AODA Alliance
ACCESSIBILITY FOR ONTARIANS WITH DISABILITIES ACT ALLIANCE
NEWS RELEASE – FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Disability Advocates Press Federal Party Leaders to Make the “Accessible Canada Pledge” in the Impending Federal Election to Address the Urgent Needs of Over 8 Million People with Disabilities in Canada
March 21, 2025, Toronto: With a snap federal election being called this Sunday, the grassroots non-partisan AODA Alliance has asked all federal party leaders to make the 3-plank “Accessible Canada Pledge” to over 8 million people with disabilities in Canada to address their urgent needs. The Accessible Canada Pledge is designed to ensure that (a) the implementation and enforcement of the Accessible Canada Act (ACA) is swift, strong and effective, (b) air passengers with disabilities stop suffering horrific mistreatment by Canadian airlines, and (c) the Canada Disabilities Benefit Act fulfils its purpose of lifting people with disabilities out of poverty. Below is the AODA Alliance’s March 20, 2021, letter to the party leaders which sets out the Accessible Canada Pledge.
“People with disabilities in Canada at long last deserve equal access to air travel and other services that the Federal Government regulates. People with disabilities languishing in poverty deserve more than the paltry $200 per month maximum available under the new Canada Disabilities Benefit Act,” said David Lepofsky, Chair of the AODA Alliance who testified before Parliament on all of these issues. “We don’t seek to elect or defeat any party. We try to get strong commitments on urgent disability issues from all the parties, so that people with disabilities win no matter which party forms the next Government.”
In this campaign, people with disabilities will be raising disability issues across Canada. This is the first step in this important democratic process. The news media has an important responsibility in a democracy to alert all voters to the full spectrum of election issues, beyond the trade war with the US that has occupied the headlines.
Contact: AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky, aodafeedback@gmail.com
Twitter: @aodaalliance
For More Background
The AODA Alliance Website’s Canada page documents its efforts to get the Accessible Canada Act strengthened and effectively implemented.
The AODA Alliance website’s Bill C-22 page sets out efforts to substantially improve the paltry Canada Disability Benefit.
The AODA Alliance website’s transportation page details efforts to make air travel and other modes of transportation accessible to passengers with disabilities.
AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky’s March 19, 2024, testimony at the House of Commons Standing Committee on Transport’s hearings into Canadian airlines’ horrific mistreatment of passengers with disabilities.
AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky’s October 1, 2024, testimony before the House of Commons Human Resources Standing Committee (HUMA) on the need to strengthen the weak Accessible Canada Act during Parliament’s five-year review of that legislation.
AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky’s April 27, 2023, testimony before a Senate Standing Committee on serious deficiencies in the Canada Disability Benefit Act.
March 20, 2025, Letter from the AODA Alliance to the Five Federal Political Parties
Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance
United for a Barrier-Free Society for All People with Disabilities
Web: www.aodaalliance.org Email: aodafeedback@gmail.com Twitter: @aodaalliance
March 20, 2025
To:
Prime Minister Mark Carney, Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and Prime Minister of Canada
Office of the Prime Minister
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa, ON K1A 0A2
Email: pm@pm.gc.ca
Pierre Poilievre, P.C., M.P., Leader of the Conservative Party of Canada
House of Commons
Ottawa, ON K1A 0A6
Email: pierre.poilievre@parl.gc.ca
Jagmeet Singh, M.P., Leader of the New Democratic Party
House of Commons
Ottawa, ON K1A 0A6
Email: jagmeet.singh@parl.gc.ca
Yves-François Blanchet, M.P., Leader of the Bloc Québécois
House of Commons
Ottawa, ON K1A 0A6
Email: yves-francois.blanchet@parl.gc.ca
Ms. Elizabeth May, M.P., Leader of the Green Party of Canada
House of Commons
Ottawa, ON K1A 0A6
Email: elizabeth.may@parl.gc.ca
Dear Party Leaders,
Re: Asking All Federal Party Leaders to Make the “Accessible Canada Pledge” in the Forthcoming Federal Election
With a federal election about to be called, we ask each federal party to make the “Accessible Canada Pledge.” Below please find the proposed text of this Pledge. Over eight million people with disabilities in Canada urgently need you all to make this Pledge. In this letter, we explain who we are and what we seek and why.
