Ontario's Progress Toward Fully Accessible Transportation for People with Disabilities. David Lepofsky, Chair. Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance. Delivered at the Osgoode Hall Law School, January 23rd, 2014 as a Roy McMurtry Clinical Fellow.
>> Good morning everyone today's lecture is gonna focus on, the campaign for accessible public transportation for people with disabilities in the province of Ontario.

My name is David Lepofsky, I'm Chair of the Accessibility for Ontarians. With Disabilities Act Alliance. And I'm, I'm very honored to be able to present to this policy course in the critical disability studies program. I want to talk to you about why public transportation matters, about the kind of problems that people with disabilities face using it.

About the kind of, resistance we faced trying to achieve full accessibility in public transit. And then I wanna take you through the gains made or site but not made under the accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act. And I'm going to conclude with some remarks about recent developments and upcoming events on the public transportation front.

You should consider public transpiration, a really good case study in the battle for accessibility. It isn't always this vexing. We don't meet as much resistance, in each sector as we have here. But each sector we challenge, take on as important and each battle in one way or another has it's own dynamic.

So what's the problem? We have at least 1.8 million people with disabilities in Ontario, over four million in Canada. And many more will get disabilities, virtually everybody as they age. They face too many barriers in society, and our public transit system is one example. Our public transit system was not originally designed, to accommodate and include people with disabilities.

That's crazy. It's not like we just invented people with disabilities in 2005, or even in 1982. However, we still face too many barriers, barriers getting into stations, barriers getting out of vehicles, barriers knowing where we are on the vehicle or what stop we're at on the route, barriers getting service, barriers with fee structures.

Barriers with public para-transit for those who can't use the, the conventional transit system, getting a ride, getting to where you want to go, and getting there in a timely fashion. Far too many barriers. They're not all physical barriers. The first thing you might think of are steps to get into a subway station, or onto a bus, that impede people with mobility disabilities.

But I, as a blind person, have faced barriers finding out what stop I'm at. More about that in a moment. People with hearing loss, face difficulty knowing what's being announced over the public address system. Where it's not displayed in text form on a video screen. Some of the barriers are old, like subway stations built in the 50s, and some are brand new, like the spanking new presto smart card for paying your public transit fares.

A system designed with barriers included. I'll talk about that right near the end of my presentation. How do we take on these barriers? Historically, the only way we could was by bringing claims under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which guarantees equality. Without discrimination, based on physical or mental disability.

That applies to governments, Federal, Providential, Municipal, including Municipal Public Transit Authorities. We could also file individual claims of discrimination, under the Ontario Human Rights code. It guarantees the right to good services and facilities without discrimination, based on disability in both the charter and the human rights code imposed on all organizations including transit providers, a duty to accommodate the needs of people with disabilities.

Up to the point of undo hardship. If equal service is not being provided. Put simply, these barriers I've described, are at some way, or in some way, pretty much all illegal. It may take time to remove them. And it should take no time to prevent the creation of new ones, but they gotta go.

The problem historically was that, if we had to reinforce these one barrier at a time, one complaint at a time, one transit authority at a time, one individual with a disability bringing claims at a time. The burden of enforcing them was just far too heavy. That's what led a number of us in 1994 to argue that we needed a new law, to systematically require the removal and prevention of these kind of barriers without us having to litigate them one at a time.

I had the privilege of leading the. Coalition that fought for a decade and won that law. The Ontarians with disabilities act committee. The law that we won in 2005 is called the accessibility for Ontarians with disabilities act, or AODA. I now have the privilege of leading the successor coalition, these are all volunteer roles, of volunteer coalitions that are non-partisan.

The accessibility for interims with disability act alliance campaigns to get the disability act effectively implemented. Let me zero in on public transit. Why is it so important? It's hugely important. It's hugely important because getting around. Is vital if you're gonna get a job and keep a job, if you're gonna get an education, if you're gonna get to the doctor or the grocery store.

For many, many people who don't, or can't, drive or afford their own car. Well, some people with disabilities can't drive. I'm one of em. Being totally blind you don't want me driving. So for us, unless you've got someone to drive you, the TTC, the public transit system, I'm gonna talk a lot about TTC cuz we're in Toronto and that's where I live.

But it's, it's our car unless you've got a family member or or access to taxis or whatever. It's your car. And without an education you can't get to school, to university. You're not gonna get an education, if you don't get an education you're gonna have trouble getting a job.

And even if you get an education, if you can't get to that job you're not gonna be able to be interviewed and then win the job and then keep. It's all pretty obvious. Access to public transit is vital to being able to take part in the mainstream of life.

For other people with disabilities, they may be able to drive, but they can't afford a car. What we know about people with disabilities is that we're large in number. But we're also substantially over represented among the unemployed, or under employed. We're substantially over represented among the welfare dependent and the poor.

So buying a car, for a number of them, is out of the question. Moreover, cars are not designed to accommodate people with certain kinds of disabilities. And for them, they may need a speciali-, specially designed vehicle, and to buy that, they'd be way more expensive. Than an already expensive conventional car.

