AODA Alliance’s 2024 Year-End Report to Our Many Supporters

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’s 2024 Year-End Report to Our Many Supporters

 

December 20, 2024

 

SUMMARY

 

This year that is quickly coming to an end is one of special importance to all who have supported our non-partisan grassroots campaign to make our society accessible to 2.9 million Ontarians with disabilities and everyone who will get a disability in the future. This is the final year before the January 1, 2025, deadline mandated by the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act for this province to become disability accessible. This is the year when we have sounded the alarm with the greatest urgency that Ontario will not fulfil that deadline. It is a deadline that the Ontario Legislature unanimously enshrined into law.

 

With that deadline fast approaching, we have had an extraordinarily busy year. Our year-end report gives you some highlights.

 

In other news, on December 19, 2024, the Ontario Government announced that it is extending its deadline for sending it feedback on the Initial Report of the Customer Service Standards Development Committee from January 9, 2025, to February 6, 2025. Therefore, we are extending our timeline for giving us your feedback on the draft brief that we circulated on December 19, 2024.

 

Please send us your input for our brief by Friday, January 17, 2024. Write us at aodafeedback@gmail.com We will finalize our brief around the end of January 2025.

 

You can read our draft brief on the AODA Alliance website. Email us at aodafeedback@gmail.com if you want us to send it to you as an MS Word document.

 

After a holiday break we will be ready to leap back into action. We’re ready for the big challenges that await. An Ontario election seems more and more likely in the spring. So does a federal election. We have no idea which will come first. We’ll again raise disability issues with the parties in both elections and let you know where they stand. We also know we’re going to start the new year with a bold agenda to address the Government’s failure to live up to the deadline that the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act imposed for the province to become accessible.

 

Let us again express our deep gratitude to our many supporters who helped this year with our advocacy efforts. We cannot do what we do without you! Our action tips in our AODA Alliance Updates offer you ideas. It’s you who put them into action!

 

Please have a safe, healthy holiday season and a fully barrier-free New Year.

 

MORE DETAILS

 

Here are some highlights of 2024 for the AODA Alliance and its supporters.

 

  1. On November 25, 2024, the AODA Alliance staged a very successful event at Queen’s Park to mark the 30th anniversary of the birth of Ontario’s grassroots campaign for strong accessibility legislation. In the morning, we held a Queen’s Park news conference, which was streamed across Ontario. It is now available online for anyone. Visit the AODA Alliance YouTube channel.

 

In the afternoon, we convened our own public hearings. People with disabilities told MPPs from all parties about the many wrenching barriers they face when they try to enjoy such basics of life in Ontario as health care, education, public services, jobs, and housing. Watch this public forum on the AODA Alliance YouTube channel.

 

  1. In August, the AODA Alliance unveiled the latest in its series of online videos that reveal serious disability barriers in public buildings. This time, it was the billion-dollar accessibility bungle that is the new Toronto Armoury Street courthouse. Watch the 14-minute version or the 49-minute version. The two versions have secured over 6,000 views and great media coverage. In many ways, that courthouse is now the poster child of how not to design a public building like a courthouse. Together, our comprehensive collection of online videos about advocating for disability accessibility got thousands of new views this year. You can find them all on the AODA Alliance website’s videos page.

 

  1. This year, we kept you, our many dedicated supporters, updated with a record-breaking 105 AODA Alliance Updates. These were shared with you by email, on our website, and through social media. You can browse through these by visiting the AODA Alliance website’s what’s new page.

 

We sent out thousands of tweets once again this year and many Facebook posts, which resulted in a delightful number of re-tweets, shares and likes.

 

  1. We again worked hard towards tearing down the many unfair accessibility barriers in Ontario’s education system. For example, in the spring, we highlighted how the Ford Government had announced major new funding for school construction without ensuring that the schools built with that money are fully accessible to students, teachers, staff and family members with disabilities. Later, when a student with disabilities died in a so-called “sensory room” at his high school, we joined with others to press for restrictions on the use of such isolation rooms at Ontario schools.

 

We tried to keep the pressure on the Ford Government. That Government has now been sitting for almost three years on the final reports of the K-12 Education Standards Development Committee and the Post-Secondary Education Standards Development Committee. It has still not enacted the promised Education Accessibility Standard. All this year’s efforts can be found on the AODA Alliance website’s education page.

 

  1. We wrote major written briefs to address two important areas where people with disabilities still face far too many barriers.

 

 

  1. Throughout the year, the AODA Alliance, working together with other advocates in the disability community, continued our efforts to protect vulnerable people with disabilities, seniors and others from the dangers to them created by the silent menace of electric scooters. You can find these activities documented on the AODA Alliance website’s e-scooters page.

 

The goods news is that working together, we got the Toronto City Council to again decide not to allow e-scooters in Canada’s biggest city. The e-scooter corporate lobbyists tried to get City Council to reverse its 2021 decision. In 2021, disability advocates convinced Toronto City Council to unanimously say no to e-scooters. Despite the e-scooter corporate lobbyists’ financial muscle, we won this round. Next year we must battle to get Toronto’s law enforcement to start to seriously enforce that ban.

 

The bad news is that the Ford Government decided this fall to extend its so-called “pilot” with e-scooters for another five years. They did nothing to embed any protections in that pilot for vulnerable people with disabilities, seniors and others who are endangered by e-scooters. Next year, we will try to get the Ontario Government to enact at least some protections in an effort to respond to this danger.