Founded in 2005, the AODA Alliance is a non-partisan grassroots community coalition that advocates in Ontario and federally for accessibility for people with disabilities. We were one of the disability organizations that gave testimony at Parliament on the issues addressed in the proposed Accessible Canada Pledge. During debates in Parliament, MPs and Senators relied on our submissions and commended our expertise in this area.
Please make the Accessible Canada Pledge to ensure that (a) the implementation and enforcement of the Accessible Canada Act (ACA) is swift, strong and effective, (b) air passengers with disabilities stop suffering horrific mistreatment by Canadian airlines, and (c) the Canada Disabilities Benefit Act fulfills its purpose of lifting people with disabilities out of poverty.
Your parties have all supported these three goals. Yet none of these goals will be achieved unless Canada implements achievable reforms. The Accessible Canada Pledge lists those needed reforms.
Our non-partisan request aims to get strong commitments from all parties. We never seek to elect or defeat any party or candidate. We will make public your responses to this request.
Every Canadian needs all parties to make the Accessible Canada Pledge. Everyone has a disability now or gets one later in life.
Sincerely,
David Lepofsky, CM, O. Ont. Chair, Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance
The Accessible Canada Pledge
March 20, 2021
The AODA Alliance asks all parties in the House of Commons to make the Accessible Canada Pledge in the 2025 federal election. It addresses three areas where people with disabilities need major improvements:
- Ensuring the effective Implementation of the Accessible Canada Act to achieve a barrier-free Canada by 2040.
- Ensuring equal access to air travel for air passengers with disabilities, and
- Ensuring that the Canada Disability Benefit Act lifts impoverished people with disabilities out of poverty.
I. General
- If elected, will your Government comply with the Accessibility Canada Act and the guarantees to people with disabilities in the Charter of Rights and the Canada Human Rights Act?
- Will your party commit not to reduce any protections in law that people with disabilities now enjoy in Canada?
II. Effective Implementation of the Accessible Canada Act
We commend Parliament and all parties for unanimously enacting the Accessible Canada Act (ACA) in 2019. It legislatively commits to achieve a barrier-free Canada for people with disabilities by 2040.
Unfortunately, the ACA is strong on good intentions but extremely weak on implementation and enforcement. It must be substantially strengthened and simplified if it is to achieve its purposes.
Progress towards an accessible Canada since the ACA’s enactment has been agonizingly slow. We are more than 25% through the 21-year period set by Parliament for making Canada accessible, yet Canada is nowhere near 25% of the way towards becoming barrier free for people with disabilities. Some federally regulated organizations have no doubt taken some action to remove some disability barriers but not because any ACA requirements required them to do so.
The weak ACA does not require a single disability barrier to ever be removed or prevented. It gives people with disabilities no substantive rights. It gives the Federal Government and federally regulated organizations many loopholes. It requires federally regulated organizations to make accessibility plans, but it does not require those plans to be strong and effective. It does not require those plans to be effectively implemented.
The long, complicated and convoluted ACA is incredibly hard if not impossible to decipher, even for experts. Its implementation and enforcement are excessively bureaucratized and wastefully splintered among three federal agencies, the Canadian Human Rights Commission, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) and the Canadian Transportation Agency (CTA). Each has a poor record on effectively enforcing accessibility for people with disabilities. The ACA’s fragmented enforcement is confusing, bureaucratic and ineffective.
The Federal Government’s implementation of the ACA is far too slow. In six years, it has not enacted a single mandatory accessibility standard regulation. It has only passed a regulation on procedural matters. It is good that Accessible Standards Canada has developed some voluntary standards. However, voluntary, unenforceable measures are thin gruel compared to mandatory enforceable regulations. Who obeys a speed limit if it is voluntary?
In 2018 and 2019, the grassroots non-partisan AODA Alliance was one of the disability organizations that predicted these results when the Accessible Canada Act was going through Parliament. We proposed constructive amendments to prevent this. Most were rejected.
We therefore ask for the following commitments:
Enforceable Accessibility Standard Regulations Should Be Enacted Within Three Years
The ACA’s centerpiece is the enactment and enforcement of accessibility standard regulations. These regulations will specify what an organization must do and by when in order to become accessible. The ACA lets the Federal Cabinet, the CRTC and the CTA enact these regulations. However, it does not require any of these regulations ever to be enacted. If they are not enacted, the ACA will fail.
