just these standards. Anyway, let me now go past these general provisions to tackle the three specific areas that the Integrated stan, Accessibility Standard of, of 20, 2011, touches.

First it regulates transportation. This is huge for people with disabilities. I gave an entire lecture on this subject, which will be available on video as part of this lecture series, so I'm only going to now touch on a couple of high points. The transportation provisions help by delineating, requirements for accessible public transit vehicles, and requirements for parallel transit, in Toronto it's called Wheel Trans, for those who can't ride the conventional system.

But, it's got a number of major, major flaws. First, this part of the standard, like most, if not all of the standards the government passed, really owns, only aims at preventing new barriers. Now, preventing new barriers is important, making sure that public transit authorities only buy accessible vehicles to be used by the public, that's important and that's good.

But what about all the inaccessible vehicles that they're gonna have on the road for the next 20 years till they wear out. The standard purports to say that they don't need to be retrofitted, generally with a couple of very narrow exceptions. Well, if the retrofit could be done at reasonable cost, but could provide real accessibility, that's wrong.

Maybe not for the vehicle that's gonna go out of service next week, but the one that was bought 20 minutes before the standard went into effect, we shouldn't have to wait the 20 years or whatever that that vehicle wears out. Moreover, the standard actually authorized organizations, transit authorities, to keep buying inaccessible vehicles all, contracting for them all the way up to July of 2011 even though the transit sector knew these standards were coming, were at the table when they were being negotiated, had a lot of input into what they say.

That's just wrong. It also violates, in our views, Supreme Court of Canada case law about the not, duty not to create new barriers. Finally, or second, the transportation standard does not address accessibility in public transit stations, union stations, subway stations, and so on. And, there are a number of barriers there that are pretty important.

Accessible vehicles aren't very useful if you can't get on them, or if you get off them in a station, but you can't get out of the station. Finally, the standard, deals with a couple of areas that are important, like accessible taxis, accessible bus stops at the roadside, not by saying all of what needs to be done and by when, but simply by leaving it to cities to decide what needs to be done, and when, as they regulate trans, state taxis, or decide what to do with their bus stops.

The problem with that is it means we gotta have every city reinvent the wheel, make a lot of mistakes, and we've got to now lobby city by city rather than one provincial government. It defeats the purpose that the Disabilities Act was passed for in the first place. Let me turn to the area of information and communications.

This is a hugely important area, and it's probably the area where we've made some of our greatest strides. Think about it. When you go to work, or to school, or to buy goods or services, or engage in any kind of commerce, communication is at the core of it.

Reading what's on their website, reading materials that they make available for you to, to read if it's option, manuals, catalogs, reading materials at school. Talking to people, talking to the person over the counter about what they're selling, or about what you want to buy. Knowing what your professor is actually, or teacher is saying in school and so on.

For people with communication disabilities, or information disabilities, these are huge, the barriers to, accessible information and communication are, are enormous and are a huge impediment to full participation. I think it's to the government's credit that they did tackle information communications as part of the 2011 integrated regulation, accessibility regulation, and there are a number of good components in it.

These are subject to our general criticism that the timelines are way to long, and the exemptions are way too broad. But, I'll just summarize some of what's in there. First, they require organizations, that provide goods or services, to provide information supports. For a blind person that might mean, mean access to information and audio recorded, or, in braille, or, in large print if they're low vision.

Similar for people with dyslexia, they may need it, in an electronic version that their computer can read aloud. For people with hearing loss, there's alternative kinds of communication that work for them. Some use sign language, some use lip reading, some use captioning, there's a range of different needs.

The regulation doesn't detail exactly what you give and when to give it, but it does set up a framework for requesting these kinds of accommodations, and, and supports. And that, is a real step forward. Perhaps the most, specific step forward in this regulation, in the area of information and communication, relates to website accessibility.

Now, if you're sighted, you're used, and not dyslexic, you're used to just going on your computer, logging on a website and using it. Point and click and so on. If you've got a mobility disability, if you can't use your hands, you may have problems using a mouse, and, there is access technology to conquer all this.

But, for those of us with print disabilities, with visual reading disabilities, whether visual impairment, or dyslexia and other disabilities, there are ways to format a website that makes it easier for our computers, using our screen reading access technology, to access. And if they, if, if they use those design techniques in the architecture of their website, that actually enables us to fully, use them, and, in fact, opens through the internet, an entire world of information accessible without needing anyone's help, that was never available to me 35 years ago when I went to this law school.

