Prime Minister Carney’s New Cabinet Has No Minister for People with Disabilities But Has a Minister for Seniors, a Minister for Women, Two Ministers for Indigenous People, and Even a Minister for Sport!

Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance Update

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

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Prime Minister Carney’s New Cabinet Has No Minister for People with Disabilities But Has a Minister for Seniors, a Minister for Women, Two Ministers for Indigenous People, and Even a Minister for Sport!

May 13, 2025

For a decade, from 2015 to early 2025, Canada’s Federal Government under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had a cabinet minister designated as responsible for people with disabilities. This was an important and commendable effort to try to ensure that the needs of millions of people with disabilities in Canada had a voice at the Cabinet table when important issues were raised.

Now, under Prime Minister Mark Carney, that cabinet post has inexcusably been abolished. He first eliminated it when he became leader of the federal Liberals earlier this year and took over as prime minister. At that point, he hurriedly appointed a substantially reduced Cabinet. While it was a bad sign that he eliminated the Disabilities Minister position, we anticipated that this situation was temporary. His party was rushing into a snap election.

However, with the announcement of his new Cabinet today, he has not revived that position. In sharp contrast, he still has a minister responsible for women, a minister responsible for seniors, two separate ministers responsible for Indigenous Peoples, and even a minister of sport. We of course recognize the value of sports in Canada, but are the urgent needs of people with disabilities less important than sports?

After Mark Carney named his initial Cabinet earlier this year, he was blasted for having eliminated both the minister responsible for people with disabilities and the minister responsible for women’s issues. In this new Cabinet, he took that criticism seriously enough to restore the position of minister responsible for women’s issues, but not seriously enough to restore the minister for people with disabilities.

This sends a strong and deeply worrisome message to millions of people with disabilities in Canada that they and their issues are a low priority in the world view of Canada’s new prime minister. This is even more worrisome because Prime Minister Carney aims to undertake major restructuring of Canada’s economy and reorganization of the Federal Government due to the Trump threat. If disability considerations are not fully factored into those plans, we can expect that yet more serious new disability barriers will be created in Canada. This will violate the requirement in the Accessible Canada Act that the Federal Government lead this country to become accessible to people with disabilities by 2040, a deadline that we have already fallen quite behind on reaching.

Making all this even worse is the fact that Prime Minister Carney did not even answer our written request of all federal party leaders during the recent election to make detailed commitments on disability issues. We had asked all the parties to make the Accessible Canada Pledge. Only the Green Party did so.

Of course, having a minister responsible for disability issues in the federal Cabinet is not a guarantee that the Federal Government will effectively meet the urgent needs of people with disabilities in Canada. On the one hand, the longest serving minister in this role, Carla Qualtrough, spearheaded two important pieces of new federal legislation, the Accessible Canada Act and the Canada Disabilities Benefit Act. She also played a key role in getting an emergency disability benefit paid during the pandemic.

On the other hand, both those bills were far too weak. Their implementation has been crushingly sluggish and ineffectual. The single disability benefit during the entire pandemic took an absurd amount of time to reach impoverished people with disabilities. At the same time as these measures were being developed, the Federal Government was excessively liberalizing doctor-assisted suicide, applicable only to people with disabilities, without ensuring proper safeguards for society’s most vulnerable.

However, it is reasonable to conclude that weak as these measures were, they would have been even weaker had there not been a minister at the Cabinet table with direct public responsibility for disability issues. We urge Prime Minister Carney to designate one of his ministers whom he has already appointed with an explicit and clear mandate to be the voice for people with disabilities at the Cabinet table. The last thing people with disabilities now need is for the Federal Government to be backtracking in any way on disability issues.

How You Can Help

Contact your newly elected MP. Tell them to press Prime Minister Carney to appoint a Minister for People with Disabilities.

Learn more about the battle to get the Accessible Canada Act strengthened and effectively implemented by visiting the AODA Alliance website’s Canada Page.

Explore our battle to strengthen the weak Canada Disability Benefit Act by checking out the AODA Alliance website’s Bill C-22 page.