- Will you commit to enact at least one accessibility standard regulation covering all obligated organizations within one year from now, with another four such accessibility standard regulations to be enacted within three years from now to cover all the areas that the ACA regulates (including federally funded housing)?
The ACA Should Be Effectively Enforced
The ACA is not being effectively enforced. We know from extensive experience with provincial accessibility legislation that the ACA will be ineffective unless it is effectively enforced.
- Will your party commit to ensure that the ACA is effectively enforced and to amend the ACA in open consultation with Canada’s broad disability community to remove legislative barriers to its effective enforcement?
Federal Public Money Should Never Be Used to Create or Perpetuate Barriers Against People with Disabilities
The ACA does not require the Federal Government to ensure that federal money is never used by any recipient of those funds to create or perpetuate disability barriers. For example, the ACA doesn’t require the Federal Government to attach accessibility strings when it gives money to a province, municipality, college, university, local transit authority, or other organization to build new infrastructure. Those recipients of federal money are left free to design and build new infrastructure without ensuring that it is fully accessible to people with disabilities. The ACA doesn’t require the Federal Government to attach any federal accessibility strings when it gives out business development loans or grants.
The ACA lets the Federal Government impose accessibility requirements when it buys goods or services. However, it doesn’t require the Federal Government to do so.
This allows for a wasteful and harmful use of public money. The Senate’s Standing Committee on Social Affairs that held hearings on Bill C-81 made this important observation in its May 7, 2019 report to the Senate:
Your committee heard concerns that despite this legislation, federal funding may continue to be spent on projects that do not always meet accessibility standards. Therefore, we encourage the federal government to ensure that when public money is spent or transferred, the funding should never be used to create or perpetuate disability-related barriers when it is reasonable to expect that such barriers can be avoided.
- Will your party ensure by legislation, and if not, then by public policy, that no one will use public money distributed by the Government of Canada in a manner that creates or perpetuates barriers, including for example payments by the Government of Canada to purchase or rent any goods, services or facilities, to contribute to the construction, expansion or renovation of any infrastructure or other capital project, or to provide a business development loan or grant?
The ACA Should Never Reduce the Rights of People with Disabilities
The ACA includes only limited and insufficient protection to ensure that nothing under the ACA reduces the rights of people with disabilities.
- Will your party amend the ACA so that if a provision of the ACA or of a regulation enacted under it conflicts with a provision of any other Act or regulation, the provision that provides the highest level of accessibility shall prevail and that nothing in the ACA or in any regulations enacted under it or in any actions taken under it shall reduce any rights that people with disabilities otherwise enjoy under law?
A discriminatory provision was included in the Accessible Canada Act, which the Senate somewhat softened after extensive disability community advocacy efforts. However, it should be repealed altogether.
Making this worse, section 172(3) of the ACA unfairly takes away important rights from people with disabilities in a discriminatory way. It bars the CTA from awarding justly deserved monetary compensation to a passenger with a disability, even if the Agency finds that an airline or other federally regulated transportation provider has imposed an undue barrier against them, so long as a federal transportation accessibility regulation wrongly says that the airline did not have to provide the passenger with that accommodation. This is especially unfair since the House of Commons held public hearings in 2024 confirming that air passengers with disabilities continue to face horrific mistreatment by Canadian airlines, as is further addressed below.
This unfairly protects huge, well-funded airlines and railways from having to pay monetary compensation in situations where they should have to pay.
- Will your party remove from the ACA its provisions unfairly limiting the remedies available to air travel and rail passengers with disabilities?
The Federal Government Should Be Required to Apply a Disability Lens to Its Decisions
The ACA should entrench in law that the Government must apply a disability lens to all Government policies and decisions.
- Will your party commit to apply a disability lens to government decisions and to entrench this in the ACA?
The ACA’s Implementation and Enforcement Should be Consolidated in One Federal Agency, Not Splintered Among Several Agencies
The 105-page complicated ACA harmfully splinters the power to make accessibility standard regulations and the power to enforce the bill among a number of federal agencies, such as the new federal Accessibility Commissioner, the CTA, and the CRTC. This makes the ACA’s implementation and enforcement far less effective and more costly. It takes longer and costs more to get accessibility regulations enacted. It risks weak, contradictory or unnecessarily complex regulations.