The revolution in access to printed information for people with vision loss since I was a kid is breathtaking. I would compare it to the difference between taking a horse and buggy to go from Toronto to Florida, to taking a, airplane to go from Toronto to Florida. It is absolutely transformative.

However, if when a website is designed, the right architecture is not included, which is easy to include to ensure that our screen access technology can access it, we don't get the benefit of those websites, we don't get the benefit of that transformative change. Instead, we find that yet another accessibility door has been slammed in our face.

Now, what did the government, do here. By the way, the changes in a website, or the architectural features in a website, that make it more accessible to us, also make it easier to use for everybody, and especially those using smart phones. So, this isn't a question of what do we require them to do that, benefits us in, in, at the price of everyone else.

It actually benefits everyone the same way that when the TTC calls root stops for benefit of a blind person, like me, it also helps sighted folks. Same way a ramp, instead of steps, in front of a building helps people with a baby stroller, a shopping cart, a bag on wheels, or a wheelchair and a walker.

Well, what the government did is, they relied on and they accepted our position that they should require, over time, that websites conform with an international standard that's been set for web accessibility. The fancy letters are WCAG or World-Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, 2.0. These were developed some years ago.

They have three different layers, levels, single-A, double-A, triple-A. Triple-A is not meant as a regulatory, lever. We wanted double-A. The government has regulated, required itself to achieve double-A over timelines we say are too long, but at least it set them. And for other organizations they say single-A rising to double-A.

This is foolish because what they're really telling people is reengineer your practices once to meet an inadequate lower single A standard, and then later, go back and learn all over again to start meeting a more useful double-A standard. And, they set timelines for them that are so long that I think that by the time the last of them kicks in there'll be a WCAG 3.0, and this will all be moot.

It will be superseded. But, in any event, it is a step forward. I think any organization that's smart is gonna go to double-A right now ahead of the timelines. Why bother running the risk of being sued. It's happened in the states, Target Corporation was sued for inaccessible websites successfully, and it's happened in Canada.

A blind woman named Donna Jothand successfully sued the Canadian government for website inaccessibility. The federal government was, was given 18 months to fix their, websites. Now, the Government exempted some technical standards for, a number of years, I, I don't want to go into the details, I can answer questions on it, but all in all this is a significant step forward.

Finally, in the area of information communications, the standard does set requirements for educational institutions, like this one. It requires that when they get, provide books like you read, for courses, they should be trying to acquire them from suppliers who can also have ones that can be provided to students, with print disabilities in an accessible format.

Since books are now no longer written by pen, or on a typewriter, they're written on computer probably in a program like Microsoft Word, the, publisher at some point has the document in a format, like Word that we could readily read with the right access technology. If you have a iPhone, by the way, you can buy one app for $10, that I use everyday.

Upload any word document in it, tap, and your IPhone is reading it to you, or your iPad. I mean, this is, we're not talking about expensive access technology. But if the formats are in, are, are problematic formats, we can't read them. So, the idea of Universities having to aim to procure, materials for use in courses, that we can actually get access to quickly, would overcome barriers that I've faced when I was a student here, and as an undergrad, and in high school, and that, students with disabilities, print with disabilities continued to face over many years since then.

It also requires publishers, to sell books to institutions like this, to make product available with an accessible format option, and that's a significant breakthrough. And finally, it requires any educational organization like this to train their, the people who teach you, on how to teach in an accessible way.

That's a breakthrough. There are requirements about libraries procuring accessible product. There's a lot of accessible product that they can procure. We think the requirements and standards should've gone further. Let me turn to employment. Employment is, of course, fundamental, as is, are all the areas that these standards tackle.

What we wanted was a standard that would describe to the employer of today what to do to make sure that their workplace five years from now is a fully accessible one. Five years, you could say six years, whichever. The fact is that the workplace of five years from now has not been designed.

For a lot of organizations, they don't know what building they'll be in, and frankly, a lot of people don't work on site anyway. The technology, the software, the processes that they will use in five years, in many cases have not been acquired yet, they've not been purchased yet, they've not been contracted for yet, they've not even been designed yet.

So, if employers set about today on an aggressive strategy to make sure that the workplace of five years from now would be barrier-free for people with disabilities, they could accomplish a great deal by planning ahead, and at very marginal cost in most cases. The standard, for the most part, doesn't do that.

