AODA Alliance Welcomes Premier Ford to His Second Term by Listing His Job Duties as Premier to Lead Ontario to Become Accessible to Ontarians with Disabilities

Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance Update

United for a Barrier-Free Society for All People with Disabilities

Twitter: @aodaalliance

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AODA Alliance Welcomes Premier Ford to His Second Term by Listing His Job Duties as Premier to Lead Ontario to Become Accessible to Ontarians with Disabilities

June 22, 2022

SUMMARY

For a second time, Doug Ford has won a job competition for the position of Premier of Ontario. He must fulfil the duties in the Premier’s job description. The Premier’s job includes fulfilling his duties to over 2.6 million Ontarians with disabilities under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act.

We want to help. We therefore just wrote Premier Ford. In our letter, set out below, we congratulate him on winning this job competition. We list his important job duties under the AODA. Of course, we also extend our hand, offering to help him with this task. To begin, we ask for a meeting with him.

We will let you know what we hear back. We are on stand-by, ready to help the Premier of Ontario.

Your feedback is always welcome. Write us at aodafeedback@gmail.com

MORE DETAILS

Text of the AODA Alliance’s June 22, 2022 Letter to Premier Doug Ford

June 22, 2022

To: Hon. Premier Doug Ford, Premier

Via Email: doug.ford@ontariopc.com

Room 281, Legislative Building

Queen’s Park

Toronto, Ontario M7A 1A1

To: Dear Premier Ford,

Re: Fulfilling Your Government’s Obligation to Lead Ontario to Become Accessible to over 2.6 Million Ontarians with Disabilities

Congratulations on your success in the recent Ontario Election. Four people applied for that job and campaigned vigorously to win it. As the winner, we write to describe for you an important part of that job and to offer you our help so you can do it well.

The part of your job description that we address here comes directly from the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act. That landmark law was unanimously passed in 2005. Ontario’s Conservative Party proposed amendments to make it even stronger. It congratulated the Government of the day for bringing in that legislation. The PC party has supported that legislation ever since it was passed. While in opposition, the PC party pressed for the AODA’s implementation to be sped up and strengthened.

You personally pledged your support for the AODA in your May 15, 2018, letter to us, stating:

“Whether addressing standards for public housing, health care, employment or education, our goal when passing the AODA in 2005 was to help remove the barriers that prevent people with disabilities from participating more fully in their communities. For the Ontario PCs, this remains our goal. Making Ontario fully accessible by 2025 is an important goal under the AODA and it’s one that would be taken seriously by an Ontario PC government.”

Your job, and that of the Government you lead, includes responsibility to lead Ontario to become accessible to over 2.6 million Ontarians with disabilities by 2025, as mandated by the AODA. Among other things, it is part of your job and that of the Government that you lead to enact all the accessibility standards necessary to ensure that Ontario becomes accessible to people with disabilities by 2025. An AODA accessibility standard is a mandatory, enforceable regulation, enacted under the AODA. It spells out the disability barriers that an organization must remove and/or prevent, the measures the organization must take to remove and/or prevent them, and the timeline for doing so.

Ontario is now quite behind schedule for achieving the goal of becoming accessible to people with disabilities by 2025. This is overwhelmingly evident from the life experience of people with disabilities. It also derives from the final report of the third Government-appointed Independent Review of the AODA by former Lieutenant Governor David Onley.

The AODA accessibility standards enacted to date do not rectify a majority of the disability barriers in our society. Even if fully obeyed to the letter, those standards will not ensure that Ontario will ever become accessible, much less by 2025.

It is a requirement of your job to fix this. Fortunately, you have in hand many of the needed tools to help you. We are eager to help you. Please take the hand we are reaching out to you.

Here are some key actions you can and should take, to fulfil your job duties under the AODA:

Your job includes strengthening the AODA accessibility standards that are now on the books to address disability barriers in three important areas, namely access to transportation, access to employment, and access to information and communication. Under the AODA, you can revise an accessibility standard to strengthen it once you have a report from a Government-appointed advisory Standards Development Committee that has reviewed that accessibility standard.

For years, the Government has had in hand the final reports from three Government-appointed Standards Development Committees in these three areas. They all recommend that the accessibility standard they reviewed needed revisions.

Specifically, the Government received the final report of the Transportation Accessibility Standard over four years ago. It received the final report of the Employment Standards Development Committee over 3 years ago, on January 22, 2019. It received the final report of the Information and Communication Standards Development Committee over two years ago, on January 23, 2020. Since then, nothing has been done to strengthen any of those three accessibility standards.