 

During the first five years of the Ford Government’s e-scooters pilot, we learned that it did nothing to learn from people with disabilities about the dangers that e-scooters pose for them. On our website’s briefs page, you can see briefs we submitted to the city of Toronto and the Ontario Government about the dangers e-scooters create.

 

  1. This fall, the Ford Government decided to bring forward and fast-track controversial legislation regulating and restricting the construction of bike paths. Last year, the AODA Alliance made public a video showing that people with disabilities are endangered when a bike path is built at sidewalk rather than street level. That video got a great deal of public attention and media coverage.

 

This fall, we urged the Ford Government to amend its bike path legislation, to prohibit bike paths from being constructed at sidewalk level. The Ford Government refused to do so. Its bike path legislation passed this fall without including any protection for vulnerable pedestrians with disabilities.

 

  1. We were active on the federal front. Twice this year, the House of Commons invited AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky to Ottawa to give testimony on accessibility issues within federal authority:

 

In both cases, the AODA Alliance filed detailed briefs with the House of Commons. These provided practical recommendations listing actions the House of Commons could take to accelerate action on accessibility for people with disabilities.

 

This year, we also continued to highlight the serious deficiencies in the Canada Disability Benefit Act. When the Federal Government announced a paltry $200 per month maximum for the Canada Disability Benefit last spring, even members of the disability community who had staunchly defended that Act came out with strong criticism of the Government.

 

  1. Over the year, we saw, took part in, and helped generate an unprecedented amount of media coverage concerning disability barriers. You can find lots of this coverage on the AODA Alliance website’s media page and on the AODA Alliance YouTube channel.

 

This media reporting was book-ended by a great CBC series at the start of the year and an amazing series of articles in the Toronto Star’s Metroland online publications near the year’s end. The latter focused on different facets of the Ontario Government’s failure to deliver the accessible province that the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act requires them to lead Ontario to reach by the start of next year.

 

For the first time, the AODA Alliance was invited to contribute a regular monthly column on disability issues, now appearing in all the Toronto Star’s Metroland publications. Metroland advises us that this column is generating a positive number of “clicks.”

 

As 2024 was drawing to an end, more media reached out to us, wishing to over the upcoming unmet 2025 AODA deadline.

 

  1. We helped opposition parties raise disability issues in the Ontario Legislature during the year, including during Question Period.

 

  1. On a more individual or personal note, AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky had published a new memoir about the battle in 1980 to get the new Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms amended to include equality for people with disabilities. It is called “Swimming Up Niagara Falls — The Battle to Get Disability Rights Added to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms” and is available for free download on the internet.

 

  1. In contrast to our many efforts driven by volunteer energy, the Ford Government, with all its staff and resources, have far less of which to be proud. For example:

 

It has not even acknowledged that Ontario is in an accessibility crisis. Fully 18 months ago, the Rich Donovan AODA Independent Review, which the Ford Government appointed, declared that Ontario is in an accessibility crisis and needs an emergency action plan. The Government has not announced the emergency steps that the Rich Donovan final report recommended.

  • It has enacted no new accessibility standards under the AODA in the six and a half years that it has been in office. Several are needed.
  • For another full year, the Government did not act on any of the six Standards Development Committees’ final reports on which it has been sitting. It has not revised a single existing AODA accessibility standard that is now in force, despite the many recommendations it has received to strengthen them.
  • It has continued to build new major infrastructure replete with preventable disability barriers. The most obvious of this is the new Toronto Armoury Street courthouse, whose barriers are brought to the public in plain view in this year’s new AODA Alliance video, which we mentioned earlier.
  • Its paltry enforcement of the AODA remains virtually invisible.
  • It has continued to create new barriers, as exemplified by its continued unleashing of dangerous e-scooters in Ontario.
  • It has still failed to announce a comprehensive, effective plan to lead Ontario to ever become accessible to people with disabilities.
  • This year, we’ve seen no indication that the Ford Government’s Accessibility Minister has spoken even once to any media. When the media approaches the Ford Government for comment on accessibility stories, the Government routinely responds by issuing what appears to be the same email, making the same dubious claims, and typically, not even responding to the core of the media’s questions.
  • It has itself violated AODA deadlines. It did not appoint the 5-year review of the Design of Public Spaces Standards Development Committee until 5 years after the statutory deadline. It did not appoint the mandatory 5-year review of the Customer Service Accessibility Standard until 2 years after the AODA’s deadline. This year alone, it did not make public the Initial Reports of the Design of Public Spaces Standards Development Committee or the Customer Service Standards Development Committee upon receiving them, as the AODA required. It delayed their public release for at least six months in both cases.
  • The Government’s abysmal performance on disability issues this year was most bluntly illustrated on November 25, 2024 when Ontario Accessibility Minister Raymond Cho claimed in the Legislature that 88% of people think Ontario is now accessible. That claim callously denies the reality that so many Ontarians with disabilities continue to face.

 

How You Can Help

 

  • Take a well-deserved break!
  • Have a restful, enjoyable and festive holiday with family and friends.
  • Don’t look for AODA Alliance Updates, Facebook posts and Twitter tweets. There won’t be any for a while.
  • Recharge your batteries. We have a busy 2025 waiting for us around the corner.
  • Be proud of how much we all accomplish when we join together to advocate for a barrier-free society.