Thank you. I very much appreciate the opportunity to present to you this morning.
I have the privilege of serving in a volunteer capacity as chair of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance. We are a non-partisan, province-wide coalition that advocates for a fully accessible Ontario for all people with a physical, mental, or sensory disability.
We encourage the House of Commons and the federal government to learn from our experience in Ontario. As a result of a decade-long campaign, from 1994 to 2005, our community won the enactment of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, which is unprecedented legislation in Canada. It requires Ontario to become fully accessible to all people with disabilities. It sets a deadline, 2025, which was 20 years out from the year it was passed, and it puts in place the machinery we need to develop, implement, and enforce accessibility standards that will get us to that destination.
We encourage the federal government to keep its commitment made back in 2007 to enact a Canadians with disabilities act. We are delighted that the Government of Manitoba has announced that they're going to pass a disabilities act. We would encourage the federal government to set a national standard so that people don't have to reinvent the wheel province by province, and to ensure that all federally regulated workplaces and service providers meet national standards for accessibility.
Why do we need this legislation, and what can you learn from our experience? We need this legislation not because we don't have the right to equality; we do. We have strong equality rights and human rights codes across the country federally and in the Charter of Rights. The problem is that to enforce them requires individuals with disabilities to litigate barriers one at a time. That is, in the end, a very costly, burdensome, and trying process. We always have to have resort to it, but we need a proactive law that would get us to full accessibility without having to litigate one organization and one barrier at a time.
That's what Ontario set about to do in our disabilities act. Now you can learn from Ontario's accomplishments and from where we can do better, but here are the key ingredients.
First, the federal government should set a deadline in legislation by which federally regulated organizations, including the federal government itself, become fully barrier-free as a place to work and as a place that provides good services and facilities to the public.
Second, the federal government should set national standards for accessibility, not ones that override the charter or the Human Rights Code, but ones that will do their best to fulfill their equality commitments and that are tailored to the needs of different organizations. We encourage you as well to provide a mechanism whereby provinces that don't now have a disabilities act could opt in to those federal standards so that interprovincial businesses don't have to worry about patchwork accessibility requirements, but can meet the strongest requirements across the whole country.
There are a couple of practical suggestions that could be part of this. Let me offer a principle with which I would suspect that anyone from left, right, centre, or nowhere on the political spectrum would agree. Not one dime of public money should ever be used to create, perpetuate, or exacerbate barriers against people with disabilities. Why not have the federal government now as a matter of policy proclamation but also in legislation require that no federal money will be used to make things worse for people with disabilities?
You're looking at employment for people with disabilities. The world we face now is that an individual who wants a job or has got a job and wants to keep it faces barriers. Either they have to seek voluntary compliance by their employer, or they have to litigate against their employer one barrier at a time. The workplaces of the future will not become fully accessible just by requiring individuals with disabilities to fight barriers one at a time. They will become accessible only if we require those workplaces to set about now [Technical Difficulty—Editor] ...for the future, planning on how, in an orderly way, to remove the barriers they now have, along reasonable timelines, and ensuring that they never create any new barriers after the present.
We have ideas from Ontario both about how we're doing it well, and frankly, about how it could be done better than what we're doing in Ontario. We'd be delighted to share those.
Let me just conclude with two ideas for you to think about.
It is wrong to think about accessibility and employment for people with disabilities or equal opportunity for employment for people with disabilities in isolation. You can't get a job if you can't get to the job. The federal government spends a lot of money helping provinces and municipalities fund infrastructure. How about making it a condition of any province or municipality that takes that money, that creates infrastructure such as public transit, that not one dime of it will be used to create an inaccessible public transit? Don't make things worse.
How about when it comes to federal money that flows through places of education in any province ensuring that there's equal educational opportunity for kids with disabilities? If you can't get an education, you can't qualify to get a good job.
Don't think about employment in isolation. We've got to tackle the barriers across the board. Transit, education, and employment must all be tackled together. The same barriers hurt in all contexts.
My last point, with which I will conclude, is this. As I'm speaking, you might ponder to yourself how much all this is going to cost. The fact of the matter is, providing for a fully accessible future won't cost money; it will save money. By getting more and more people with disabilities into the workplace so they can become taxpayers and off social assistance, we expand the public purse. By having more and more people with disabilities able to pursue employment, we make our workplaces more competitive. By having more and more organizations able to provide accessible customer service, we broaden their customer base so that they can make more money.
Accessibility is a win-win-win solution for people with disabilities, for government, and for business. Not mandating accessibility, not making it mandatory and putting in place the machinery to make sure that it actually happens is the one way to rack up costs for the public, costs that we'd like to avoid.
I've welcomed the opportunity to present to you and, if time permits, I'd be delighted to take your questions.