The battle for Ontario's Disability Accessibility laws. Lessons learned about law, lawyering, legal education and scholarship. David Lepofsky, Chair. Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance. Delivered at the Osgoode Hall Law School January 29, 2014 as a Roy McMurtry Clinical Fellow.
>> Good afternoon everybody, it's, it's, it's it's a tremendous opportunity for me to spend a month at Osgoode Hall Law School's, Roy McMurtry Clinical Fellow, and it, it, it, it's especially humbling to be able to speak at a faculty seminar at my old alma mater where I had such a wonderful time back in the 70s learning to be a lawyer.

I wanna dedicate the lecture series that I'm giving while here to Roy McMurtry. As the attorney general who I knew, both first by name and then working in his ministry he defined what was the attorney general for me for the first nine years that I studied and then practiced law.

And then became later the, the Court of Appeal Chief Justice, an embodied justice in what he did. He is a paradigm of public service. He is the role model of public service for me. It is especially meaningful for me to have a fellowship that's named after him. I will try to live up to that honor.

While I work by day for the Government, I'm speaking in my personal capacity. I'm supposed to say that, so I just did.
>> [LAUGH].
>> [COUGH] Every once in awhile the accessibility gods look down on me and say okay, today, you deserve to have something handed to you that will help the battle.

It happened today. In fact it started a couple of days ago, I got a call a couple of days ago from a reporter I know at the Toronto Star saying that they were going to do a story about a woman in a wheelchair who trying to take a one hour bus on a well known inner city bus line it turned out into be a four hour ordeal.

With broken down accessibility equipment, sounded like possibly staff who aren't properly trained in how to use it, improper follow-up, and eventually, being left having to sit for a long stretch outside, stuck on the accessibility equipment that wasn't working, or whatever, in the freezing cold, while needing to go to the bathroom.

Not the usual ride on an inner city bus that people without disabilities would expect. I was asked for a response, and that article ran in today's newspaper in the Toronto Star, and you have a copy of it. And it, I don't say the Gods look down kindly. I, it is horrible this woman had this happen.

It's just these sorts of things do happen too often. This one got to the media and they were prepared to report on it. And I was approached to comment. Let me talk to you about what I've learned in my years of doing disability advocacy, about the law, about legal, legal advocacy or lawyering.

About legal education and finally about legal scholarship. And I wanna come back to apply all of that to the newspaper story I just told you about and for which you, of which you have a copy. Now in explaining this I have to emphasize that in none of the situations where I've played a community organizing advocacy and leadership role, have I been acting as a lawyer.

In fact, I am most decidedly not a lawyer in my coalition. And I have any of our legal positions lawyered by generous probono legal council. But I do draw on the skills and knowledge I learned to become a lawyer and I did draw on the expertise I tried to develop in how to be persuasive, which is in essence what lawyers do.

And I hope that this experience will help highlight things that we might be able to do here at this law school and others as well to share this kind of knowledge and expertise with others about the law. So we were delighted and honor, delighted, we were indeed ecstatic in 1982 when through the community efforts of many, I was one of many, we got disability included in the Ontario human right codes ban on discrimination in employment housing and so on, in, and also get a disability to the equality rights guarantee to the charter rights of freedoms.

And I as I embarked on my legal career started doing what many of us did which was writing articles trying to figure out what equality means from a disability perspective or others. And speaking at law conferences and law schools and, and to judges and students and lawyers. But over time as we found that these laws, though well defined, weren't being effectively implemented.

I started thinking along with others involved in my, what was to become my the coalition I've led and served in various incarnations. Started thinking that maybe we should be rethinking what equality means for people with disabilities. I started to think afresh about the law. And, it wasn't that the articles we wrote in the 80s were wrong, or the lectures we gave missed the point, or the case law that was developing was deficient.

