You're going to have to bear with me a little bit. This is probably as much reading as I've done in the last 12 years. It's really tough stuff here.
Dear members of Parliament, and the Government of Canada's Standing Committee on Operations and Estimates, first I would like to thank you for this opportunity to speak in front of you today on behalf of persons with disabilities.
Today I want to try to take you from what you're going to hear as you cross Canada—a lot of numbers, and a lot of different means and ways to do different things—down to a personal perspective. I want you to really try to imagine where a person with disabilities is coming from when this is presented to them.
As a person living with a visual disability, and having been connected to the disability community for some 12 years, I would like to make a case for the issues of inequality and hardship involved with the introduction of community mailboxes as opposed to home delivery service.
The federal office responsible for persons with disabilities is currently also planning and/or holding cross-Canada consultations on how the federal office can improve equality for persons with disabilities, and certainly the postal service would fall under these criteria, because hardships encountered physically, emotionally, visually, and mentally would infringe on the rights to equality in our society that our Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees us.
I want you to try to picture in your own mind what it would be like if you actually had to do this, especially if you were in a wheelchair and especially if you were in a rural area where a proper sidewalk would likely be non-existent, and you had to trudge through mud or snow to get to a mailbox only to find out the mailbox is probably too high to get at, or maybe a vehicle is parked in the way so the mailboxes are inaccessible. Persons with a visual impairment who have to go out in the wintertime face the same situation as somebody in a wheelchair does.
The vision-loss community is not a very select group. It encompasses the better part of our society from the young to the old, so imagine those kinds of persons. For somebody with a mental disability, who sometimes finds it hard to get to the door whether because of depression, anxiety, or whatever the mental disability, can you imagine the struggle of trying to get out to a mailbox? Image being a person with hearing loss. As Mayor Pender said, in certain places, we have four-lane intercommunity roads. Imagine the stress for these people as they go up onto a major road to try to get to a mailbox as opposed to having home delivery.
I'm sure a whole lot of numbers will be presented to you, but probably this number should shock you: there are some 3.5 million Canadians living today with disabilities. That's basically 10% of our society, so if we take away the home delivery service and put in these mailboxes, 10% of people right off the bat are going to encounter certain hardship.
Thanks.