Also potentially out of their financial reach, if they're among the many people with disabilities who are unemployed, underemployed, poor, and or socially dependent, social systems dependent. These barriers hurt everyone. Nobody benefits, from the barriers of our public transit system. They hurt people with disabilities by driving, helping drive, or keep people with disabilities into a state of unemployment or poverty.

They force more of them to become, social assistant dependent. Not just the barriers in, in transportation alone drive them to this condition. They contribute. To the disadvantage that leads to this, this economic end result. It ends up with society not benefiting from as many people with disabilities contributing as, as employees and as workers.

And it, puts a greater social assistance burden on society. It also hurts our society, because businesses don't get the benefit of their skills, if they can't get there or can't get an education or can't get a job. Similarly, these kind of barriers hurt us economically, because if you can't get to a store, you can't spend your money there.

So if a person with a disability can only get to the stores immediately near them, that means that other stores and other services that might benefit from there, from them as customers don't get the chance. And finally, it undermines your community as a tourism destination. Tourists with disabilities, like to travel like anyone else.

But, they're gonna pick a city that's got accessible public transit over a city that doesn't, in making their choices whenever they can. There are a billion people with disabilities around the world. Not all of them are gonna come to a particular city in, in Ontario. But, within them there's a lot of spending power that we'd benefit from having.

And with inaccessible public transit, or transit barriers, we make ourselves an unattractive tourist destination for them. And that hurts everybody. Well, how hard should it be, to achieve an accessible public transit system? Well, I'd like to suggest to you that it actually shouldn't be hard at all. At one level you might say oh, well, we're talking about a lot of buses, lot of subway cars and stations and man if we, if they're not accessible to change that all that's gotta be a huge pile of money, it should be tough.

But here's why it shouldn't be hard. Number one, we all have a financial interest. Collectively as a society, in having an accessible public transit system because it helps our economy across the board. We all have an individual interest in it because, if you don't have a disability now, you're likely gonna get one later.

And even if you don't have one now, you've got friends or family who do. And when you're going to go out for the afternoon or the evening if you're with a person with a mobility disability who can't get on, can't use a particular subway station or, or a bus or whatever.

You're not going to say well lets go with a movie together, you figure out how you're getting there. I'll see you if you make it. You want travel together. That's what's going out together is all about. So we all have an interest in it. Moreover, the organizations that deliver public transit are large organizations.

They're not mom-and-pop operations, rubbing two nickels together to just try to get by. They're mainly large organizations, I'll talk separately about taxis later. Moreover, the equipment they use is not internal. They have to, replace it over time. And if they replace inaccessible vehicles with accessible ones and inaccessible equipment with accessible equipment over time, we can get away from this problem over time.

It's also a problem that we should be able to solve relatively readily because the organizations, at least those that deliver public transit, are non-profit public sector organizations. We don't have to meet a profit margin for them. At all. As well, they're not only public and non, and, and non-profit.

They get their money substantially from the government. Any year you pick up the newspaper or turn on the radio and you're gonna hear some announcement or other. From the federal or provincial government, of millions or tens or hundreds and sometimes billions of dollars going into capital infrastructure. And one major area that is going, that that funding goes to, is public transit.

So as a society, we're paying the freight. We ought to be able to call the accessibility tune. So for all these reasons, it ought to be doable in a straightforward way. Here's the shocker. I've been involved in advocating now on accessibility, one way or another, for many years, as a volunteer.

Working with many wonderful people. If you're interested in getting involved, just send an email to AODAfeedback@gmail.com and ask to sign up for our email list and we'll give you lots of tips on how to do that. If you want to see, a record of our campaign including a fight on the transportation front.

Just go to our website at AODAAlliance.org or follow us on Twitter AODAAlliance, pardon me, @AODAAlliance. But in any event, in all the different context in which I've done this advocacy, people think all of the biggest opponents to advocating for accessibility across the board. It's probably going to be the business sector.

They're going to be worried about their profits. And, you know, why are you requiring this? It's not the case. There's some in any sector who, you know, may be skiddish. But generally, I will tell you that of the various sectors we've dealt with, the area where I at least have seen.

The greatest collective resistance has been Ontario's public transit providers. I'm just gonna give you a couple of illustrations. In some cases Canada's. Number one: Me and TTC. I In 1994, I approached the Toronto Transit Commission to ask them to do something which they've been doing for years in Boston and Washington and New York and elsewhere which is to have their their subway crews announce route stops as you get to them.

That ended up in protracted litigation. It took to 2005 on and off. And I had to go through a full human rights hearing to force them, to get an order forcing them, to consistently and reliability announce all route stops. Now every subway has a crew. Every crew member has a mouth.

They all have a microphone, and presumably they know what the stops are. So it shouldn't be hard to do. I wasn't asking them to put in any fancy automated system, but you would not believe the fight they put up. When I, just before I won that case, I asked them to also audibly and reliably announce all bus stops.