It's just that they weren't being effectively implemented. And that, of itself, drove some of us to start thinking, we'd better think afresh. So some of the new legal ideas that came directly from the community organizing and legislative advocacy I was involved in for the Disabilities Act later for reforms the elections act, reforms the human rights code and so on, included these ideas.

Ideas that I think are equally worthy of consideration in the in the sphere of law journal writing, legal debate, and legal critique. First a new way to think about what equality means of itself, or what it seeks to achieve. We decided to redefine it from the disability perspective as achieving a barrier-free society in which all people with disabilities could participate.

It's not a hugely novel concept, but it crystallizes it in a sharp and focused way that channeled a lot of our activities. It's not that we're against the use of the word discrimination, but we don't talk about it. Rather, we talk about the fact that we have a society full of barriers that face people with physical, mental, or sensory disabilities.

And that our goal, a measurable goal, is to get the old barriers removed. And the new ones prevented. That leads me to the second legal idea. The old way of thinking about equality that you'll see permeates the case law and the lectures, and discussions, and academic writings. In the case of the charter it's about legislative distinction.

When can the legislature draw a distinction. In another context, removing barriers. Well in my glib moments I say I never had a distinction draw against me in my life as a blind person. But I have experienced barriers. So we found that it was useful to get away from that language and talking about about removing barriers.

But we went further. The old way of thinking was to just talk about the existing barriers and why we should remove them, because of course, who would ever think about ever creating a new one? We know better. Wrong. We came to realize that as quickly as we were tearing down old barriers, new ones were being created.

And so yet another legal concept that we added to the dialogue was that equality met a barrier-free society which all are barriers are identified and removed, and new ones are prevented.
>> [COUGH]
>> And in fact, changing the channel from just removing all barriers. Oh, my God, what does that cost.


>> [LAUGH]
>> To let's prevent new barriers. Hey, who would waste money creating new barriers? Change the entire discussion. Not that old barriers can't be fixed or shouldn't be fixed, but it shifted the ground in our direction. That's not all. The old way of thinking about equality rights and human rights that you'll see pervades a lot of the case law is a static snapshot point in time.

The employee needs an accommodation, the employer can't, doesn't provide it, could they do so at that time without undue hardship. If they could, the employer loses. If they couldn't, the employee is out of luck, now and for good. Static snapshot pathological, if you will, in the sense of looking at a scene and saying what should have happened?

We decided that's the wrong way to think about it as a matter of law. We decided instead that it was important to start thinking in terms of a dynamic process over time. Not could you accommodate that one moment and if not that one moment because it would undo hardship at that one moment rather why don't we say, could you accommodate ever?

If you can't do it right away, then could you do it over time? What? You can't do it one year, what about two? That's an undue hardship. What about three? Are you saying you couldn't do it in 500 years? Okay the person won't be alive but others will have the same need.

'Kay. So 500 years is possible immediately not, now we're just debating over the timeline. By shifting the discussion about equality, from old barriers to also new barriers, and from snapshots in time to how long do you need, we changed the conception of equality and the focus of the discussion.

The result was a movement for a disability act that aims to achieve a barrier free society, it set a deadline, 2025, and then allows for timelines to be set tied to specific barriers in different organizational sizes. So the change in conceiving what equality means ended up leading to significant legal or legislative results.

Those are just a couple of the ideas that we brought to the table that, that are new. But there are others that I'd say I, I've myself have learned about the law. We used to think about the law as just the law. Here's a rule. And that's it.

And, if it's a problem, what will fix it? But, when we sat down to develop the Disabilities Act, we, we found out that there's actually a more, another question that we, we really hadn't applied our mind to. And it turns out, others really hadn't either. When it came time to design the law, to figure out what should be in it.

The question arose, what regulatory regime will actually work? What will change human behavior? Two things come from this, first it was quickly determined that nobody is actually, at least that we could find out, and we were guided by a team of law professors at the University of Toronto, headed by a guy named Sausan, you may have heard of him, who donated their time and their expertise to help us think through how to do this.

