Certainly. Thank you.
Timelines are needed in two contexts.
First, the bill is lacking an ultimate deadline for achieving full accessibility.
You've heard from many groups that have said we need that, and I don't know if you've heard from any groups that said we don't. The only person who's come before this committee, I believe, to make a case against doing that, and correct me if I'm wrong, is Minister Qualtrough, who may have said, or someone may have said, “Well, we don't have a timeline in the Criminal Code to be crime free.” It's a wrong comparison.
We have a criminal code because we know that unfortunately in our society, there will always be violence and so on. We need laws to protect us when that happens. On the other hand, we can achieve full accessibility by a deadline if we set the deadline.
We do have a society now in which we manage to ensure that we have women's washrooms in public buildings. We don't have to even think about that anymore.
You heard yesterday from Marie Bountrogianni, who wrote Ontario's accessibility law. She talked about how in the design of Ontario's law, the idea of an end deadline was hers and her government's, not ours. They were very clever in doing that. It was a great move.
She said we're doing this so that we reach a point where we can think about accessibility in our environment for people with disabilities the way we think about women's washrooms. It just happens, and we don't even have to think about it anymore.
That's the first thing. We need an end deadline. Without it, progress will be slower. While progress in Ontario hasn't been fast enough, the end deadline has played a very important role in any progress we've made. If this bill has an end deadline, it will be stronger. If it doesn't, it's basically telling people with disabilities, “We'd like accessibility, but don't expect it, ever. There may be some progress, but we're not prepared to say when or even if a world you can fully participate in will ever really happen.”
The other deadlines that need to be built in are concrete deadlines by which various implementation measures in the bill must be taken by government—when standards must be made by, when public officials and agencies like the accessibility standards development organization must be established, and those kinds of timelines.
What we know about government, regardless of party, as we've learned in Ontario, in Manitoba and elsewhere where legislation exists, is that unless there are timelines by which public servants must take certain actions to get the bill and the measures it requires up and running, they will fall behind. It's not because they're bad people, but because they have competing pressures.
To put it simply, folks, you guys are in the political biz, and in the political biz, your timeline is usually the crisis of next week, and the distant future for you is next year's election. Beyond that, it's really out of the spectrum of what people even think about.
We need legislative timelines that go beyond that, and a process to implement it. As in Ontario, if a government fails to meet one of those deadlines, there's a place we can go and an order we can get for the measure they were obliged to take.