They fought that one, too. Even after I won the subway case. Now you might think that if you got to announce all, when I won in 2005, it was held that the Human Rights Code requires the TTC to announce all, all subway stops for the benefit of blind people.

Now, you'd think that If they gotta do it on the subways, they gotta do it on the bus. I mean, it seems pretty obvious. Seems obvious to me. Probably to you and I don't know if any of you have had any legal training, but on the first day of law school that wouldn't be a tough one either.

It's obvious to everybody except, the TTC. So I had to file a second case. And I won that in 2007. I did a Freedom of Information request afterwards to find out how much they spent on lawyers in these two cases, fighting against accessibility. I got their legal bills, and between the two cases, it totaled $450,000.

That's a lot of accessibility that could have been bought by the money they spent on lawyers. To lose to loser cases. To oppose something as simple, as consistently and reliably announcing all stops. Now, in this lecture series, there will be another lecture on a closer look at those two cases.

I don't have time now to go into them, but they, they're, with that kind of fight over a simple accommodation. An accommodation that helps not only blind people, but sighted people, who can't see through a crowd on the bus or subway, or through dirty windows, or through a snowstorm, or when it's dark at night.

When, so much of a fight over that simple accommodation. Imagine what we, we're fearing. For tougher ones. By the way after I won that case, the human right's commission to their credit, surveyed all transit authorities to say what they were gonig to do about it. Some say they would, some said they wouldn't.

Some of them that said they would still didn't. And now stops when they said they would. The human right's commission had to start two more. Legal proceedings. After that. When the law was clear over, something as simple as calling stops. And let me just explain that it's the, the bus stops case.

By the time I got to the tribunal, the human rights tribunal on the bus stops case. The TTC had said, we're gonna put in automation. We're gonna put in automated stops, announcements, but it's gonna take a couple years. So by then I was arguing at the Human Rights Tribunal that in the interim two years, get your drivers to call the stops.

TTC said no, and I won. A leading spokesman for London's public transit authority was quoted in the London Free Press. When asked if London would also direct their drivers to call stops, pending their putting in an automated system, the answer was no. I guess they felt they were above the law or something.

And the law was clear, it won the case. But another public transit authority has according to this news report in substance felt that they could decide to disregard the law, on something that had been hard, you know, fought, and lost! Another illustration. A case in the Supreme Court of Canada, this is not an Ontario provider, but national, Via Rail against Council Canadians with Disabilities.

Via Rail decided to go out and spend $134 million, on some passenger cars replacing, if memory serves, and I could have this wrong, about a third of their fleet. But the cars they decided to buy. It was argued, were less accessible than the ones they were gonna replace.

They were gonna use public money to create new barriers. Council of Canadians with Disabilities, a fabulous advocacy group, took them to the Canadian Transportation Agency. They won their case, in substantial part. The Canadian transportation legislation has a human rights-like provision. Got fought all the way to the Supreme Court in Canada, and Via Rail lost there too.

That case stands for the proposition in my view, the essentially. You can't use your money to create new barriers. That's going to be important in a couple of moments, for what happened in Ontario afterwards. But this is an illustration of via rail, resistance to uum, providing accessible public transit.

So this is what we've been up against. And it's a sector that's not only demonstrated itself to be. I'm not saying everybody. And I'm not saying always. But collectively through these illustrations and through a process of standards development I'm gonna talk about in a moment, a sector that' demonstrated itself to be, Less enthusiastic about doing the right than, than we would like.

And the frustrating part from our perspective is, these are public sector agencies who are using public money to resist, and a foot drag. It's not their money. It's not their companies. They work for us. So, with all this in mind along comes the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act passed in 05.

How does it work? It requires the government of Ontario to lead this province to become fully accessible by 2025. That would include making sure all our public transit services are fully accessible by 2025. How's the government to do that? It's required to develop, enact, and enforce access ability standards.

To tell organizations what they've got to do. And when they gotta do it by. What barriers they gotta fix and when they gotta fix em by. How does that work? The government appoints a standards development committee, with representatives from the disability community and the obligated organizations. In this case, it would be the transit providers among others.

To come up with proposals, for what a new standard would look like in an area the government wants regulated. One of the first ones the government wanted was transportation. Good job. We agree. In the year, in the two thousands-a. The Ontario Human Rights Commission released a report documenting serious barriers in the Public Transit sector, and calling on the government to do something proactive to fix it, and here was a chance to do it.

So, in 2006 the government appointed a Transportation Standards Development Committee with Disability sector representatives. And government and transit representatives and others. And they sat down to start working on a proposal. The way it works is they, they put their thoughts together. They present an initial proposal. It goes to the public for comment.

We comment. They go back and read the comments. And then the standards development committee makes a final proposal. That sent to the public, we tell the government what we think of it, and then the government decides what to enact. The transportation standards development committee worked between 06 and if memory serves, I think, around 09 maybe 08.

