I have a couple of things in an immediate response around the consultation. Make no mistake—a lot of work has happened over the past three years.
We're very proud of the intentional effort around our consultations to be included, to have a national conversation, which, I would submit, has never happened before around disability issues. We needed to take the time to properly consult and include anybody and everybody who wanted to speak on what their vision of an accessible Canada was. I'm incredibly proud of the consultation process. I think it set a gold standard for how we can be inclusive in the way we consult as governments of any stripe.
What we clearly heard through the consultation was that Canadians with disabilities wanted to enshrine the concept of “nothing about us without us” in law. What that means is, “We don't want to have standards or requirements imposed by law, by government, that will impact our daily lives.”
What Bill C-81 does is create a framework of a process, a system, whereby Canadians with disabilities are squarely at the centre and have direct input into the decisions that are being made around the barriers to accessibility that they're facing.