This splintering makes it much harder to enforce the ACA. People with disabilities are burdened to learn to navigate as many as three or four different bewildering sets of accessibility rules, enforcement agencies, procedures, forms and timelines for presenting an accessibility complaint.
This splintering only helps existing federal bureaucracies that want more power and any large, obligated organizations that seek to dodge taking action on accessibility. Those organizations can exploit the bill’s confusing complexity to delay and impede its implementation.
The CTA and CRTC have had powers to promote accessibility for decades. Their record on accessibility is poor.
- Will your party assign all responsibility for the ACA’s enforcement to the Accessibility Commissioner and all responsibility for enacting regulations under the ACA to the Federal Cabinet? If not, then at a minimum, would your party require by legislation or policy that the CRTC, CTA, and the Federal Public Sector Labour Relations and Employment Board must, within six months, establish policies, practices and procedures for expeditiously receiving, investigating, considering and deciding upon complaints under this Act which are the same as or as reasonably close as possible to those the ACA mandates for the Accessibility Commissioner?
No Federal Laws Should Ever Create or Permit Disability Barriers
No federal laws should ever impose or permit the creation of barriers against people with disabilities. For a federal law to do this violates the Charter of Rights and the Canadian Human Rights Act.
- Will your Party review all federal laws to identify any that require or permit any barriers against people with disabilities, and will your party amend Section 2 of the ACA (definition of “barrier”) to ensure that the ACA also effectively addresses barriers created by federal laws?
Federal Elections Should Be Accessible to Voters with Disabilities
Voters with disabilities continue to face disability barriers in federal elections, including, for example, barriers that can impede them from voting independently and in private and verifying their choice.
- Will your party ensure that federal elections become barrier-free for voters and candidates with disabilities.
Unfair Power to Exempt Organizations from Some ACA Requirements Should be Eliminated
The ACA has too many loopholes. For example, it lets the Federal Government exempt itself from some duties under the ACA. The Government should not ever be able to exempt itself.
- Will your Party eliminate the power to exempt organizations from some of the requirements imposed by the ACA, such as eliminating the power to exempt the Government of Canada, or a federal department or agency? If not, will your party commit not to grant any exemptions from the ACA?
Federally Controlled Courts and Tribunals Should be Made Disability Accessible
People with disabilities continue to face barriers when they try to take part in legal proceedings in courts for which the Federal Government is responsible.
- Will your party develop and implement a plan to ensure that all federally operated courts (e.g., the Supreme Court of Canada and Federal Courts) and federally operated regulatory tribunals (like the CRTC and CTA) become accessible.
III. Ensuring Barrier-Free Air Travel for Air Passengers with Disabilities
The media has reported on episode after episode of Canadian airlines subjecting air passengers with disabilities to horrific treatment. Air travel in Canada for air passengers with disabilities is replete with far too many serious, unfair, and preventable disability accessibility barriers. Air passengers with disabilities have very good reason to dread entering Canadian air space. They cannot know in advance which trips will go smoothly, and which will be replete with infuriating mistreatment.
In 2024, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Transportation held public hearings on
this, received wrenching evidence, found that this is a serious problem requiring new federal action, and issued a report with detailed and helpful recommendations.
These recurring disability barriers violate several Canadian laws, such as the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the Canada Human Rights Act, the Accessible Canada Act, and the Canada Transportation Act. However, these laws are not effectively implemented and enforced. They unfairly depend too heavily on air passengers with disabilities to be private accessibility cops.
Making this worse, the federal agency mandated to enforce these rights, the CTA, has a long and very poor track record. It is too close to the airline industry that it is supposed to regulate in the public interest. It is a model illustration of regulatory capture.
Despite their self-promoting and self-serving news conferences and pledges to do better, airlines and airport authorities have not made it a real and effective priority to fix these systemic problems with effective systemic solutions. Fixing this is not rocket science.
- Will your Party commit to these actions:
- Implement the recommendations of the December 2024 report of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Transport.
- Creating a new independent public agency to oversee the regulation and enforcement of disability accessibility for air passengers with disabilities in Canada, with substantial safeguards to protect against the airline industry’s regulatory capture of that agency.