It made an initial proposal in 07 and got feedback. And then a final proposal in either 08 or 09. All of this is documented on our website, and I can't take you through all the chapter and verse, but you can read the proposals and you can read our feedback on them.

And then the government of Ontario took all that feedback and finally passed a standard that, was enacted on, early June. Of 2011, dealing with a wide range of different areas, one of which is transportation. Let me tell you a little bit about what happened at the standards development committee, and let me tell you what the end result that we got is.

These are detailed organiza, pardon me, documents worth reading. I'm gonna hit on some. Some general themes. The first thing I'll tell you is that when the standards development, the transportation standards development committee first met, people with disabilities did not have equal number of seats at the table. The government had, set up several different standards committees, and the disability sector.

At the table was less than 50%. They were outnumbered, and in the in a sense they were out gunned because they were either volunteers, or coming from volunteer agencies. With no staff support in the room. And on the other side of the table, would be the organized public transit sector.

Who had access to lawyers and policy people that you and I were paying for, through the fare box or your tax returns. And they came in with a pretty solid common front, and it was a common front that was tried to argue for. A very limited range of barriers to be addressed in this standard.

For standards, for anything that was gonna be enacted would be very vague. So it would lead to transit authorities sweeping decisions on what they would do or what they wouldn't do. From the beginning, it was clear they were only gonna pro-, or, they were primarily, the committee was primarily only gonna focus on new barriers.

Preventing new ones from being created, not un-rectifying the old ones. And. There were, a couple of stunning things that happened early on. Both, interestingly, relate to the subject of my TTC litigation. It was still ongoing when some of these events were taking place, but I got word that the committee was really having a knock down drag out over whether.

They would require all buses. Subway stops to be announced. TTC and their fellow transit authorities were, were I guess holding off against it. The disability is pressing for it. So I in my personal capacity wrote the committee. And asked the Transportation Standards Development Committee, and asked, can I come and meet with you folks just to give you my pitch?

After all, I'm in the middle of this lawsuit against TGC, and I've been dealing with issue, this issue for a decade. They refused. I got a letter back saying, sorry no we are busy and we're running out of time, or whatever their excuse was. So they were Rather than this being an open process.

And remember, this is a time when the disability sector was a minority. In the. The then, recommend in their initial proposal that, yes, route stops should be called out. But, the public transit authority should have. How much time to start up this, this service? 18 years. By the way, when I won the case against the TTC in 05, for subway it stops and in 07 for bus stop, they were ordered to get it done promptly, and in both cases, within a couple of months they got their drivers and their crews making the announcements.

As they were ordered to do. 18 years, that's just a good illustration of what we're up against. In 07, there was a Provincial election. We went to the political parties and argued that that the whole process for developing these standards needs to be beefed up. And one of the things we said need to be done is, we needed to have equal seats at the table, for people with disabilities or our representatives.

The government agreed. In fact, if memory served, all three parties agreed. We're non-partisan, we ask all parties for election commitments. Well, this is amazing. The chair of the, of the Transportation Standards Development committee, wrote. The Minister responsible. This letter's on our website. Urging the Minister to break that promise.

Please don't have more people with disabilities at our table. And as far as I know, it was the only one of the number of standards developing committees in operation then. That took that position. Needless to say, just after winning the election, the minister was not inclined to break a commitment the Premier made in writing to us.

And they went ahead. The effect was our voice was strengthened and recommendations that came out at the end, while weak, were strengthened. Gives you a bit of an illustration of what we're up against. Well then, what. Let's jump past all this process stuff. What did we get? Well in the end we got a, in June, 2011.

The Ontario Government, to their credit, passed what they called the Integrated Accessibility Standard Regulation, or IASR. That is one big line title. It covered, at the time, barriers in transportation, in employment, and in information and communication. It's since been expanded to cover barriers in public spaces like recreational trails and such things.

Before this, in '07, the government already passed a more general customer service accessibility regulation. Which by the way applies to public transit providers as well as others who provide good and services to the public. So what's in this standard? its, a lot of it technical, I encourage you to download it and read it.

But I'm gonna sort to synthesize it for you. There are two parts of it that matter to you. One part deals with all obligated organizations, and one part that focuses specifically on transportation There's a series of obligations that apply either to all organizations that provide goods or services or facilities.

Or at least the public sector ones, so that it certainly will capture all public transit authorities, that Ontario can regulate. This includes an obligation to have a an accessibility policy, and then an accessibility multi-year plan, in which they detail. Not only what they're gonna do to address the specific requirements of the regulation.

But also, what they're gonna do to address barriers generally, in their service. They've gotta make that plan public. And they've gotta make, make or at least, on request. And they've also gotta make available. An annual status report, on what they've done so far. Now these plans aren't, the regulation doesn't specify what exactly they've got to put in it.

But it names some topics that have got to be addressed. And the regulation spells out for transit authorities some additional requirements that they've got to include that other organizations don't, specific to public transit. Now, let me just explain that all of this is helpful. It's helpful cuz it forces them to go to the table and actually think it through.