It does require all organizations, and their accessibility plans, to detail what they're going to do to implement the standard, and to remove and prevent barriers. And that, we believe, is general language that should require the kind of planning we're talking about. But the standard would have been way more effective if it then went into detail.

Each employer shouldn't have to go out and figure out themselves what they need to do to reach that goal five or six years from now. It would have been much better if the standard did it for them. Instead, what the standard does, and it's helpful, is it takes something the law already requires and tries to make it actually happen.

There are two ways to achieve accessibility in a, in a place of employment, or a school, or anywhere else. One is plan for an inclusive environment. Plan for a workplace that's barrier free. That'll get you a good chunk of the way. But, the other thing that will invariably happen is you'll have an employee or some employees with disabilities who, no matter what your, your arrangements are, they may need an individual accommodation.

And the human rights code provides a duty to accommodate employees with disabilities up to the point of undue hardship on the part of the employer. So, the standard doesn't touch that duty. It doesn't change that duty, nor should it, or would it, or could it. But what it does do, is it tries to get employers to actually live up to that duty.

It takes a bunch of practices which make, frankly, good sense, and I gather a number of large number of organizations already use, and it sets it as a requirement for all but smaller organizations. It requires throughout the employment life cycle, interviewing, recruitment, hiring, training, promotion, and, if you go off work on disability, return to work, and your evaluation.

It specifically says that, that the employer has to have a plan, that they work out with you the employee with the disability, on meeting your accommodation needs, and that you've got to make sure they know about the availability of these kind of supports. In a province where too many employees don't know what they're entitled to, and not enough employers know what they're obliged to do, this can cause a lot of success, I believe.

It will not completely solve the problem. To completely solve the problem, we need employers effectively planning for that barrier-free workplace of the future. By the way, if you're even spending a moment thinking about, well, what does this cost, the fact is by planning for the future you build it into the cost of running your business, and by achieving full accessibility you open up the workplace to a greater pool of employees, and, as our population ages, a much greater pool of employees.

So, in effect, this is a money maker for any organization that seeks profit, we believe. Moreover, removing workplace barriers also helps ensure that the organization will have a barrier-free environment for customers with disabilities. So, it's a win-win for an employer if they can hire, have access to a broader labor, labor pool, and a broader customer base.

Certainly worth the money. That's employment. So, those are the three areas that were regulated in 2011. Let me turn now to the final area that the government said that they would regulate, and that at least in one posting they claim, they've finished regulating. And we disagree. And that is the area of the built environment.

Physical buildings, indoors and outdoors. You don't have to spend much time trying to make your way around our community before you find out that we have a community full of barriers. In government, in public sector settings like schools, in public transit, and in private settings, businesses and so on.

These barriers hurt everyone, they help no one. And if you look at the legislative history of the AODA, back between 2004 and 2005, as all three political parties, got on their feet to support the AODA, and in some cases urged that it even be strengthened, many references were made to the need to fix our built environment.

And when the government proposed 20 years for implement, achieving full accessibility, it's because principally they thought that the built environment was gonna be one of the toughest nuts to crack. And the hypothesis underlying, or the hypothesis, the policy underlying the AODA, if barriers are easy to remove, do it fast.

If it costs or takes more effort, costs more or takes more effort, take longer. But 20 years was viewed, unanimously, to be enough. So how are we doing. The government decided a built environment accessibility standard is needed, and they set about developing it. That's good. Where we got to is substantially incomplete.

The government split the end product into two pieces. They decided to deal with inside the building by regulating it under the building code. The building code is a law that stipulates what buildings, what requirements you have when you build buildings, with a few exceptions. They decided to create a second, or separate, standard under the AODA, to deal with what they call public spaces, things the building code doesn't, code doesn't regulate, recreational paths, parking spots, and the like.

Let me tell you where we've gotten so far. For one thing, the government decided when they embarked on this back in, 2008 or so, they decided that the first round of regulatory effort would only deal with new construction or substantial renovations. See the building code doesn't require you, for example, to go back and retrofit anything, unless you're doing a, ren, major renovation, and then only in the area you're doing the major renovation.