It was not, there was no side by side taste test examination of different legislative or regulatory regimes to see which actually works better. Administrative law professors and lawyers, judges and commentators talk about principles of judicial review or hone in on one regime or another, labor law or environmental law and so on.

And look at the details. But try to find a look at all of them and say, hey, this one work really well. That one over there not so much. Here's what works here. Here's what doesn't work over there so that we could pick and choose and figure out what worked.

We had to do that by the seat of our pants. But if you think about it, that's a legitimate legal question. If you're designing different regulatory regimes, shouldn't we be figuring out which ones work? That in turn drives us to another level of legal inquiry. Which isn't legal inquiry at all.

See ultimately, what this presents us with, is the question, what actually changes human behavior? Our goal is to get businesses in the private sector and government agencies in the public sector to actually do things differently. We knew that the barriers they are leaving in place and new ones they're creating are pretty much illegal under the charter of the human rights code.

But they're not being fixed. So we want to figure out what kind of law would actually change their behavior sounds like a legal question. But the closer you look it becomes a psychological question. The question of what will, what stimuli will actually change human behavior is a question of psychology.

So this became, this lead to a way, a new way of thinking for me about the law which is trying to figure out what to create that will actually stimulate changes in human behaviour by asking the people who study human behaviour. I'll give you a tiny little example of something I did on this score.

Not only this building I put when I was fighting the Toronto Transit Commission to get them to announce, you know, route stops. It seemed to me that the TTC was so intransigent that I needed remedies, not only to order them to call route stops for the benefit of the blind people and also sighted people who aren't paying attention to where they are, which basically means everybody at some point but.

What will get the TTC to not put up such a recalcitrant fight against the obvious and the beneficial? I, I talked to some lawyers about different options for remedies and nobody came up with anything new. Now the choice of what's a good remedy is usually a legal question.

I ended up instead talking to an organizational psychologist I know. He said, essentially, get them in their proverbial pocketbooks. Get them in a way that will make them accountable. This led, among other things, to the, as far as I know, the first remedy ever. This is in a case I brought personally, not for my coalition.

The first remedy ever that ordered an organization, here the TTC, to have to amend its annual performance review documents for all of its senior managers to require inclusion of a, of an annual performance review on disability accommodation accessibility. And that in turn was to be taken into account in pay and promotion decisions.

So a new legal remedy, but the idea came from psychologists. It's a new way of thinking about law as far as I'm concerned. It's not new in the sense that there's a whole discipline within psychology that studies law in psychology and there are legal academics that study it.

But, in the area in the kind of advocacy we're doing, it was, for me, an entirely new insight. So that's just a snapshot of some of the new ways of new legal ideas to, that leaped at me from the work that we've been doing. What about loitering? Or perhaps, because I'm not the lawyer for my coalition I should say, the activity of advocacy.

I, I'm gonna be giving other lectures on, in this series that are gonna be going onto greater details. And there's gonna be a couple examples. First, we lawyers are verbose. In fact, my nickname at law school was David Verbosky. Richly deserved. We're lucky in a, in a, in a court case you get a certain amount of time.

In the Supreme Court of Canada, you get an hour. If you're an intervener, you get ten minutes. On CBC you might get three sentences, and on the front page of the, or whatever page it was in the Star today, and I indeed got two or three sentences. It is an entire new approach to the persuasion activity that is at the essence of what lawyers do, or any other advocates do.

To learn to get to the point and to do it in a way that's punchy and to do it a way that's effective and to do it in a way that's extremely brief and for someone who's listening to the newspaper, reading the newspaper, listening to to a radio while they're doing something else, while their distracted it's not just a matter of it's gotta be persuasive.

It's got to be persuasive enough that a reporter decides that, that's the quote to include and its got to be able to reach out to a person who's doing other things and not studying carefully the way a judge would study a factum and its got to grab them and persuade them.

It's a form of, rhetoric that is entirely form, foreign to what we lawyers learn to do in our court practices. And by the way, I will tell you that what I have learned of doing it, and I'm still and always learning has actually helped me in my day job arguing cases in court.