And to write it down. And by status reports to actually account for what they're doing. This is, however, not what a, a, a, the core of what an access standard was meant to be. An access standard was meant to sit down and tell you. You gotta remove this barrier.

It may say: Here's how you gotta remove it. But it also will say when you gotta remove it. And it can set different timelines and requirements for big organizations versus small ones, but it's supposed to provide specific actions. These policies and plans leave a lot of flexibility to the Transit Authority or others to figure out what they're gonna put in them.

This is also not altogether new. In 2001, four years before the AODA was passed by the McGuinty Liberal government, the prior conservative, Mike Harris' government, had passed a weaker law called the Ontarians with Disabilities Act. That law required all public sector organizations like. Public transit authorities. To make public and annual plan, about accessibility.

It didn't require the plans to be any good. It didn't require the organization to ever act on those plans. And it didn't require them to ever account for what they've done. In a comprehensive way. You could, under that act you could write a plan that was one sentence long.

I'm gonna put a one inch ramp in front of one little curb and that's it. And you'd meet the law. And, by the way, you don't actually have to do that. Fix the ramp or the curb that you referred to. You just have to release a piece of paper saying.

You're saying you're going to. And we couldn't enforce it. So the, the requirements in the AODA standard are stronger, and they talk about both making and implementing these plans. And providing standards pardon me, providing status reports on how they're doing. So there's a potential for it to go further, considerably further than the weak Paris government requirements.

Even though plans, are different from standards. A standard tells you what you gotta do. A plan lets you go back and think about what you wanna do, do. Set it out. And then decide how much, how far you're gonna go. and, one of the difficulties with just a straight planning requirement, is each organization in a sense has to reinvent the wheel.

A standard invents the wheel for everyone. However, some of these limitations are offset by the fact that the. The rest of the standard goes into some detail of what transit authorities are supposed to do. Public transit authorities. I'm gonna talk you but public transit authorities like TTC, I'll talk to you about requirements for a couple of sort of offbeat things, like school boards and ferry services and trains, railways, inter-city trains.

And then I wanna talk to you about requirements on municipalities in relation to taxis and bus stops cuz those are the basic areas that are covered in the specific transit context. Now where the standard turns to the requirements on public transit authorities. It talks about two kinds of services.

Conventional services, meaning the transit services that folks are used to seeing. The bus on the street or the subway under the ground that, that folks use. And then it talks about what we conventionally call para-transit, in Toronto called wheel trans, for people who can't use the main stream system.

It's an accessible vehicle. You call up. You have to book a ride. And it's a door to door service. But unlike the conventional service, it's not available the moment you. If you want a bus, on Englington, you walk out of Englington. You wait for the next bus. Maybe it's ten minutes, maybe it's 15.

With para transit, you gotta call, book a ride, wait online, see if you can get through. And who knows whether they've got a ride, ride available when you want it. And then when you're waiting for it, they may not show up on time and so on. It's, it's not a comparable level of service at all.

The regulation doesn't use the word para-transit, but I'm going to cuz it's what we know. The standard sets out a series, the first thing I've got to just tell you just as happened in the whole standard development process. The standard predominantly if not almost totally, only deals with creating new or preventing the creation of new barriers.

So then a public transit authority could have. Lots of old barriers, in vehicles that they keep using for the next 20 years until they can't drive them anymore. And there could be aspects of them that could be fixed, without undue hardship to the par, to the Transit Authority.

Something the Human Rights Code would require. And the standard state side doesn't require them to do that. In fact at one point it says that it isn't requiring them to retrofit. The only time it requires retrofits is in very limited areas of getting a vehicle and modifying it in some circumstances.

they, they might be required to also provide accessibility in the area they're modifying. It's, it's a very limited, narrow, very constrained and completely inadequate requirement. So there's a huge lot of barriers, that the standard doesn't touch. The standard also does not touch, one huge important area which are public transit stations.

Stations where thousands of people go through every day. It doesn't address them at all. Whether it's an old station or you're building a new station. They're leaving to the building code to fix that. The building code, which was just recently upgraded on accessibility but is chronically out of date on accessibility.

Does not require any changes, in an old building that you aren't renovating. So as long as you keep your old subway station, or your old bus station, or your old union station and don't do anything to renovate it, you can leave barriers there forever. And, of course, how do you get on public transit without being able to, or get off.

Without having full access to the stations. Now there are requirements we're getting talk in a sec, in a couple of seconds. There are a series of requirements, technical requirements in this standard for new, newly acquired transit vehicles. And some of them are quite helpful, and, and some are, I mean, they're quite detailed.

In some cases, they're nowhere as detailed as we'd like them to be. For example, in the area of lighting and signage, we asked for considerably more specificity and detail. And the pushback we gathered from the transit sector is no, no, no, leave it to us to decide. And there's a lot of leave at us to decide in the standard.

What is stunning, is that the, the standard basically said that if you got, if you sign the contract for a vehicle before July 1, 2011, its accessibility requirements don't apply. The Standard was enacted in June of 2011 to go into effect in July in 2011. But here is the thing.

