AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky’s Monthly Metroland Column Asks Why Toronto’s New Armoury Street Courthouse was Built With So Many Disability Barriers

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 Monthly Metroland Column Asks Why Toronto’s New Armoury Street Courthouse was Built With So Many Disability Barriers

 

September 13, 2024

 

SUMMARY

 

In his monthly column in the Toronto Star’s Metroland publications around Ontario, AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky asks why the Ontario Government built a new mega-courthouse in the heart of downtown Toronto that has so many accessibility barriers impeding people with disabilities. You can read the article below. You can also watch the AODA Alliance’s captioned online video, published last month on YouTube, which shows and describes these barriers a 14-minute version and a more detailed 49-minute version.

 

What You Can Do to Help

 

Call or write your member of the Ontario Legislature. Press them to ask the Government in the Legislature why this courthouse was built disregarding accessibility advice provided before any shovels went in the ground. It could well be that the same people who designed these barriers or approved them are now designing or approving more public buildings, built with public money.

 

Learn more about the AODA Alliance’s years of advocacy to tear down the barriers people with disabilities still face in the built environment by visiting the AODA Alliance website’s built environment page.

 

Only 110 days remain until 2025, the deadline for the Ontario Government to lead Ontario to become accessible to people with disabilities. Have you seen Doug Ford’s plan for achieving this? We haven’t

MORE DETAILS

 

 

Metroland Papers September 13, 2024

 

Originally posted at: https://www.toronto.com/opinion/contributed/new-mega-courthouse-in-ontario-has-serious-accessibility-problems-how-did-this-happen/article_d549c130-caf7-5e08-8c2d-9475ab3cb15a.html

 

Opinion

 

New mega-courthouse in Ontario has serious accessibility problems. How did this happen?

 

BY DAVID LEPOFSKY

 

David Lepofsky is a retired lawyer who chairs the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance.

 

Toronto’s new downtown courthouse is a shocking example. Built by the province with almost a billion dollars of public money, it replaces six courthouses around Canada’s largest city.

 

I recently made public a video that exposes examples of these serious entirely preventable disability barriers. I’m your blind tour guide, describing the barriers. I show barriers hurting people with blindness, low vision, hearing disabilities, mobility disabilities, autism, dyslexia, chronic fatigue or pain, and others.

 

For example, there’s far too little disability parking for court attendees with disabilities. Provisions for people with disabilities waiting for accessible public transit are seriously inadequate. It’s far too difficult for us blind people to even find the building’s front door or to navigate parts of the building. The main floor help desk and third floor Court Services Office have obvious violations of Ontario’s accessibility laws. Braille washroom signage is full of inaccuracies, such as labelling some inaccessible washrooms as “universal.”

 

The non-partisan Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance and others forewarned the government about many of these barriers before shovels went into the ground.

Using public money to create these new disability barriers is an affront to the rights of people with disabilities under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Ontario Human Rights Code.

 

The province said it wanted this courthouse to be disability accessible and it does include some good accessibility features. However, these are dramatically overshadowed by the blunders.

 

Months after this building opened, the province hired two different accessibility consulting firms to advise it on how to fix the mess. Why didn’t the province listen to the accessibility advice it received from accessibility consultants and the disability community before construction had started?

 

Most people mistakenly think that the Ontario Building Code requires all new buildings to be disability accessible. Our video shows this isn’t so. We’ve so often called on the province to substantially strengthen and effectively enforce Ontario’s laws on building accessibility, including the Ontario Building Code and the Disabilities Act’s accessibility standards.

 

This video also shows how some design professionals (like architects) can be dramatically out of touch with the needs of 2.9 million Ontarians with disabilities. I’ve told architecture students that they won’t want to ever design a building that ends up in one of our videos.

 

This new video follows in the cyber-footsteps of the success of three earlier AODA Alliance videos — Toronto Metropolitan University’s Student Learning Centre, several new or renovated Toronto-area public transit stations and Centennial College’s Culinary Arts Centre — available on the alliance’s website.

 

Over the past decade, three successive government-appointed independent reviews called on the province to treat barriers in the built environment as a priority. The most recent report told the province more than a year ago that Ontario is in an accessibility crisis. To date, the province has failed to take the needed action to fix this, or to even acknowledge that there is an accessibility crisis. All Ontarians suffer as a result.

 

This billion-dollar accessibility bungle shows what happens when Ontario has weak and ineffectively enforced built environment accessibility regulations, when design professionals have inadequate accessibility training or give accessibility too little priority, when the government ignores its grand promises on accessibility, and when there are insufficient accessibility safeguards tied to Ontario’s massive infrastructure spending.

 

It shows how far Ontario still must go to live up to the promise of the landmark 2005 Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, for which we people with disabilities fought so hard from 1994 to 2005. It requires the Ontario government to lead this province to become accessible to people with disabilities by 2025.