Once the Government has received the final report of a Standards Development Committee that has reviewed an existing AODA accessibility standard, the Government can make whatever revisions to that standard that will best achieve the goal of making Ontario accessible by 2025–and not only those revisions that the Standards Development Committees final report recommends. In each of these areas, we have recommended additional changes beyond those that the relevant Standards Development Committee recommended. Your job includes considering our recommendations in those three areas. To help your Government with this, you need only look to the AODA Alliance’s July 31, 2017 brief to the Transportation Standards Development Committee (jointly submitted with the ARCH Disability Law Centre), the AODA Alliance’s May 7, 2018 brief on the initial recommendations of the Employment Standards Development Committee and the AODA Alliance’s November 25, 2019 brief on the initial recommendations of the Information and Communication Standards Development Committee.

You can and should enact new AODA accessibility standards to address the disability barriers in education (both K-12 education and post-secondary education) and in the health care system. You are now empowered to do so at any time. Earlier this year, the Government received the final report of the K-12 Education Standards Development Committee, the final report of the Post-Secondary Education Standards Development Committee, and the final report of the Health Care Standards Development Committee.

On or before March 16, 2022, your Minister for Accessibility, Raymond Cho, committed in writing in an email to Lynn Ziraldo, Chair of the K-12 Education Standards Development Committee, that the Government would enact an accessibility standard to deal with barriers in the education system. He wrote:

“While it is still too early for me to confirm which of the proposals can be recommended to the Lieutenant Governor in Council (LGIC) for adoption into regulation, I can advise that I intend to recommend that the LGIC adopt into regulation specific requirements for the education sector either within the existing IASR accessibility standards or as an education standard for grades Kindergarten to 12, as appropriate, based upon the Education Standards Development Committee’s Final Recommendations Report.”

Your job includes ensuring that the Government does not violate its own accessibility laws. Your Government is legally required to appoint AODA Standards Development Committees to review the 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard and the 2012 Design of Public Spaces Accessibility Standard. The Ontario Government continues to be in breach of that duty in two separate ways:

a) The Design of Public Spaces Accessibility Standard was enacted in December 2012. The Government was required to appoint a Standards Development Committee to review its sufficiency by December 2017, four and a half years ago. Your Government announced last December that it appointed a person to chair that Committee. No competition was held for that position. There has been no posted advertisement for other members to be appointed to that Committee.

On December 20, 2021, your Government said that this Standards Development Committee would be at work by early 2022. Despite this, and as far as we have been able to discover, there is no one else appointed to that Committee. No advertisement has been posted inviting people to apply to serve on that Committee.

b) The Customer Service Accessibility Standard was enacted in 2007. Five or so years later, the Government appointed a new Customer Service Standards Development Committee to review its sufficiency, as the AODA requires. That Committee submitted a final report to the Government.

On or around June 6, 2016, the Government revised the Customer Service Accessibility Standard. The AODA required the Government to appoint a new Customer Service Standards Development Committee to review it within 5 years, which was early June 2021. One year has passed since that deadline. However, no new Customer Service Standards Development Committee has been appointed.

Your job includes ensuring that the AODA is effectively enforced. Yet for years (including long before you took office), the AODA’s enforcement has been paltry at best. It needs to be substantially ramped up.

Your Government is spending a substantial amount of public money on new infrastructure, including such things as new schools, public transit, hospitals, and college and university buildings. Ontario does not now have in place an effective, accountable process to ensure that this new infrastructure is accessible to people with disabilities and that public money is never used to create new disability barriers.

As you have said many times, your job includes ensuring the responsible use of public money. To fulfil that duty, substantial reforms are needed for how the Government oversees the design of this new infrastructure.

In conclusion, for you to be able to fulfil these job duties, we recommend that you appoint a full-time Minister for Accessibility, with no other responsibilities. We have seen time and again over the past 17 years that a minister cannot effectively do this job if they have other ministerial duties. Media reports suggest you are planning to appoint a much bigger cabinet. Thus, you are well-positioned to appoint a full-time Accessibility Minister. This is more important than ever, given the looming 2025 deadline for achieving an accessible province.

In your May 15, 2018 letter to us, you wrote:

“Your issues are close to the hearts of our Ontario PC Caucus and Candidates, which is why they will play an outstanding role in shaping policy for the Ontario PC Party to assist Ontarians in need.”

Drawing on that strong commitment, can we please have a meeting with you to offer our input, advice, and help as you take on this part of your job in this second term? As a first step, can you please identify the lead official within the Premier’s Office with whom we can speak?

You campaigned on a commitment that you are the person to “get it done.” We are eager to help you get it done when it comes to your job duties for tearing down and preventing disability barriers that hurt all Ontarians.

Sincerely,

David Lepofsky CM, O. Ont, LL.B. (Osgoode Hall Law School), LL.M. (Harvard Law School), LL.D. (Honorary) (Queen’s University, Western University, the Law Society of Ontario, and Brock University

Chair, Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance

Twitter: @davidlepofsky