The transit authority was, the transit sector was at the table, negotiating these from 06 onward. They knew what was coming. Why on earth would, should they have gone out anywhere between 06 and 2011, and signed a contract, with our money for public transit vehicles that fall anywhere short of full accessibility.

Especially standards that they were making sure. In a number of cases, gave them a ton of flexibility on, on, on the details. Moreover, even as, it, it's not like it was something on, on, on June 3rd or whatever it was, 2011. They all of a sudden found out about these new details.

The government had released a summary of what they were proposing to put in the integrated standard back at the end of the summer before in 2010. And they released a draft of this regulation at the start of February 2011. So as late, early, earlier, or as late as February 2011, they could know.

But these, they've got another grace period of five months to run out and sign contracts. I don't know if they did, but clearly there must have been pressure on the government to give them the freedom to. We said, this is crazy. This totally, remember before I told you about the Via Rail case, I said I'd get back to it?

We're right back to it. This was essentially giving them Carte Blanche. To do what Via Rail in the supreme court, the via rail case in the supreme court of Canada, said they couldn't do. Now, here's why this was especially stupid, to use a technical legal term. When we were negotiating the AODA with the Ontario government.

We wanted to make sure that if the standards were weaker than our rights under the Human Rights Code, the standard couldn't trump the Human Rights Code. So, and we, we succeeded in that. Both the AODA and the standards enacted under it recite, that where there's two different laws, the one that requires more accessibility prevails.

So where did this standard purports to give them Carte Blanche to sign contracts right up to the eve of July 1st, 2011 to buy an inaccessible vehicle? It's giving them nothing. Because it still violates, in our view the human rights code requirements. As expounded on in the comparable provisions of the Canadian Transportation Agency, by the Supreme Court of Canada, in the case.

So, what's going on here? Was the public transportation sector pressuring for a standard that gave them carte blanche that doesn't really give them carte blanche at all? What possible use would that serve? Other than to, for someone who hasn't got access transit authority, just reads the standard and thinks that's all they gotta do, and goes and does this.

Which would be pretty foolish. Especially with public money. I just didn't get it. We didn't get it. We didn't understand why they were asking for it, and we didn't understand why the government did it. But we pressed against it, and we didn't succeed. What else is in the standard?

There's a number of requirements about maintaining accessibility equipment. Anybody with a wheelchair goes on the TTC knows that the elevators Can't really count on them. Anybody needs the escalators to go up the stairs in a subway station knows sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. If you're a walking person who can walk up the stairs anyway, it's an inconvenience.

If you're a person with chronic fatiguing problems or stamina problems. It means the, can mean the difference between getting, getting to where you wanna go and not. There are requirements to make this information public, about the status of their accessibility equipment. There are a series of added training requirements.

The general requirements under the regulation requires all obligated organizations to train their staff on. On the requirements of the accessibility regulation and the human rights code. In other words, they can't just know about the, the standard, which may be lower in its demands. They also have to learn to be trained on the human rights code, which in the number of cases is more exacting in our favor.

But there are also added training requirements for transit authorities, training on using access equipment, and so on. In a number of the areas, if you pick up the standard and read it, it's quite interesting, because as you're reading it, you will probably, or should, shake your head. And say, you had to pass a standard to get them to do this?

This is just like good service. Like in the description of the material, I believe it is for steps on a bus, it requires use of slip resistant materials. Now. I, I'm not saying the public transit sector was running around looking for buses with sheet ice on their steps.

But to me, when I read that I, it's like, I mean it's great it's there but a lot of this is just plain basic good customer service. And all of it is, are, are things that would help everybody. I could give you an illustration where the transit authorities must have been pushing to ensure that they had as much discretion as possible.

There are times when a driver is driving a bus and a person with a disability's on it. But there's a barrier at the bus stop. And so the dri, the passenger can't get off where they wanna go. And normally the driver only lets you off, at a stop.

Not anywhere. And it requires the driver to instead let you off at, at a at an appropriate spot that's safe to get off. That's fine. But it leaves it, it, it's worded so the bus driver totally has the final say. It does require them to consult with the passengers preference and take it into account, that's nice.

But still they were bending over backwards trying to make sure that the driver. Has carte blanche, on this one, with the ultimate, decision. the, the standard requires properly signed courtesy seating for people with disabilities. These are good, these are good things to have. They're all good customer service.

The fact that we would need to regulate any of this, tells you how much of a how much of a, a challenge, excuse me, achieving accessibility has, has made. Let me be briefly turn to Paratransit. This is a huge issue. This is a huge issue paratransit, the paratransit services in a city like Toronto, and from what I understand elsewhere, are nowhere near comparable.

If you have to rely on them, it is nowhere near comparable to the service you get on mainstream. Stories are often heard of having to phone and dial and wait and dial to get through. Of waiting for a bus when the standard came along, it set consistent criteria across the province for qualifications, required a prompt application service.

