AODA Alliance
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
Lime Canada’s Latest Corporate Lobbying Strategy to Proliferate Electric Scooters is to Try to Look Like They’re Partnering with the Very People with Disabilities whom Their Product Endangers
December 4, 2023
SUMMARY
Be on the lookout! One of the biggest electric scooter (e-scooter) rental companies wants to create the impression that it is concerned about the needs of vulnerable people with disabilities and others whom their product seriously endangers.
Earlier this year, Lime Canada’s lead corporate lobbyist twice wrote the AODA Alliance, asking to “partner and collaborate” with the AODA Alliance. (See their emails, below.)
Lime stated it is trying to set up some sort of “roundtable”. We anticipate that Lime wants to tell politicians and senior government officials that it is very concerned about the needs of people with disabilities and is partnering with them, even while they continue to proliferate e-scooters which endanger people with disabilities, seniors and others
On December 4, 2023, AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky wrote Lime, calling out this corporate lobbying strategy for what it is. (See that email below.) We have respectfully declined Lime’s invitation. We have much higher priorities for our scarce volunteer energy.
We emphasized that Lime no doubt already knows exactly what our concerns are with e-scooters. Several times, Lime has sent its corporate lobbyists to one municipal city council committee meeting after the next to argue in opposition to our concerns. Moreover, Lime can easily see what our objections are by visiting the AODA Alliance website’s e-scooters page.
We want to make Lime’s strategy public so that other community organizations are forewarned about it. We caution other organizations not to get played or used as a political prop.
Send us your feedback. Write us at aodafeedback@gmail.com
MORE DETAILS
July 29, 2023 Email from Lime Canada to AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky
Dear Mr. Lepofsky,
My name is Sonia – and I’m the Director of Government Relations at Lime. Lime is the world’s largest shared electric vehicle company. We are on a mission to build a future where transportation is shared, affordable and carbon-free.
My goal is to create programs across Canada that are designed in a safe and responsible way, without negatively impacting local residents or visitors with disabilities or access needs.
I’ve recently just joined the Lime team, and starting to get the lay of the land. Thank you for your recent comments at the Toronto City Council meeting.
I really value feedback from those with lived experiences.
I’d love to sit down with you (virtually, and maybe in person in the coming months) and discuss ways we can meaningfully partner and collaborate.
Are there times you may be available next week for an initial virtual meeting?
Thanks,
Lime
Sonia Kandola
Director Government Relations, Canada
October 19, 2023 Email to the AODA Alliance from Lime Canada
Hi AODA,
My name is Sonia Kandola, and I am the Director of Government Relations at Lime.
I know AODA has provided input to many municipal micromobility programs and I’d love to connect and discuss opportunities for collaboration in line with your Members’ needs.
Lime is also in the process of launching a roundtable alongside accessibility groups to help facilitate feedback, recommendations, and guidance to Lime to enhance the accessibility, usability and safety of our services across Canada.
Please kindly let me know if there are times for us to connect over the next week or two.
Many thanks,
—
Lime
Sonia Kandola
Director Government Relations, Canada
December 4, 2023 Email from AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky to Lime Canada
December 4, 2023
To: Sonia Kandola
Director Government Relations, Canada
Via email: sonia.kandola@li.me
Dear Ms. Kandola,
I write in response to your July 29, 2023 and October 17, 2023 emails. You asked the AODA Alliance to partner with and collaborate with Lime Canada to assist its business of renting electric scooters (e-scooters) to the public.
The product which your company seeks to proliferate in communities around Canada directly and clearly endangers safety and accessibility for vulnerable people with disabilities, seniors and others. This has been proven in community after community here and abroad.
Our objections to your product, and the manner in which you and other e-scooter rental companies deploy them, should be well known to you. We have presented them at a good number of municipal council committee meetings in various parts of Ontario. Your company has sent paid corporate lobbyists to vigorously argue against our objections in community after community.
Your emails to us state that you are looking for our partnership, feedback, recommendations and guidance regarding your product. Our concerns and feedback have been fully documented in exhaustive detail on the AODA Alliance website’s e-scooters page over three years. Lime has no doubt closely monitored that web page, as part of its corporate lobbying work.
We expect that you are also quite familiar with the October 25, 2023 open letter that the AODA Alliance and 20 other disability and community groups sent to Toronto’s mayor and City Council. In it, we reiterate our strong opposition to allowing e-scooters in public places.
Despite our repeatedly voicing our concerns, Lime and the other e-scooter rental companies continue to vigorously market their product to municipalities, thereby endangering vulnerable people with disabilities, seniors and others. It is reasonable to conclude that your outreach to us and your stated intention to form a roundtable for accessibility groups is part of a corporate lobbying strategy, a strategy whose purpose is to enable Lime to tell politicians, the media and the public that it has partnered with disability advocates like us, all the while continuing to market a dangerous product.
We are not prepared to divert any of our scarce volunteer time to being part in such an exercise. We regret that we have had to divert so much volunteer time over the past three years in our effort to protect people with disabilities, seniors and others from the danger to them created by Lime and the other e-scooter rental companies.
Respectfully,
David Lepofsky CM, O.
Ont
Chair Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance
Twitter: @davidlepofsky