Check Out this New Captioned Video Series on Tackling the Many Disability Barriers in Ontario’s Healthcare System

Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance Update

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

www.aodaalliance.org aodafeedback@gmail.com Twitter: @aodaalliance YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/aodaalliance

 

Check Out this New Captioned Video Series on Tackling the Many Disability Barriers in Ontario’s Healthcare System

 

December 1, 2023

SUMMARY

 

Ontario is supposed to have a universal health care system, but many people with disabilities face serious accessibility barriers when they try to use and benefit from it. Many of these barriers were funded with public money. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted and made worse the persistent and pervasive disability barriers in their access to healthcare.

 

Here is a series of captioned videos that address this important topic. We have made these videos public in the past. However, for the first time, we are compiling them together in a handy and easy-to-use package.

 

These videos are all public. They can be used by the media, by school and post-secondary course instructors and teachers, and by anyone else interested in these issues. We hope that this video series will interest anyone concerned with health care policy and practice, disability rights, human rights, social justice and activism, community organizing, public law, constitutional law, anti-discrimination law and policy, history, or political science. We welcome your feedback on these videos. Send your feedback to aodafeedback@gmail.com.

 

This update first gives a short listing of the videos in this series. After that, each video is described, with helpful links to additional information and background relative to each video.

 

Please tell others about and widely post this video series. Check out the many other videos that the AODA Alliance has posted:

 

  • Visit the AODA Alliance website videos page.
  • Flip through the equal education video series that the AODA Alliance earlier posted which addresses the grassroots campaign to make Ontario’s education system become barrier-free for students with disabilities.
  • Wander through the AODA Alliance’s disability advocacy history video series that documents the history of Ontario’s grassroots non-partisan campaign for the enactment and effective implementation of strong accessibility legislation for people with disabilities.
  • Sign up to follow the AODA Alliance YouTube channel, to get instant alerts every time we post another new video.

 

 Quick Guide

 

  1. What Should Ontario’s Health Care Accessibility Standard Include?

 

  1. Advocating to Address Added Hardships COVID-19 Imposes on People with Disabilities

 

  1. The Agenda with Steve Paikin – Demanding Disability Rights Amid COVID-19

 

  1. TVO’s The Agenda with Steve Paikin: Does Ontario’s COVID Plan Ignore Disabled People?

 

  1. Disability Rights During Critical Medical Care Triage During COVID-19 Pandemic

 

  1. AODA Alliance Presentation to Ontario Bioethics Table on Disability Rights and COVID-19 Critical Medical Care Triage Protocol

 

  1. Disability Discrimination in Ontario Critical Care Triage Protocol

 

  1. TVO’s The Agenda with Steve Paikin: Deciding Who Lives: Is Ontario’s Crisis Triage Discriminatory?

 

  1. Disability Filibuster – David Lepofsky on Medical Assistance in Dying (Doctor-Assisted Suicide)

 

  1. Serious Disability Rights Issues Swirl Around Medical Assistance in Dying

 

 

Detailed Guide

Video 1

Title: What Should Ontario’s Health Care Accessibility Standard Include?

Link to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2yuFz_z9V0&feature=youtu.be

Description: Lecture by David Lepofsky (AODA Alliance chair and Osgoode Hall visiting professor) at the Osgoode Hall Law School on what should be included in the Health Care Accessibility Standard, to be enacted under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, to ensure accessibility in the health care system for patients with disabilities and their support people with disabilities.

Related resources:

 

Video 2

Title: Advocating to Address Added Hardships COVID-19 Imposes on People with Disabilities

Link to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yB5i7cCiw68

Description: Osgoode Hall Law School Visiting Professor David Lepofsky’s November 3, 2020 lecture on added hardships that the COVID-19 pandemic imposed on people with disabilities and advocacy efforts to get governments to address these.

Related resources:

 

Video 3

Title: The Agenda with Steve Paikin – Demanding Disability Rights Amid COVID-19

Link to video: https://youtu.be/KmMlTrNbud8

Description: Ontario’s flagship public affairs TV program, TVO’s The Agenda with Steve Paikin, several times included panels on COVID-19’s impact on people with disabilities that included Osgoode Hall Law School siting professor and AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky as a panelist. In this, the first of these episodes Steve Paikin interviewed both David Lepofsky and Wendy Porch, the executive director of CILT, the Centre for Independent Living in Toronto. The panel addressed the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on people with disabilities, and the heightened barriers they face during the pandemic, especially in access to health care and education. This interview took place less than two months into the pandemic. The issues it raised persisted for months afterwards.

Related resources:

Video 4

Title: TVO’s The Agenda with Steve Paikin: Does Ontario’s COVID Plan Ignore Disabled People?