The kind of lead line I might use in a in a radio interview with the appropriate ethical constraints, it's also the kind of line I'm increasingly finding I wanna use in an oral argument eh, in a courtroom. What I've also so that's just the, be able to make your point in three sentences, or if you're lucky, three minutes is a whole new insight into persuasion, the only time you ever saw it before, well I should say we've all seen it in other contexts, but as, when lawyer shows are shown on TV, and somebody does a billion summations, a jury in three minutes, and we're not so good at that.

But on the other hand, it's a skill, it's a skill worth developing. And I'm always working on it, as are my colleagues. Another thing that's unusual is, who do you represent? In the case of a lawyer, in a traditional lawyer relationship, you've got an identified client, an individual or an organization.

When you're doing community advocacy, you are trying to advance the interest of an entire community. And you'll never be able to meet with, talk with, or even directly communicate even electronically with the vast majority of them. That imposes on someone in an advocacy role a whole new range of burdens.

You can't just say anything cause you think it's good. It's gotta be something that is reflective as best you can tell of what as many people within that community may think, from meetings, from email exchanges, from other discussions, from a whole unfolding number of months or years of interacting with that community.

And the discipline when you're doing community advocacy is not just the discipline of a, in a traditional lawyer relationship, of a client saying hey, you know, that isn't my position. In the case of community organizing you take a position that, that doesn't work for the community, they're gonna be on the phone to the, the media or they're gonna be on Twitter or on Facebook or on the Internet pointing out what's wrong and why this is not the appropriate.

And, and there goes your, your, your credibility and your community organization's effectiveness. So a whole new relationship in terms of consensus building and formulating a position underpins what we do. One of the things that in other lectures that kinda deal with this more that we do do, and it's, I think, unusual, if not outright weird is before we submit a brief to the government on something, we will actually draft a draft brief, posted on the internet, email and Tweet it out, and invite people for input.

So the government knows, the media knows, people who might not share our, our interests all know what we're thinking about before we decide it's our position. Then we get input, and then we release a final product. It's a great way to field test ideas. It's totally unusual. I mean, how many lawyers file a draft factum with the court while they're thinking it through, and send it to their opponent just in case you're wondering what we might argue, here's my draft.

You just don't do that. It would be crazy. But we do, and it works. What else could I tell you that we've learned about about the, the craft of advocacy? There's an entire challenge of how to frame an argument. Not so it will appeal to a a narrow spectrum of folks called judges.

I'm not saying judges are narrow, but they, they come to a problem with a, a, a bandwidth of, of thinking that they learned in law school and from law practice and that are governed by, by appellate decisions. Instead, we've gotta craft arguments that will be persuasive in the community and to the government when you've only got that three minute window at times.

And they've got to address and respond to what might be dwelling in the governments' minds, or in journalists' minds, anticipating and responding to it. It's a different world of persuasion. And it's not like litigating. It's not a matter of always saying oh, they say this, they're wrong. If you're always negative, you blow your credibility.

If you are engaging in this kind of persuasive activity, sometimes it's a matter of just trying to sniff out what the other side or the, if it's a recalcitrant government, what their major issue is, and being able to deal with it, or tactically decide not to deal with it.

During the years that the Mike Harris conservatives didn't want to deliver the Disability Act, they promised, our lead line, aside from showing the merits of why we need a Disabilities Act, is to keep emphasizing that Mike Harris promised it and said he was the premiere who'd keep all his promises.

We printed every news release we could on the flip side of his letter to us promising the act. That letter was a form of persuasion. The back side of the page was a form of persuasion. I knew that message was working because I had people quietly calling," me from the government saying, you really shouldn't make that point about us breaking our promise all the time, it really doesn't help you.

When they tell me, it doesn't help you, you know it's helping. The government's answer over those years was not to say, no we didn't promise it and not to say, no we didn't need the law, their answer all, almost all the time was, we spend $8 billion annually on people with disabilities.