- Enact a strong, enforceable, unequivocal and comprehensive Air Passengers with Disabilities’ Bill of Rights.
- Require the public agency regulating airlines’ disability accessibility to periodically conduct unannounced inspections of the supports and services that airlines provide to air passengers with disabilities, similar to secret shopper audits, with the results and findings made public.
- Require airlines to alert all air passengers with disabilities, well in advance of their flight and in accessible formats, about all disability supports and services that are available from the beginning of their trip to the end, including curbside assistance when arriving at an airport. The public agency that regulates disability accessibility at airlines should be required to effectively monitor and enforce these requirements, including spot-checking content to ensure that it is comprehensive and provided in plain language. This information should be provided in multiple accessible ways, such as emails to air passengers with disabilities, printed notification in documents such as boarding passes provided to air passengers with disabilities, and regular audible and text announcements in all airports.
- Require in any airport where the check-in desk is difficult to reach from the front door, such as Toronto Pearson Airport Terminal 1, to establish a disability check-in desk immediately inside a main door, and to notify air passengers with disabilities of the availability of that check-in desk.
- Require that an airport or well-publicized provider provide all curbside assistance to air passengers with disabilities no matter which airline they are using for travel.
- Require that except where impossible to do so, the airline should have a single staff member assist a passenger with disabilities during their entire journey through the airport.
- Require that if airline or airport officials assisting air passengers with disabilities through the airport must leave them in any waiting area to wait, this must be in a designated seating area where a permanent airline or airport official is posted who can be asked for assistance while they wait to finish their journey through the airport.
- Require airlines to consistently and reliably pre-board air passengers with disabilities as well as others needing pre-boarding before any other passengers are boarded on an aircraft.
- Eliminate the systemic practice of requiring air passengers with disabilities to be the last passengers off the plane, particularly where this delay is unnecessary.
- Require airlines and airports to install and maintain effective video monitoring of the entire handling of a wheelchair or other mobility device from the moment that air passengers with disabilities give up possession of them to the point where the device is returned. Where an incident occurs where the device is damaged, this video should be automatically shared with the passenger and the relevant regulatory authority.
- Require airlines and airports to implement a one-stop disability help, fast-action hotline for air passengers with disabilities to call to seek help or report complaints.
- Require the relevant regulatory authority to receive all requests and complaints and action reports on what results were reached through the disability fast-action help hotline, with overall results made public in an anonymized aggregated report.
- Require airlines and airports to publicize to air passengers with disabilities and to the public the availability of the disability hotline for seeking help and for lodging complaints. This should be included in all standard airline communications with air passengers, such as emails that confirm a ticket purchase or inviting online check-in. This should also be publicized in airports, such as in posters and in regular audio and text announcements in airports.
- Enact new accessibility standards for passenger aircraft design that requires such basic features as call buttons for flight attendants and controls for adjusting one’s seat to be accessible to passengers with disabilities rather than inaccessible touch screen buttons.
- Providing for serious penalties with personal liability to be imposed on senior airline and airport officials in the case of accessibility infractions.
IV. Ensuring that The Canada Disability Benefit Lifts Impoverished People with Disabilities Out of Poverty
The Canada Disability Benefit Act (CDBA), which Parliament unanimously passed in 2023, has not lived up to the promise that it would lift hundreds of thousands of people with disabilities out of poverty. Capped by new regulations at about $200 per month maximum, it will leave most impoverished people with disabilities still languishing in poverty. Deserving impoverished people with disabilities will not even qualify for it. The CDBA lacks key safeguards. Moreover, its implementation has been far too slow.
The following reforms are needed to ensure that the CDBA is effective at tackling disability poverty.
- Will your Government revise the Canada Disability Act and regulations to:
- Require that the Canada Disability Benefit paid to people with disabilities living in poverty is sufficient to lift them above the poverty line?
- Remove the requirement that to qualify for the Benefit, a person must have qualified for the Disability Tax Credit; instead, make a person eligible if they qualify for provincial or territorial disability social assistance?
- Prevent the Benefit from being clawed back by private insurance companies or under any federal legislation or program?
- Once the amount of the Canada Disability Benefit is initially established under these revisions to the CDBA, require that Parliamentary approval be obtained before a future Cabinet or Government can reduce or eliminate the Benefit or eligibility for it?
- Address poverty among children and seniors with disabilities?