System for determining whether you're eligible, and provides an independent appeal if you're refused. These are all good. And for the first time, it requires transit authorities to recognize and provide service to visitors to their community who qualify for para-transit in another community in Ontario. That's good. But it then leads to the transit authority huge discretion over who to decide is a visitor.

Well, to my mind, if you're there for one day, you're a visitor. If you got qualifications, that should be it. It shouldn't be open to them to say, sorry, you've gotta be visiting, you know, for a month, or whatever. I mean, it, it's an example of where they went too far that way.

The toughest issue, was what kind of guarantee of service. And what our community wanted was at least a guarantee of same day service. You call up, or next day service. You call up on Monday, you ask for a ride on Tuesday, you get a ride on Tuesday. And if you want to say we gotta call by 3 O'clock or whatever that's fine.

The transit authority wouldn't agree. What they got, what we got instead was a guarantee, of same day service next day service where available. Where available means nothing, means they'll give it to you if they can and if they don't, they don't. And you have no recourse. So it's, it's, it's, it's significantly inadequate.

The standard does require these transit authorities, running para-transit services, to put in their access plan, strategies to reduce wait times and so on, and that's. That's helpful. It requires giving notification of service delays. But that's gotta be if it's gonna be over 30 minutes. So, if they're gonna be 29 minutes, past the time when they pas the 30 minute window when they told you to be available to be picked up, they don't have to let you know.

They don't have to let you know. quickly. There are five minutes. Okay, quickly, for inner city trains you're entitled to you're entitled to one accessible vehicle, one accessible car per train, one accessible washroom. That's pretty inadequate. For there's some requirements for ferries and for school boards and so on.

But in the end, while helpful, this standard, if fully honored and fully implemented, will not achieve a fully accessible public transit system in 2025, or ever. So, while it's a step forward, and a lot of hurdles had to be overcome. It is not anywhere near enough. Let me conclude with just a few up to the minute things.

Number one we are, we have been, and we remain, I believe significantly behind the United States in accessibility. Generally. And as highlight example. in accessible public transit. Not to say the U.S. has got it all right, but they're considerably ahead of us. Number two, even though the new accessibility standard requires organizations like public transit authorities.

To take into account accessibility when setting up self-service electronic kiosks and procuring goods or serv, systems to be used by the public generally. They've gotta take into account accessibility. You may know that the government of Ontario sponsored. And is actively pressing municipalities to adopt the Presto smart card.

As a single card that you could use. To pay fares on various public transit systems. This Presto smart card was unveiled a few years ago. You could look at our website. We hit the roof because, for us, it is not a PRESTO smart card, it is a PRESTO dumb card.

It is full of barriers. For example, if you go to a transit station, you've got your card in your hand, you wanna find out what your balances, before you decide about getting on the train or the bus or whatever. You pop it in and at the time it was designed, it was gonna come up on a screen.

Blind people are just like sick people. Can't read the screen. There is available access technology to have it also talk. You could have an earphone jack, like bank machines have it, a number of banks, where you pop an earphone in and it speaks you through what's on the screen, so you have privacy.

When we presented this to the public. And by the way the the, the answer that the government initially said is. A, we have a commitment to make it accessible. Well that's great but you're not doing it. And B, they said we've consulted with people with disabilities on the design.

Well, the day after that hit the, the public arena, one of the people they consulted who is blind. Called me and sent me documentation to show, that they had been alerted months before that they had barriers in the system. So they committed to accessibility, consulted, and ignored it.

And as a result, we get complaint feedback from people with disabilities. Facing new barriers created with your money in the public transit system with the Presto smart card. Totally avoidable by the way. It wasn't that they you know, you might think, oh, did they just go out and buy an off-the-shelf system, and no, it didn't provide for these needs?

And the answer is, no. They had it custom-designed with these barriers. Now we raised this a couple years ago and they said oh we're gonna work on fixing it and we look forward to seeing the unveiling of a fully accessible solution. But I will tell you that I at the same time some years ago, I think it was 2010, I was on the Chicago subway and I, a friend of mine who's blind demonstrated.

That, the, the smart card system that have, it's been talking and accessible for years. So, this can be done. Let me conclude by telling you that this is a huge and ongoing issue. That there is a pressing need to fix this system. It goes without saying. That there's a pressing need to effectively enforce these standards goes without saying.

It is hugely troubling as I will address in another lecture in this series. That the government though it promised effective enforcement of this law, in all it's areas. Not just transportation but across the border. And even though it gave itself enforcement power under the Disabilitys' Act. Last fall was revealed by us not to be doing really anything, use those enforcement powers at all.

And in a terms of the customer service standard, not the transit one. I'm gonna update on that. But in terms of the customer service went, as of last fall, fully 70% of private sector employers. With over, with 20 or more employees, we're in demonstrated violation of the Customer Service Accessibility Standard Public Reporting requirement.