It's the Santa Claus claim. Now a litigation way of thinking is, that argument is legally irrelevant and let me prove why it's wrong anyway. But you don't want to in the, in the community advocacy world, you don't want to get trapped into that debate. You don't answer it.

Why? It is irrelevant and it's trying to change the channel. I understand why they tried to change the channel. We just kept trying to change it back. You promised it and said you'd resign if you didn't keep you promise and, by the way, this is a law that helps everyone.

We just stuck to our message rather than responding to that claim. And, you know, if, if your training is in litigation, it's really hard to not answer an argument that keeps getting thrown at you, but on that point, it was the smart tactic persuasive technique to use. I could give you tons of other examples, time is scarce.

Let me let me say this. One final thing I will tell you in the area of, in terms of advocacy that's really important. That I'll give you as an illustration for now, is just knowing to jump onto opportunity when it comes along. Half the time, you know, when you're in a, involved in a traditional law practice you, got a claim, it goes to court, you know where to go, and you make your arguments.

When you're not playing the role of lawyer, there is no quote, client. And there's a longer term agenda. You never know all of which pieces are actually gonna work, and often the opportunities that come along are the least expected, but you learn to grab them, and they may look like bad news, but you turn them in to useful tools.

In my conclusion, I'll give you an example of how the article in today's Star illustrates this. Let me turn third, to what I've learned about legal education. My presence during my Roy McMurtry Clinical Fellowship is, I believe, the best illustration of this. We don't, was kind enough to invite me to give the opening lecture on the first day of law school for the first year class in their ethical lawyering course.

And he invited me to speak about doing community organizing and social justice advocacy as a form of ethical lawyering. And I have to emphasize that that includes being in a role like mine, which is not strictly speaking, legal council. But drawing on ones experience as a lawyer to play a role of a community advocate, or organizer, or leader.

I was, and am, deeply honored to have done that. The lecture now on YouTube has been tweeted and re-tweeted to many people a, around the world. I hope it is of value to others beyond the law school. The message I tried to drive home that day was that in law school, we do and we must teach what courts do.

And how to think about legal problems as they are argued in courts and resolved in courts. But there is a whole vast array of legal problems which will never get to court because people can't afford a lawyer and can't afford to go to court. In the case of the accessibility act, we're dealing with cases of barriers that are, should be removed but aren't, or are being created when they should have been prevented.

All of which, pretty much, violate the human right code or the charter rights of both. But they aren't being litigated because many people don't want to go through the ordeal of bringing those kind of cases like I had to go through against the TTC, not once, but twice; that Donna Jodhanna, a blind woman, had to go through to force the Federal Government to make their web sites accessible to our access technology.

So, what we've what, what we need to do I believe is to open up the legal education process to provide an opportunity for law students to learn how to, to advance use the law and to use our unique kind of advocacy skills that we're trained in to advance social justice causes, in the court of public opinion, or the legislature, or other kind of venues for community advocacy.

Let me just give you a couple of ideas that I think you might draw on for this. This isn't a how to do it kind of thing, though there are parts of that that would be worthwhile. But the various aspects of what I've been able to teach about have become relevant.

You've got copies of lectures I've given here, a list of the lectures I've been giving here. In as diverse areas as constitutional law class, in administrative law, regulatory policy, legal process, discrimination of the law, disability rights and so forth. There's even a course on negotiations and mediation. This, these kind of issues cut across such a wide swath.

And that's just talking about disability. If you pick another area of social justice advocacy, it would cut across the same or similar or other courses. There is ample room for rich principled analysis in deciding how to frame an argument when you're sitting across the table from a cabinet minister or at a legislative committee table as opposed to in a court room.

Moreover, there is, there are ample opportunities to discover new areas of legal scholarship and investigation that we haven't thought of before. I'll give you one illustration. Now, in the olden days we would think that the charter rights guarantees equal rights for people with disabilities. That means the government has to make sure their laws complied.

