AODA Alliance
Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance Update
United for a Barrier-Free Ontario for All People with Disabilities
Website: www.aodaalliance.org
Email: aodafeedback@gmail.com
Twitter: @aodaalliance
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/aodaalliance
AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky’s January Column in Toronto Star’s Metroland Publications Around Ontario Focuses on the Need for All Ontario Parties to Make the “Accessible Ontario Pledge” in the Upcoming Election
January 26, 2025
SUMMARY
Today, the Toronto Star’s Metroland publications around Ontario published AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky’s monthly disability rights column for January 2025. Read that column below.
Today’s column introduced readers to the Accessible Ontario Pledge that the AODA Alliance made public at a Queen’s Park news conference on January 6, 2025. We are now campaigning to get all Ontario political parties to make the Accessible Ontario Pledge. So far, only the Green party has done so.
How You Can Help
- Circulate the January 2025 Metroland disability rights column to your friends, family members, and anyone you meet casually. Encourage them to take it into account when they consider their vote in the upcoming Ontario election, to be called next Wednesday.
- Use social media to spread the word about this new column. If you use Twitter, just follow @aodaalliance or @davidlepofsky and retweet our tweets about it. If you are on Facebook, you can easily follow the AODA Alliance Facebook page and share our posts about this Metroland column that you will find there! Similarly, AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky regularly posts about our activities on his LinkedIn page. Please share those posts, if you use LinkedIn.
- Email a letter to the editor, no longer than 300 words, at Metroland. Please tell them about disability barriers you face and about why this issue is important in this election. Thank Metroland for carrying this monthly disability rights column. Write them at thenewsroom@metroland.com
Twenty-five days have already passed since Ontario failed to meet the January 1, 2025 deadline for becoming accessible to people with disabilities set by the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act. Ontario now has no comprehensive plan in place that will lead Ontario to become accessible to Ontarians with disabilities. Help us get all parties to commit to the Accessible Ontario Pledge!
MORE DETAILS
Simcoe.com January 26, 2025
Originally posted at https://www.simcoe.com/opinion/columnists/accessible-ontario-pledge-offers-next-step-for-disability-advocates-bent-on-change/article_d0757f26-d12c-5d26-a50f-4a753184db8a.html
Accessible Ontario Pledge offers next step for disability advocates bent on change
We are more determined than ever to get the accessible province we were legislatively promised 20 years ago, writes David Lepofsky.
By David Lepofsky
David Lepofsky is chair of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance.
When many people woke on New Year’s Day with their own personal resolutions, a group of Ontarians with disabilities had one specific goal in mind.
And it’s all because a solemn legislative promise to the 2.9 million Ontarians with disabilities has been broken.
We’re furious, but we’re tenacious.
Two decades ago, the Ontario Legislature unanimously promised that by Jan. 1, 2025, the Ontario government would lead this province to become accessible to people with all kinds of disabilities when it passed the historic Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA).
The AODA is Canada’s first comprehensive disability accessibility law. On May 10, 2005, MPPs gave the passage of that landmark law a resounding standing ovation.
The AODA has brought about some progress, but far less than Ontario could have achieved.
Ontarians awoke on New Year’s Day in 2025 to a province that is still brimming with many preventable and soul-crushing disability barriers when we people with disabilities try to get a job, ride public transit, get health care services, go to school or university, or simply use public sidewalks.
Some of those barriers are described in extraordinary detail in last month’s Metroland “Restricted Access” series.
Over the past 15 years, disability advocates and government-appointed experts repeatedly forewarned government after government and minister after minister the 2025 deadline would be missed unless successive governments ramped up this issue as a priority and effectively implemented the AODA.
And we weren’t the only ones.
Unfair recurring barriers that too often victimize people with disabilities were documented in government-appointed independent reviews of the AODA in 2015, 2019, and 2023.
Those recommendations weren’t followed.
We are more determined than ever to get the accessible province we were legislatively promised 20 years ago.
Last November, individuals with disabilities gave wrenching accounts of disability barriers to Ontario’s four political parties at community public hearings at Queen’s Park.
We know how to fix this mess.
Earlier this month, we went to Queen’s Park to unveil the “Accessible Ontario Pledge” which we sent to Ontario’s party leaders. You can watch our news conference on YouTube.
The Accessible Ontario Pledge would lead this province to become accessible as soon as possible after the legislated 2025 deadline.
Over the past 30 years, each Ontario political party has turned to our movement to share its expertise on achieving an accessible Ontario when the AODA was being written and afterwards when it was being implemented.
Our predecessor coalition led the fight from 1994 to 2005 to get the Disabilities Act passed. We, at the AODA Alliance, led the uphill battle to get the AODA effectively implemented.
Our proposed Accessible Ontario Pledge draws on all our accumulated experience and expertise.
Our new Accessible Ontario Pledge lays out a comprehensive 10-point plan and specific deadlines for the government to put in place all the accessibility standards needed to achieve the accessible province people with disabilities have been legislatively promised.
It is carefully crafted to ensure the AODA’s effective enforcement, to provide obligated organizations with much-needed free technical assistance on needed accessibility, to effectively deploy other levers of government power and to make sure there is no backsliding on accessibility.
If Premier Doug Ford calls a spring election, we ask the parties to make the Accessible Ontario Pledge as part of their campaigns.
Ontario’s Green Party has made the Accessible Ontario Pledge. Now we turn our attention to getting the other provincial parties to sign on to it.
And what if no spring Ontario election is called?
In 2022, the Ford government won a mandate to govern up to June 2026. We turn to the Ford government to make the Accessible Ontario Pledge now and to immediately start implementing it.
The AODA did not vanish on New Year’s Day and neither did our non-partisan grassroots movement.
The media is asking us “What comes next?” Our Accessible Ontario Pledge is our constructive answer.
Our battle continues — we’re determined.
David Lepofsky is a retired lawyer who chairs the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance, and is a visiting professor of disability rights at the law schools at Western and the University of Ottawa.