AODA Alliance
ACCESSIBILITY FOR ONTARIANS WITH DISABILITIES ACT ALLIANCE
NEWS RELEASE – FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Tenacious Ontarians with Disabilities Converge Today at Queen’s Park to Demand Action to Tear Down the Many Accessibility Barriers, Marking 30th Anniversary of the Birth of Grassroots Accessibility Campaign
November 25, 2024 Toronto: Disability advocates converged on Queen’s Park today to demand government action, marking the 30th anniversary of a tenacious campaign to make Ontario accessible to 2.9 million Ontarians with disabilities.
At a Queen’s Park news conference this morning, AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky slammed successive Ontario Governments. They failed to lead Ontario to become accessible to people with disabilities by January 1, 2025.
In 2005, after a decade of non-partisan provincewide advocacy, the Legislature unanimously passed the landmark Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act. It requires the Ontario Government to lead the province to become accessible to people with disabilities by 2025. Yet almost twenty years later, Ontarians with disabilities still face too many accessibility barriers when they try to get a job, ride public transit, use our health care system, get an education, eat in restaurants, or shop in stores.
Retired special education teacher and parent of a child with disabilities, Nora Green described the many crushing barriers that K-12 students with disabilities face at school. These were again revealed three weeks ago at a Town Hall for parents of students with special education needs that she helped organize as a member of TDSB’s Special Education Advisory Committee.
Longtime built-environment accessible design consultant Thea Kurdi described the absurdity that even after all this time, all new Ontario buildings following the Building Code are still replete with disability barriers, including those funded with public money. A prime example of the kinds of disability barriers described by Kurdi were revealed recently in the AODA Alliance’s widely watched video of the new Toronto Armoury Street courthouse entitled “Billion-Dollar Accessibility Bungle.”
This afternoon, the AODA Alliance convened community public hearings At Queen’s Park. The Legislature did not organize these hearings. We did. Presenter after presenter told MPPs from the four parties about barriers they face in education, health care, transportation, employment, long term care, the built environment, enforcement, and much more.
“Thirty years ago this week, on November 29, 1994, our grassroots accessibility advocacy movement was spontaneously born in a Queen’s Park meeting room to fight for legislation to make Ontario barrier free for people with disabilities,” said AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky who led the campaign from 1994 to 2005 to get the Disabilities Act passed. “After our three decades of provincewide advocacy, we’re returning to where it began to commemorate our anniversary of tenacity and to press the political parties to speed up the glacially paced action to make Ontario accessible.”
The feedback that MPPs received today will fuel a forthcoming letter to the party leaders from the AODA Alliance, which will seek concrete and specific commitments on what they will do to achieve the AODA’s goal as soon after 2025 as possible. A possible spring Ontario election is widely anticipated. The AODA Alliance will seek election commitments that over a million Ontario voters with disabilities can mull over as they decide for whom they will vote. In each of the eight Ontario elections starting in 1995, every party that made pledges on accessibility did so in letters to the AODA Alliance or to its predecessor coalition, the Ontarians with Disabilities Act Committee.
“Over these three decades, we’ve sent hundreds of email updates, posted thousands of tweets, taken part in many town halls and public forums, held dozens of news conferences, written innumerable briefs and letters to the Government, issued a barrage of news releases, been quoted in an untold number of news reports, met with a parade of premiers, ministers and MPPs, made presentations to a large number of legislative, municipal and other committees, and trained new generations of disability advocates,” said Lepofsky. “The Disabilities Act doesn’t vanish on January 1, 2025, and neither will we! We’re more determined than ever.”
Contact: AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky, aodafeedback@gmail.com
Twitter: @aodaalliance
For more background
- A comprehensive timeline of major events over the past 30 years in the grassroots campaign for accessibility in Ontario.
- The AODA Alliance’s November 2, 2024 letter to the party leaders inviting the parties to take part in our community public hearings.
- The AODA Alliance’s captioned online video series of the major news conferences and other key events in the 30-year campaign for accessibility for people with disabilities.