And when the courts comes up with a new decision with ground breaking content like Eldridge and BC back in 1997 that finding a deaf women in an emergency ward needing to give birth prematurely had a constitutional right to an interpreter, sign language interpreter, government funded. By going further and saying the government had duty to take into account the needs of people with disabilities when they design and operate programs.

Now, when they, court said that, you've got a duty to take into account the needs of people with disabilities when you design and operate government programs even if they're delivered by private sector organizations like hospitals. You've thought governments should of sat down and reviewed all their laws, all their practice to make sure they got in line.

Far as we know, they didn't. 2004 we asked the government to include such a requirement in the disabilities act. They refused. 2007 we asked the three political parties in Ontario to include this as a requirement or as a, as a practice. Would they please undertake to review all preventual laws of, statutes of regulation for accessibility barriers.

They agreed to. Took them til 2010 or 2011 to get started, but this was a whole new adventure. Think of this as being, fighting about a 1000 charter cases at once. But without a court and you might not even, as an advocate, even be in the room. So what do you do?

Well we realized there was no tool to help the people who were gonna do this legislative review. So I got together with a, a fabulous legal scholar, Randall Graham, a graduate of this law school and now teaches interpretation and other subjects at Western and we co-wrote an article on how to draft legislation or how to review legislation for accessibility barriers.

It's a whole new, line of thinking. We didn't know what we were doing to start with. And we came up with brand-new ideas. It's in the National Journal of Constitutional Law version and an Oxford Statutory Interp Journal. And it could be the basis of other contributions by other people, think of new ideas of how to do it.

We could teach this in a law school by giving for example specific legislation for people to review and contemplate what kinds of barriers there might be and how you might draft to get around it. In fact that's exactly what we do when I have done training sessions with professor Graham for stature, legislative drafters and various parts of this country.

This could be the spot a starting point for a whole new area of law school teaching and legal thinking. All to help advance a cause that, in the 80s, we were writing law journals about, law journal articles about just in terms of fighting over or wrestling with what equality should mean.

This idea of a legislative review and writing articles or giving lectures or offering exercises on, on how to review legislation is not only new turf But it's rich turf I believe for for legal education. I'm gonna take you back to an earlier part of my talk for just a moment to say it also involves an opportunity to rethink the law, to rethink legal concepts.

See, inequality, we used to talk about discrimination. Now we talk about prevent, removing and preventing barriers. In the area of accessibility to products, goods and services, there's a new concept called universal design. The old concept was, dry out, draw, create an operating system, I won't mention any names, but like Windows, that doesn't have any accessibility built in and then we've gotta go have some special adaptive tech company create a new, screen reader that we can buy for hundreds dol, hundreds of dollars, potentially, to enable our computer to read to us.

That's the old way of thinking. The new way of thinking is build accessibility in. Make it usable by everybody. It's called universal design. I won't mention any names, but by initials, Apple Corporation did just that. If you have an Apple computer, if you have a Mac Book, if you have an iPhone, if you have an iPad, if you have an iPod Touch, they all have a screen reader.

One keystroke, I can be using it too. And I don't have to pay an extra dime for it. When Randall and I sat down to come up with our article, we decided to offer a new concept, to be the bedrock for this new exploration of legislative drafting and review.

We talked about working towards principles of universal design in legislation. There is so much room for more creative ideas here. We just started. Let me finally turn to what I think might be, worthy areas for future effort in the area of legal scholarship. Needless to say, we need to document more of what's being done to fight the campaign for accessibility, what's being won, what's being lost, and what better ideas might be put on the table.

I've done some of that in writing. I hope to do more and I'm hoping the lectures series I'm giving will be at least a first and rough draft. But it would be really great to have more people contributing to it who, unlike me, aren't an insider of the process.