Well, most buildings in Ontario are old, and aren't going away, and aren't being renovated. So, the government decided to do that first, and ipso facto decided that they were gonna leave most built environments barriers untouched. The government's answer is, okay, we're going to do that first, so we set the benchmark of what new construction should look like, and then after that we will come back up through the standards development process, deal with the issue of retrofits, of fixing buildings which are not now under renovation, and are not going to be renovated, in the for, you know, for the time being.

That's what they said. They've since passed a public sec, a public spaces accessibility regulation to deal with outside the buildings, and at the end of last year, at the end of December of 2013, they passed amendments to the building code to deal with inside the building. Let me tell you what we got, and let me tell you why it's inadequate so far.

Helpful steps forward, but again, lost opportunities, and certainly not enough to get us to a fully accessible, barrier-free, built environment in 2025, or indeed ever. First, the public spaces regulation. It deals with a range of areas, beach, recreational trails, and beach access, routes. It sets some good technical standards about making sure they're accessible.

By the way, everything that they're doing for people of mobility disabilities, if you're a hiker, you could say that that's just a whole lot less tripping for me, and stumbling and falling, and hurting myself. Which is good it's going to mean not, it's going to be helpful not only for people who have ex, explicit mobility, disabilities, it'll be helpful for seniors who want to go for a walk and just can't go that far, and for whom these supports will, will be helpful.

But they are limited by a number of unreasonable limitations. They take way too long to go into effect, you've heard me sing that song. They are only applied to a trail, or a beach access route, that the organization creating them intends to maintain. Now superficially, that means all an organization has to do is say, I built it, here it is, I hope people enjoy it, I have no intention of ever maintaining it, and they're off the hook.

Our answer is, that wording, is, should not be read that way, and it should be read narrowly so that it must require a demonstrated ongoing commitment in unequivocally to never maintain it at all. So, as long as there's some chance they're gonna any maintaining ever, that exemption should not come to the assistance of an organization.

And any organization that thinks they're gonna rely on that exemption is running a big risk. Moreover, their inaction could trigger a human rights complaint, whether or not it constitutes a contravention of the Public Spaces Accessibility Regulation under the AODA. The second problem, and this recurs, is the government created these huge exceptions for these, for, for anything that, I'm gonna paraphrase, might adversely effect certain natural environment considerations, or heritage properties, and so on.

And these exemptions are way wider then the undue hardship requirement of the Human Rights Code. There is no justification for saying we are going to make the, we can't make this trail accessible because it might adversely affect heritage. There is always, they've made the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, its only what 2,000 years old, they made that accessible, the Parthenon in Greece, the Osgoode Hall, the other Osgoode Hall, the one downtown, I'm going a little closer to contemporary, built in the, whatever, 1850s, used to have steps at the front.

They put a ramp in. It's different than the steps, but it works, and everybody likes it, especially, I might add, lawyers with law books in bookcases on wheels, which of course is every, most of who is going in and out of that building. So, these exemptions were, were included in terms that were way too broad, and we feel that any organization that thinks they are going to rely on them is doing so at their peril.

The, nevertheless assuming organizations still try to hide from those kind of requirements, this standard, unlike the Customer Service Standard, unlike the Employment Standard, set some detailed, specific technical requirements. How wide the path angles, what you should have at the edges so people don't fall off or hurt themselves, when and where railings, and so on.

And all of that is actually quite useful. The Public Spaces Regulation, then goes on, to deal with certain other public spaces. For sidewalks, only new ones, or redeveloped ones, it provides requirements for accessible curb cuts, those are the, where, where we don't have a step down at the edge, so that, people with mobility devices, like wheelchairs or walkers, can get down to the street.

But for blind folks like me, a curb cut that just ramps down to the street is actually dangerous, cuz our cane doesn't warn us, hey, you've left the sidewalk, enjoy those cars coming at you. So, there is a solution, and the standard actually sets it, and this is groundbreaking, and this is good.

They require, at those edges, what are called tactile walking surface indicators. It's a bumpy surface that our cane can detect, or if you're using a guide dog, your feet can detect, which help you know that you're in a, you've changed from the sidewalk, to the street. We wish there was a requirement for retrofits at major, intersection, but at least for new ones, that will be helpful.

The Public Spaces Standard also requires, everything in this is like good news on the one hand, and bad on the other. It requires that new traffic lights, or redeveloped traffic lights, I don't know who redevelops a traffic right or renovates them, but in any event, they have to include what's called an audible pedestrian signal.