- For all the background on the work of the Ontarians with Disabilities Act Committee from 1994 to its dissolution in August 2005, visit odacommittee.net
- For all the work of its successor coalition, the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance, from Fall 2005 to the present, visit aodaalliance.org
How it all began! Excerpt from “The Long, Arduous Road to a Barrier-Free Ontario for People with Disabilities: The History of the Ontarians with Disabilities Act — The First Chapter” by
David Lepofsky
Published in the National Journal of Constitutional Law Volume 15, Number 2, Carswell
Despite sporadic discussions among some in the early 1990s, there was no grassroots groundswell in Ontario supporting an ODA. There was also no major grassroots political force building to push for one. Similarly, there was no organized grassroots disability rights movement pushing for the inclusion of disability equality in the Ontario Human Rights Code in 1979 before the Ontario Government proposed its new disability discrimination legislation in that year.
In the early 1990s, Ontario disability organizations involved in disability advocacy were primarily focused on other things, such as the NDP Ontario Government’s proposed Employment Equity Act, expected to be the first provincial legislation of its kind in Canada. That legislation, aimed at increasing the employment of persons with disabilities as well as women, racial minorities and Aboriginal persons was on the agenda of the provincial New Democratic Party that was then in power in Ontario.
What ultimately led to the birth of a province-wide, organized grassroots ODA movement in Ontario was the decision of an NDP back-bench member of the Ontario Legislature, Gary Malkowski, to introduce into the Legislature a private member’s ODA bill in the Spring of 1994, over three years into the NDP Government’s term in office. By that time, the NDP Government had not brought forward a Government ODA bill.
Malkowski decided to bring forward Bill 168, the first proposed Ontarians with Disabilities Act, to focus public and political interest in this new issue. Malkowski was well-known as Ontario’s, and indeed North America’s, first elected parliamentarian who was deaf. Ontario’s New Democratic Party Government, then entering the final year of its term in office, allowed Malkowski’s bill to proceed to a Second Reading vote in the Ontario Legislature in June 1994 and then to public hearings before a committee of the Ontario Legislature in November and December 1994.
In 1994, word got around various quarters in Ontario’s disability community that Malkowski had introduced this bill. Interest in it started to percolate. Malkowski met with groups in the disability community, urging them to come together to support his bill. He called for the disability community to unite in a new coalition to support an Ontarians with Disabilities Act. A significant number of persons with disabilities turned up at the Ontario Legislature when this bill came forward for Second Reading debate in the Spring of 1994.
Over the spring, summer and fall months of 1994, around the same time as Malkowski was coming forward with his ODA bill, some of the beginnings of the organized ODA movement were also simmering within an organization of Ontario Government employees with disabilities. Under the governing NDP, the Ontario Government had set up an “Advisory Group” of provincial public servants with disabilities to advise it on measures to achieve equality for persons with disabilities in the Ontario Public Service. In the Spring of 1994, this Advisory Group set as one of its priorities working within the machinery of the Ontario Government to promote the idea of an ODA.
This public service Advisory Group met with several provincial Cabinet Ministers and later with Ontario’s Premier, Bob Rae, to discuss the idea of an ODA. It successfully pressed the Government to hold public hearings on Malkowski’s ODA bill.
As 1994 progressed, Malkowski’s bill served its important purpose. It sparked the attention and interest of several players in Ontario’s disability community in the idea of an ODA. No one was then too preoccupied with the details of the contents of Malkowski’s ODA bill.
Malkowski’s bill had an even more decisive effect on November 29, 1994, when it first came before the Legislature’s Standing Committee for debate and public hearings. On that date, NDP Citizenship Minister Elaine Ziemba was asked to make a presentation to the Committee on the Government’s views on Malkowski’s bill. She was called upon to do this before community groups would be called on to start making presentations to the legislative committee. The hearing room was packed with persons with disabilities, eager to hear what the Minister would have to say.
Much to the audience’s dismay, the Minister’s lengthy speech said little if anything about the bill. She focused instead on the Government’s record on other disability issues. The temperature in the room elevated as the audience’s frustration mounted.
When the committee session ended for the day, word quickly spread among the audience that all were invited to go to another room in Ontario’s legislative building. An informal, impromptu gathering came together to talk about taking action in support of Malkowski’s bill. Malkowski passionately urged those present to come together and to get active on this cause.
I was one of the 20 or so people who made their way into that room. In an informal meeting that lasted about an hour, it was unanimously decided to form a new coalition to fight for a strong and effective Ontarians with Disabilities Act. There was no debate over the content of such legislation at that meeting. However, there was a strong and united realization that new legislation was desperately needed, and that a new coalition needed to be formed to fight for it. This coalition did not spawn the first ODA bill. Rather, the first ODA bill had spawned this coalition.