AODA Alliance
ACCESSIBILITY FOR ONTARIANS WITH DISABILITIES ACT ALLIANCE
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Ford Vetoes Hearings on Housing Bill, Blocking Ontarians with Disabilities from Seeking Amendments to Protect Their Rights
May 30, 2025 Toronto: Premier Ford is slamming the door in the faces of 2.9 million Ontarians with disabilities and preventing them from having a say on a harmful bill before the legislature by using its majority to impose “Time Allocation” (closure) on Bill 17, the so-called Building Smarter and Faster Act.” Aimed at speeding up new home construction, that bill threatens to undermine the constitutional rights of Ontarians with disabilities by forbidding municipalities from passing any bylaws respecting the construction of buildings. Among other things, this would take away a municipality’s ability to make bylaws imposing accessibility requirements that exceed the weak and ineffective Ontario Building Code.
“We wrote the Housing Minister with a request to present our serious concerns about Bill 17 at Standing Committee hearings, but the Government’s only response is to shut down any hearings on the bill whatsoever, which is not a very democratic response,” said David Lepofsky, Chair of the grassroots non-partisan AODA Alliance which campaigns to tear down disability barriers. “We just want a chance to present a simple, short uncontroversial amendment to protect vulnerable people with disabilities and bring this bill in compliance with the Charter of Rights, the Ontario Human Rights Code, and the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act.”
Unless the Ford Government changes course, the only voice that people with disabilities will have during the debate on this bill takes the form of two scant paragraphs in a May 26, 2025 Second Reading Speech by the NDP accessibility critic Lise Vaugeois, set out below.
The Ford Government’s track record on tearing down disability barriers has been extremely poor. It has enacted no new accessibility standards under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act in almost seven years in office. It has announced billions of public dollars for building new schools without ensuring that they are designed to be fully accessible to people with disabilities, including students, teachers, staff, and parents. It opened a new billion dollar Toronto courthouse two years ago that is replete with disability barriers, that are revealed in a widely viewed AODA Alliance video. It failed to meet the AODA’s 2025 deadline for Ontario to become accessible to people with disabilities.
“This is not building smarter and faster – It’s governing wastefully,” said Lepofsky. “They could fix this bill simply by amending it to provide that nothing in the bill “reduces or limits the power of any municipality to enact bylaws or take any other action respecting the construction of any building that promotes the accessibility of buildings to people with disabilities.” However, Ford’s closure motion gives a scant nine minutes to the NDP and nine minutes to the Liberals to speak at Third Reading on this bill, in which they have to cover every issue they want to raise and not just ours. Ontarians with disabilities deserve better from the Government.”
Contact: AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky, aodafeedback@gmail.com
Twitter: @aodaalliance
Excerpt from May 26, 2025 Ontario Legislature Second Reading Debate on Bill 17
Draft Hansard Bill 17 May 26
The Deputy Speaker (Ms. Effie J. Triantafilopoulos): I recognize the member for Thunder Bay–Superior North.
MPP Lise Vaugeois: But I want to focus a little bit on the fact that it is National Accessibility Week. I heard this afternoon from David Lepofsky, chair of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance, who wrote to me about Bill 17 and his disappointment on this. I’d like to read this out loud:
“They have not consulted us on this. There is a very long failure by the Ontario government to enact proper, current and mandatory standards for new construction or renovations in Ontario, whether residential or other forms of construction. This has led to new buildings being built with new barriers that could have been prevented at little or no cost. This all flies in the face of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act. It gets even worse when public money is used to finance this construction in whole or in part. Public money should never be used to create or perpetuate barriers against people with disabilities. The Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance has been asking the Ontario government to effectively address this.
Premier Ford has never agreed to meet. The accessibility minister has not met to have a substantive discussion with us on this or any other accessibility issue for over three years. Rich Donovan, the person the Ford government selected to conduct the most recent independent review of the disabilities act, declared two years ago that Ontario is in an accessibility crisis. He called for the Premier to lead a crisis response. The Ford government has implemented no crisis response. It has not even acknowledged this crisis.”
I want to thank David Lepofsky for this, and I would like to recommend that we—first of all, that the Minister of Housing and that the Premier meet with the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Alliance. It’s incredibly important. If we are building anew, why aren’t we building with the best possible standard?
I’d like to make a bold recommendation: Why don’t we make it standard to have wider doorways right from the get-go? It’s not expensive when you do it the first time; it’s very expensive if you’ve got to cut away drywall and two-by-fours in order to put in a new door. Why don’t we make that standard? Make the hallways standard that they’re wide enough that you can take a wheelchair down them.
If you do it right the first time, it’s not much of an additional cost. In fact, over the long run, it means that the places that you are building could be occupied by anyone with a disability, without a disability, or somebody as they age who needs to use a walker to get down to stay in their own place. They’d like to stay in their own places, but they need to be accessible. Let’s do it right.