And the government knew it and hadn't taken any enforcement proceedings against any of them as of last fall. So, we got some uphill battles to fight. Am I pessimistic? I'm an eternal optimist. I'm totally an eternal optimist. We'll get there. But transportation will be a good illustration of the potential for gains, but the kinds of battles we have to fight to get there.

Thank you very much. Okay, so I gave the lecture for an hour, and I promised I would cover one thing, but I didn't get to it. So now, after the fact, I can tag on a little P.S., or post script, to cover what I shoulda covered, but time didn't let me cover, and that I promised I'd cover.

I said I would talk about, some of the requirements. That were imposed in the area of public transportation on municipalities. By the Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation that was passed in, in 2014. These deal with two areas accessible bus stops and accessible taxis. They're both really important. If bus stops aren't accessible.

Then what's the point riding a bus and getting on it if, if, if you can't get off alo, it stops along the way. You could only get off at the station at one end or the other end of the route. So, to that end the integrated accessibility standard regulation requires municipalities to each consult.

With their accessibility adviser committee. If they've got 10000 or more people in their community they have to have, such a committee and to do it they need a disability consultation. On standards and ways to address the need to ensure that bus stops and bus shelters are accessible. That essentially requires each municipality to reinvent the wheel rather than doing what we felt the standard should do.

Which is to require all municipalities to simply do an inventory of those stops and fix them and to set standards for what would be needed to make a stop accessible. It's better than nothing, but it's unfortunate that it requires each municipality to keep reinventing the wheel, rather than showing them what they've got to do.

The other area relates to accessible taxi cabs. Now, taxi cabs are hugely important because one can't always get on public transit, or it may not be running at the appropriate time. Or for a number of other reasons. Now the taxi industry presents a problem. Because so many taxis on the road are are not accessible to people with mobility needs.

By making them accessible they, they can accommodate a wide range of, of spectrum of, of people and and different needs. The taxi industry will argue that cars are owned by individuals, often not by the, by the taxi company. Sometimes they are owned by, or the license plate is owned by the taxi company.

And they'll also argue that the cost of accessible vehicles is, is, can be considerably higher than that of the, of the actual. Of a car that you buy that is not accessible. We have felt for a long time that this requires a more concerted strategy at the center.

We felt that if the Government, which bailed out the auto industry some years ago, had gone to the auto industry and, and said, can we come up with a design for an accessible cab. Have the province. Secure purchases of a large number that weigh less than that are annually actually purchased, but get a bulk discount price.

That we could drive down the costs of the the per unit cost of an accessible car and take that concern away from cab owners and cab companies. That's not to say the province actually has to go buy them and then go resell them. If the province could ascertain that, that I'm gonna make up a number, a 1000 new cabs are bought every year, then how about going to the auto industry, and coming up with a rate of, only 500 are bought?

And any more that's just gravy. but, but pick a number that is, that's even less than we know the demand to be and that can help drive down the per-unit cost. Now that would be a strategy potentially in parallel with the AODA, unfortunately we haven't seen that even though we did see that the government is prepared to.

Bail out the auto industry and often or I should say at times do, do, take measures to help. Ensure it stays in Canada. What we another thing that should make it easier to solve this problem is that every few years cars are traded in. And every year in one community or another new taxi licenses are being given out by people who don't have a taxi license now.

And they're scarce commodities. People. Want to get a new cab license, to put a new cab on the road. Our solution, was the standards should have specified what an accessible cab, must include, and it should require that every new taxi license go to. Only go to a person who is gonna put an accessible car on the road.

Therefore, it's not putting a burden on the, on the existing cab owners. But it's gonna get more accessible ones on the road. And if anything, the pressure will be on, existing cab owners to eventually wanna get an accessible car, in many contexts, so that they have access to a wider range of customers.

Also, a number of municipalities. Use successful cabs to help develop, deliver a pair of transit. The more that, that happens, and there's some debate in the wisdom of doing that, but the more that, that happens, the more at a the owner of a successful cab will have an assured and potentially steady supply of customers to make the purchase worthwhile and so on.

Anyway, what did we get. We didn't get any of these broad requirements. We got a series of requirements on municipalities, municipalities usually are licensing cabs and it provides a municipality to consult where they've got one with the accessibility advisory committee. On the number of accessible that they should that they need in their community.

And then it requires the municipality with, with the usual consultation kind of requirements that are built into the, the, with the standard. It requires them the municipality to include in their accessibility plan plans for increasing the number of accessible cabs on the road. So it's, it's, and it also requires them to to take certain other measures like dealing with the displaying of the the registration information on the rear bumper.

That's so the person won't take it, a passenger that you can and if you're sighted you can track them. And so the cab also provides on request accessible information about. Their identity and registration information. The burden for all of this is placed on municipalities. We therefore are left as disability advocates to have to lobby one municipality at a time and that's an un-, unnecessary and excessive burden.

We thought the standards should have set standards across the province. Rather than leaving it to the sweeping discretion in each municipality. We got something. We just didn't get anywhere near as much as we would have liked. Anyway, that's the end of the PS. And and the saga, of the campaign for accessible public transit continues.