You may have seen or heard these in some intersections, where, where it beeps, when you, when the light changes, so someone who can't see the light changing can know it's changing. This is good. The problem is, it allows them, it gives the, the option to a municipality to not have it run automatically, to require an individual, visionless, to walk over to have to grope it and find a button and push it to trigger it.

I will tell you that there are a number of, automatic or, audible pedestrian signals in Toronto that have that feature. I have tried using them, it is a royal pain. I pretty much don't bother. If I've got a white cane in one hand, a briefcase in the other, gloves because it is Canada, and it gets cold out, and I wanna get home, going over and trying to find the pole, they have a beep coming from it, but it's not always audible over traffic signals, and then find the button, and then press it, and then wait it, for it to run a couple of traffic, or a traffic cycle, there are other ways I'd rar, I rely on my earlier training, on how to cross streets without the benefit of them.

This worries me because I don't want municipalities, and we don't want municipalities to install these and then say, we put all this money into them and no one's using them. The solution is to make them operate automatically, not at, with a push button, especially in non-residential areas. Some people say they make too much noise.

There are white noise versions of them that are quite audible, but don't have to be, as intrusive. If you go to Australia, there are tons of these out there, not just at major intersections. Another example of a good step forward, at the same time is to some extent a lost opportunity.

With respect to public spaces, I will tell you they also, cover things like accessible parking for parking lots and on the street. For parking lots, they set actual specific requirements, proportions, or ratios, and so on. But for, for city parking, they just say, hey city, you figure it out, which we do, we think again, requires us to go lobbying city by city.

Accessible playgrounds. If you're gonna build a new playground, it says include accessibility features, and consult with people with disabilities on them. It's helpful, but it would've been way more helpful if it said, here are the features to include, rather than leaving it to everybody, any municipality building, a playground, or a pri, a school, or whatever, to have to incur the cost, and the burden of going out and figuring out, what, how to invent that wheel that others have already invented, with, in, in the past.

There are other public spaces requirements, they're similar in the sense that they, they target things we need to fix, but they don't have enough detail quite often, and I think that what was going on is the government was at certain points was getting chicken that if they got too specific that, organizations in the public and private sector might get upset, that why are you telling us all what to do.

The fact is, in my experience, they wanna know what they gotta do so that they've complied with the law. In one case they say in public, in service areas, that's where you go to a, an office, they have a counter, and they have a queuing line, that the queuing line has to be properly designed to be accessible, and they should have at least one low counter.

That's great, but they don't say how that, how tall the counter should be. And an organization is left then to guess how tall they gotta make it so that they don't get exposed to contravention of the law. Just misses the point of what a good and effective accessibility standard would do.

It's helpful they regulated it, they should have gone further. Let me turn very briefly to the issue inside buildings. Just last December, as I said, the government's passed some amendments to building code. And they are helpful, again they don't go far enough, but there are several problems here.

The first is, I have to say the building code's been a problem for us for a long time. Since 1975 it's purported to set accessibility requirements and it's always been incomplete and out of date. It was so incomplete and out of date that we needed the AODA passed so we could get this issue away from the building code people, and back in the hands of people who might actually come up with solutions that meet our needs.

So what happened. After the government got proposals from, a built environment standards develop, development committee that was convened to put forward ideas, they took the part that could be dealt by the building code and gave it back to the people who do in the entire government, who deal with the building code.

So it went right back to where the problem came from. It then languished there for years. Years. And what they ended up coming up with, while helpful, was always constrained by things like, oh, we can't do that because the building code doesn't let us. That might be good policy, but we can't do that cuz the building code doesn't let us.

They come up with standards which in the end don't fulfill the Human Rights Code, don't meet, rise to its requirements. And again, a lot of builders think, like others, that all they gotta do is comply with the building code. They don't know from the Human Rights Code. What we have said to the government is this, we don't mind if you've amended the building code, but you've got to keep your commitment to go further, and you've gotta pass a, an, accessibility standard to deal with future retrofits in non-renovated old buildings.

And to this day, the government has never said yes. They put a commitment to do that on their website in '09. We copied it onto our website. They've since taken down that page of their website. But we have preserved it. You can't just take a page down and think the promise is gonna go away.

That's what we're there for, to hold them accountable. But the other thing we've asked them to do is this, we're entitled under the AODA to standards enacted under the AODA, and there's a bunch of procedural protections I deal with in other lectures and a bunch of safeguards for the disability community.

