Interestingly, some years ago—and as I mentioned, I've been in this business for a while—when we talked about accommodation, we talked about it with an affirmative action component as well. It was not simply offsetting and covering the additional cost of disability, but we had some years ago affirmative action programs that were paying more than simply the cost of disability. Many of the leaders of our community, frankly, got their post-secondary education because at that time tuition, books, a living allowance, and their disability costs were covered under an old program called the vocational rehabilitation of persons with disabilities. It is not simply covering the disability costs; it is creating a climate where we're actually creating incentive for people to get post-secondary education. Many of those programs don't exist any longer.
We assume that new technologies and new levels of access have removed barriers, and they have to some extent, but they've also created new barriers. For many people who are blind, frankly, information is now in formats that are not accessible. They may be accessible if you can afford an iPad. If you're blind it has an accessibility feature. It is wonderful. But if you can't afford it, much of that information is inaccessible. Recently we had to have someone with a disability actually challenge the federal government's website information, to ensure that government websites were fully accessible and met web accessibility standards.
Those are the battles we're fighting. We're still fighting battles of transportation access at local levels, at provincial levels, and at the federal level. We challenged VIA Rail, which purchased inaccessible passenger rail cars in 2000, and we won at the Supreme Court in 2007. Now the cars are being retrofitted. In 2013, this summer, we only have about six of them coming onto the tracks. The other 30 that were purchased in 2000 are still being retrofitted.
This is a long-term business, folks. It is not that you're going to remove the barriers overnight, but we have created systems....
I'll give you another example. We worked long and hard to ensure that television was captioned so that people who were deaf had captioning. But now how do we get captioning? How do we get our news and our information? We get it through the Internet, which is not regulated. No captioning is provided. When CTV covered the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, everything that was over broadcast was captioned. Everything that was live was not captioned. There were no regulations requiring captioning.
So as our society evolves, as we create new ways of doing business, as we create new ways of getting information and access, we have to ensure that those same standards are in place to create access for people with disabilities. Apprenticeship programs will not be accessible until we have information systems accessible, until transportation systems are accessible, and we don't penalize people when they go off social assistance and make them lose all their benefits.