“Swimming Up Niagara Falls! The Battle to Get Disability Rights Added to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms” by AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky Now Available as Free Audio Book, MS Word or PDF Document, or From Amazon (Not Free) as Hard Copy Book or EBook

Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance Update

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

Twitter: @aodaalliance

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“Swimming Up Niagara Falls! The Battle to Get Disability Rights Added to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms” by AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky Now Available as Free Audio Book, MS Word or PDF Document, or From Amazon (Not Free) as Hard Copy Book or EBook

April 3, 2025

You can now get AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky ‘s book “Swimming Up Niagara Falls! The Battle to Get Disability Rights Added to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms” in multiple formats. Many options are free! This memoir includes a foreword by internationally renowned, retired Supreme Court of Canada Justice Rosalie Abella.

Forty years ago this month, on April 17, 1985, the equality rights provision of the Charter of Rights, Section 15, went into effect. AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky’s personal memoir recounts how Canada ended up being the first of any western democracy to enshrine in its Constitution a guarantee of equality rights for people with disabilities. He explains how this uphill battle was won against enormous odds. He was one of the disability activists who waged the campaign to win this constitutional right.

If you want to learn strategies for disability advocacy, this book is for you. You can download this book for free as a pdf, an accessible MS Word document, or even as a free audio book. CNIB recorded it. David Lepofsky has agreed that this can be shared with the entire public, not just CNIB clients.

For those who want a hard copy print version of the book, it is available as a print-on-demand book on Amazon. The author priced it at the lowest price possible, so that it includes no royalties. It is available on Kindle as an e-book for 99 cents. Amazon insists on a 33-cent royalty as part of that price. David Lepofsky will donate any royalties received to charity. We are going to work on trying to get it into the public library system.

Here are links to get it:

The disability amendment to Canada’s Constitution laid the bedrock foundation for court cases and legislative reforms to advance the right of students with disabilities to an equal education, the right of patients with disabilities to barrier-free access to health care, and the right of all people with disabilities to the full anti-discrimination protection of federal and provincial Human Rights Codes. It is ultimately the bedrock foundation that is at the core of the disability advocacy during the current federal election to get all federal parties to make the Accessible Canada Pledge.

“Equality for people with disabilities was the only constitutional right added to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms during the widely publicized eighteen-month epic battle over the patriation of Canada’s Constitution, which lasted from October 1980 to April 1982,” wrote Lepofsky. “It was won without any of the grassroots-organizing experience or the major technological tools that are today an indispensable part of the community organizer’s and disability advocate’s toolkit.”

The disability amendment to the Charter of Rights underpins the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act and the Accessible Canada Act. Not many know that equality for people with disabilities in Canada’s Charter of Rights was the product of grassroots action. This memoir will be informative for those interested in Canadian political or legal history, social justice and human rights advocacy, community organizing, or Canadian constitutional law. It will also interest anyone who enjoys discovering past events that form a part of Canada’s tapestry. It was the subject of an interview on September 16, 2024 with the author on TVO’s flagship current affairs program The Agenda with Steve Paikin, and an entire hour of the CBC Radio provincewide program Ontario Today on September 26, 2024.

This memoir is published in Volume 39 of the Windsor Yearbook of Access to Justice, the law journal of the Faculty of Law of the University of Windsor.

How You Can Help

Let others know about the availability of this resource. It can be useful for anyone who wants to learn how to do grassroots disability advocacy.
If you teach any courses on human rights, social justice, constitutional law or social work, consider including this book in your course reading materials.