We don't have those in the case of the building code. We've asked the government to take whatever they put in the building code and enact it in a parallel standard under the AODA for the built environment. It can regulate the exact same things in exactly same way, but so that we have access to the whole machinery and the AODA to enforce it, and to have it reviewed, with our entitlements for input.

The government hasn't answered. So, let me take the last few minutes to, so, so that's where we are. So, if all these standards that are on the books were complied with to the letter, we would not achieve full accessibility by 2025 or ever. But on the other hand, they will help, and they certainly move us considerably further forward than we would have been if we had not, got, had this act at all.

Let me take the last few minutes to talk to you about, where we've come on other important fronts in achieving the goal of full accessibility by 2025 apart from the actual making of accessibility standards. Well, the first thing that will come to mind is, okay, that's great they made these standards.

What about enforcing them. In the act the government gave itself, effective enforcement powers and we have repeated written promises on our website at aodaalliance.org, that they would effectively enforce it. They can audit organizations, they can inspect organizations, they can issue compliance organizations and there's authority for very stiff monetary penalties for contraventions.

Well, enforcement, unfortunately, is not, has not been happening up til last fall. We actually wrote the government a year ago, a year ago and said, can you tell us what you're doing about enforcing this law. Under that Customer Service Standard, the one with the not very onerous requirements that gave businesses like five years to comply, all businesses with 20 or more employees had to file, or e-file, a self report with the government by, the end of December of 2013.

And all they had to do in that is say, you know, I've got a policy on the customer service, I've trained my staff, and I've done the other measures needed. A self report. I'm not talking about an income tax return, we're talking about a very simple self report.

We asked the government a year ago, how many of those organizations did file, and what are you doing about the ones who didn't. The government did not answer. We ran a count up on Twitter for months on their failure to answer. Last summer, I had to resort to a Freedom of Information request, and I finally got the answers last November.

And they ended up on, prominent coverage in the Toronto Star, and in an editorial in the Toronto Star cuz the news was so bad. What did we find out. Of the 36 or so, or, pardon me, all the private sector organizations in Ontario that had to file one of those reports had five years to do it, by, of all those with 20 or more employees.

By the end of last year, by the end of, or by the middle of this past November, even eight or ten months after the deadline, fully 70% were in violation of the filing requirement, and the government knew it. It was higher a year ago, it had gone up to just, un, to 70% of not, or I should say down to 70% non-compliance.

That is pathetic, and the government knew it. So, the question is what were they doing about enforcing it. Well, we revealed through our favorite information request that the government had not issued a single monetary penalty, they'd not issued a single compliance order, they'd not conducted a single inspection or a single audit of any of those organizations even though they knew for months about this rampant non, contravention, and even though they withheld the information from us, and forced us to resort to a Freedom of Information request to get it.

Well, you might wonder, well, is it a problem that the budget's really bad, they just don't have the money for the enforcement. So, I asked how much the government, government annually gave to the office that had this mandate, it's called the Accessibility Director of Ontario, and how much they actually used.

Cuz you'd think, well, they must be over budget, they just don't have the time. Turned out they're under budget every year. Sometimes in excess of $1 million a year. From 2005 to 2013, they had not used a total of $24 million appropriated to them over that, I don't mean in one year, but, spread over the whole period.

So, they weren't enforcing, they knew of rapid contraventions, they had the money to do it, they had the power to do it, they just weren't doing it. And they promised effective enforcement with the lead minister responsible, Doctor Eric Hoskins, had months earlier, said that this act, accessibility, is his top, and his government's top priority.

Heck of a top priority. So, that's where we're at on enforcement. Needless to say, we have been, working hard on that one. There are other areas where we are, undertaking advocacy. I'm gonna do very, very, very quick, bullets because they, they're part of the campaign to try to get full accessibility.

We are concerned that Ontario laws not either authorize, or require discrimination or, or create or perpetuate barriers. So, in 2007 we asked the government to undertake a review of all its legislation to re, to identify, accessibility problems. The Premier in '07, Dalt McGintey, promised it. They didn't start til around 2011.

It's going on now. Again, too slow, but it's an interesting area of trying to affect social change, not through challenging laws in court, but trying to get the government to look at its own legislation and figure out what it should be doing. Another area in which we've been active is trying to use the public purse.

