Good evening, committee members. I'm delighted to be here this evening and honoured to represent Communication Disabilities Access Canada. This is a national non-profit organization that promotes accessibility for people who have speech and language disabilities that are not caused by hearing loss.
I need to take a minute to tell you a bit about who we're talking about, and then to tell you a bit about what access means for them. I'm going to focus on the needs of half a million Canadians who have a wide range of disabilities that affect how they communicate. We're talking about people who have cerebral palsy, autism spectrum disorder, intellectual disability, learning disability, ALS, traumatic brain injury, aphasia after a stroke, Parkinson's.... I could go on to list about 60 disabilities that affect how people communicate with you in their speech or understand what you're saying to them.
This is not a small, marginalized population; this is a huge population. It's a population that has received very little attention. They are off the radar when it comes to looking at accessibility needs of this group. I'm going to tell you how we think Bill C-81 can be strengthened to include the needs of people with speech and language disabilities.
At this time, the bill talks about priority areas. I think there are five or six of them. I'm going to have to reference them—employment, built environment, procurement of goods and services, program and service delivery, transportation, and information and communication technologies.
We propose that communication should be addressed in a much broader context than information and communication technologies. We have analyzed accessibility guidelines standards all across the country, and I can tell you that usually it's about respect and attitudes, it's about plain language, it's about accessible websites, and it's about alternate formats and sign language. These are incredibly important, but they are not addressing the needs of people who have speech and language disabilities.
I want to say that people who have speech and language disabilities may have difficulty. They may have little or no speech. They may use pictures, letter boards, or speech-generating devices to communicate, or they may have difficulty comprehending what you're saying.
Communication traditionally is looked at as giving information, getting information into people's heads. We're saying it's about being two-way. It's about expression and about comprehension, and it occurs in all jurisdictions that interact with the public—in face-to-face interactions, telephone and telecommunications, reading and writing, public forums, and meetings like this. These are the contexts that are important and that people need access to. If we look just at information and communication, we're going to miss it. We are absolutely going to miss it.
We're asking the government to amend the bill to include communication as a generic building block that needs to be in place for all jurisdictions—and I'll explain what I mean by that—but we're also asking that there's another building block we need to put in place, and that building block should have everything to do with discrimination, attitudes, accessibility rights, diversity and equity. That's one building block.
The other block is communication. What we want is that all jurisdictions have training in how to interact with people whose speech may be unclear; who use a communication device; or who have, or need to have, a communication assistant. That's the sort of thing that will make meaningful changes.
We are then asking that once you have the two domains, the building blocks, in place across the board, you adapt them.
Let's have our federal courts take the general communication training and then look at their own context. We want communication intermediaries to be available to victims, witnesses and accused who need to communicate in that context.
We need Service Canada to be able to communicate with people on the telephone or offer the appropriate text-based communication alternatives.
We need Elections Canada to offer online voting so that people can use their own assistive devices and not suddenly have to learn how to use a sip-and-puff switch or a scanner that they've never seen before when they go in to vote.
We have the solutions. The solutions are there. We just need to put them in place, and they are all very achievable.
I'll say one more thing. I can see you smiling at me, Mr. Chairman, but I don't get a chance to speak very often.
Most of the barriers and the frustrations for people with speech and language disabilities are there because they have no access to communication devices and the supports they need to access the services. They would like the federal government to expand its role, not just to negotiate accessibility standards across the country but to work together with us to ensure that people have what they need to communicate with their services.
Are the lights dimming at this point? I think they are. The music is coming on.