While I think there's a unique value to be offered when you did see it happen, there's also an important unique value to be offered by those who are outside of the process and who can critically look, judge, and comment on what those of us fought for, won or lost, and might've done differently.

I think that there's room for legal scholarship in how to effectively teach this in law schools. We have the bedrock at Osgood Hall for this by the various co, courses like the ones where I've given guest lectures, and through the intensive programs and through the fabulous Osgood public interest requirement.

I'm fortunate to have four fantastic students working with me through that program. And we're, we're finding great ways to take this and operationalize it and real problems that provide a chance for students to really help us, but also themselves learn and apply the training they're, and the concepts, that they're learning in law school.

There is ample opportunity for that. But let's go further. There's room for legal scholarship in the area of how to assess the competitive ef-, or the relative effectiveness of different l-, regulatory regimes, of which kind of regimes actually changed, regulatory regimes actually changed human behavior, cross disciplinary work with law and psychology, law and business studies, law and critical disabilities studies, there's a wide range of opportunities for us to bring rich scholarship and creative minds together to learn and to offer new thoughts to be shared with others.

So let me conclude by getting back to where I started, the article today. It's an illustration of so much of what I just said. For one thing, as a disability community advocate, I've learned that the media doesn't cover issues. They cover events. You call up the newspaper and say, hey, hot off the presses, we have inaccessible public transit.

They won't run the story. But if a woman who's stuck in a bus or on a lift for upwards of, you know, minutes, hours, whatever the story relates in the freezing cold, and can't get where she wanted to go, and has to go to the bathroom, and it's just a chain of problems.

And then you point to the provisions of the accessibility regulation that's supposed to prevent all of this. There's a story. And part of the training I've had to acquire on the run is knowing when one of those stories comes. And, learning how to use it. So, you'll see that when, when the reporter says, what do you say about this I can't comment on the specific facts.

I'm not there and my coalition can't investigte it. We weren't there and we don't have the resources. But, what we can do is try to educate the reporter to what we want in the Disabilities Act which is not being enforced. We have a huge agenda trying to get the government to effectively enforce the Disabilities Act and they're not and they promised they would.

So to tie it to a big agenda item was point number one that comes to mind, because, but that involves analyzing the problem not, from the traditional, is this a violation of the human rights code, is this a violation of the charter of rights. Like most of our, if not all of our cases that we deal with, it's the, it's, it's an easy case.

What went on just shouldn't have happened. But instead, it's a matter of figuring out how to tie this in a way that will advance our agenda. And at the same time be appealing to a journalist as relevant to their article. In the end what happened was the report, the reporter called a a spokesperson for the government minister involved.

And as you can see in the quotation the minister the, the article quoted us as saying we've been asking the government to have a phone number we can call, so when these things happen, we can ask that the Disability Act be enforced. Not seeking a guarantee they'll enforce every single complaint, but at least to alert them to it, so they can decide whether it's worth following up.

And what the government spokesperson said in response is, oh, you can file a human rights complaint. Well, that's gonna help us in the long run. It's an appalling answer. It's an appalling answer because the very reason the Disability Act was enacted was to reduce the need for us to file individual human rights complaints and fight bears one at a time.

But it's an appalling answer that helps us show why the government needs to effectively enforce the law. The minister's spokesperson's own answer illustrates the poignant and the article and the events it relates illustrate the poignancy, if not the cruelty of the ineffective enforcement of this legislation and their failure to live up to the very reasons the law was passed.

By saying it that clearly, it is much easier to show why they are consummately wrong. I look forward to completing my, my fellowship here. I hope this is an opportunity for others to weigh in on these topics and to add their perspectives, to share other avenues or other activities they've been in, in community organizing.

I'm just but one player and my coalition is pers, advancing but one perspective. I can't say we're the best. We can't say we're the most effective. We've made lots of mistakes for which people might generously learn as we try to. But I hope that we can combine with the experience of others to help enrich the education of law students.

So when their time comes, they can do more of this kind of advocacy too. Thank you very much.