The government spends billions every year on capital infrastructure, and not just government buildings, but giving money to colleges, and universities, and hospitals, and so on, and municipalities for buildings. And it also spends billions every year buying goods and services. We wanted the government to make it a condition of anyone getting that money, that they not use a dime of public money to create, or perpetuate, or exacerbate barriers against people with disabilities.

You want our money, we want to make sure you're not misusing it. Now, the government's done some in this area, but we don't have any sign, of, sort of, palpable progress, and they've been quite slow in doing it. The real linchpin, the real point where we are going to see if this means something or not is next year.

2015 the Toronto, 2015 Pan and Parapan American games are taking place here. The government is investing a ton of money in it. We've asked them to have, a strategy to ensure that this game is not, the games are not only accessible in the sense that people with disabilities can get in the stadium, but that there are accessible restaurants, hotels, tourist sites, services, goods and employment.

So, there's a legacy of accessibility, that's happened in other cities that have hosted Olympics. We, so far, don't have a major comprehensive public plan for this, if you check our website you'll see that we've offered one, but the government is still, going slow on it. A next area where we've been active is on accessible elections.

If people with disabilities are going to have a real clout, they've got to have clout at the ballot box. And there are barriers in the voting process, either getting to, a polling station if there's not accessible transit, or accessible parking. Getting in the polling station, even though they're supposed to be accessible, they are at times not.

Elections Ontario messes up, same on the municipal level. And there are people like me, who can not mark our ballots on our own and verify our choice. Same with people with certain motor disabilities. We have been pushing for some changes. We fought for legislative reforms. We got half way measures in 2010.

Bill 231 was before the legislature, details about it in our website, was a bill to amend the Elections Act, among other things to deal with accessibility. Our long-term fight is for telephone and Internet voting. Secured telephone and internet voting, not only for voters with disabilities, but for everybody.

We believe that that will help overcome a lot of barriers, not for all voters with disabilities, but for a lot of them. 44 municipalities in Ontario now use it, Toronto's looking at it, Elections Ontario has been dragging their feet like you can not believe. The other area I'm gonna just talk about for a few seconds is this, the courts.

The courts themselves, like all other sectors of our society, have too many barriers facing people with disabilities. And those barriers make it hard to go to court and get justice. It may be inaccessible buildings, not avail, lack of available sign language or other communication supports, a wide range of barriers.

It's hard to deal with that under an accessibility regulation, cuz you can't regulate judges the way you might, what they, how they handle cases the way you might other, other issues. To the credit of our former Chief Justice Roy McMurtry, after whom my fellowship is named, in 2005 he announced that the court should do their share to fix this.

This resulted in a report from a joint committee of the Bench Bar in Government, chaired by, Madame Justice Karen Wilder of our Court of Appeal, I worked on that committee, released in 2007 on the Court of Appeal website, mapping out how to make our courts more acc, fully accessible by 2025.

I'm also involved with a joint permanent committee that's overseeing progress, to achieve that goal. As I've said in so many other context, we're making progress, but we're not on schedule. Let me, let me conclude. The, the, the task we set out on back in, 20 years ago, November of 1994, when a small group of us started fighting for this legislation, was undoubtedly an enormous, if not, perhaps, an unrealistic one, and, you would think that everything I've just said today, which should make me lack any optimism.

After all, if the government that was committed to do this has been dragging their feet on enforcement, taking too long to get these standards made, balking at our efforts to try to get them to direct the next accessibility standards to make, and passing accessibility standards that palpably fall below the Humans Rights Code's requirements, you'd think, I should be a pessimist, but I'm not.

I'm an optimist. And, I'm an optimist for, two reasons. The first I already gave you which is that we have made significant progress the, so far, even though nowhere near what we should have. But the other reason I'm optimistic is because at every step of the way, starting on day one, what we were trying to accomplish looked not only uphill, but inaccessibly uphill.

We got the legislation passed, it only took ten years. We got standards enacted under it, not enough. We got enforcement tools, pass, created not being used. But we've been able to now secure more public attention then ever before on this. With election commitments on accessibility being made, at least by two, if not three parties in every election, and many bi elections since 1995.

So, I remain an optimist that we will get there and we will hold their feet to the fire until we do. I thank you very much for this opportunity to speak to you, and I really look forward to taking your questions.