Link to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJcpIGlPd84

Description: After two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, TVO’s flagship Ontario public affairs program The Agenda with Steve Paikin interviews Osgoode Hall Law School Visiting Professor of Disability Rights and Legal Education and AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky on February 3, 2022, about the impact of the pandemic on people with disabilities, and the Ontario Government’s ongoing failure to protect the urgent needs of people with disabilities during the pandemic, especially in the health care system.

Related resources

 

Video 5

Title: Disability Rights During Critical Medical Care Triage During COVID-19 Pandemic

Link to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxpHXUYNP4A

Description: Osgoode Hall Law School Visiting Professor David Lepofsky’s November 4, 2020 lecture on disability rights objections to the critical medical care triage protocol that the Ontario Government sent to hospitals in case the COVID-19 pandemic overloaded hospitals, requiring rationing of critical care with a short addendum added on November 5, 2020.

Related resources:

 

Video 6

Title: AODA Alliance Presentation to Ontario Bioethics Table on Disability Rights and COVID-19 Critical Medical Care Triage Protocol

Link to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAigGhN5zB4

Description: AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky’s August 31, 2020 presentation to Ontario Government’s Bioethics Table on disability rights problems with the Ontario Government’s protocol for triage of critical care patients if the COVID-19 pandemic overloads hospitals with more cases than critical care beds. The introduction at the start of this video gives background that is up to date as of October 25, 2020.

Related resources:

 

Video 7

Title: Disability Discrimination in Ontario Critical Care Triage Protocol

Link to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2yuFz_z9V0&feature=youtu.be

Description: Lecture by Osgoode Hall Law School Visiting Professor of Disability Rights and Legal Education David Lepofsky, chair of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance, on the problems of disability discrimination in Ontario’s critical care triage protocol. It directs how life-saving critical care is to be rationed if intensive care units cannot serve all patients needing critical care due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This captioned video was delivered to a graduate course on legal issues in health law at the Osgoode Hall Law School.

Related resources

 

Video 8

Title: TVO’s The Agenda with Steve Paikin: Deciding Who Lives: Is Ontario’s Crisis Triage Discriminatory?

Link to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkq1NmaXLwk&feature=youtu.be

Description: In the January 13, 2021 edition of TVO’s flagship public affairs program The Agenda with Steve Paikin, a debate was held on the impact of Ontario’s critical care triage protocol during the COVID-19 pandemic on patients with disabilities. That protocol was circulated to Ontario hospitals to direct which patients should be refused needed life-saving critical care if pandemic hospital overloads meant that hospitals could not serve all patients and would have to ration critical care services. Disability advocates contended that this critical care triage protocol discriminates against a number of vulnerable patients with disabilities. Debating were AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky and ARCH Disability Law Centre lawyer Mariam Shanouda on one side, and Physician Dr. James Downar (an author of the critical care triage protocol) and philosophy/bioethics progressor Udo Schüklenk.

Related resources

 

Video 9

Title: Disability Filibuster – David Lepofsky on Medical Assistance in Dying (Doctor-Assisted Suicide)

Link to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDrWgHAjguk

Description: Osgoode Hall Law School Visiting Professor of Disability Rights and Legal Education David Lepofsky identifies several serious problems with proposed new amendments to Canada’s Criminal Code before Canada’s Parliament in 2021 that would liberalize the availability of “Medical Assistance in Dying” (MAID) more accurately described as doctor-assisted suicide. This presentation was included in a collection of videos in opposition to that legislation from a spectrum of disability advocates.

Related resources:

Video 10

Title: Serious Disability Rights Issues Swirl Around Medical Assistance in Dying

Link to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uijzAakl2A4

Description: Ethics Grand Rounds – January 26, 2023 Presented by the Centre for Clinical Ethics, Unity Health Toronto. With the practice of medical assistance in dying (MAID) expanding in Canada, and slated to expand even more, health care providers need to learn about serious disability and human rights concerns that have been raised. Are there sufficient safeguards in place? Is MAID going far beyond what the public understood and expected? How do disability concerns about MAID interact with the disability rights objections to and unresolved controversy surrounding the critical care triage protocol that all hospitals received two years ago, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic? These issues are addressed in this presentation by Professor David Lepofsky, a disability rights advocate and Osgoode Hall Law School Visiting Professor of Disability Rights and Legal Education.

Related resources:

  • The AODA Alliance website’s Bill C-22 page, which contrasts the rapid expansion of medical assistance in dying to the slow and weak provision of new financial supports for those people with disabilities languishing in poverty.
  • Trudo Lemmens, “Charter Scrutiny of Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying Law and the Shifting Landscape of Belgian and Dutch Euthanasia Practice” (2018) 85 Supreme Court Law Review (2nd) 453-539
  • The ARCH Disability Law Centre’s November 25, 2020 submission to the Senate of Canada on Bill C-7 regarding medical assistance in dying.
  • The AODA Alliance website’s critical care triage protocol page, to compare and see parallels in how the lives of people with disabilities were made even more vulnerable during the COVID-19 pandemic by Ontario’s critical care triage protocol.