Well, I think, as David Lepofsky said earlier this week, that there are many levers that you have. There are some things that are under the jurisdiction of this act that you could be doing and there are other ways that you could be working with other parts of the federal government and other programs you have.
The lack of alignment between the building code and the Canadian charter and the human rights code is one of the biggest problems we see for built environment and design. Why is it a human right? The Canadian charter says disabled people are equal citizens, and the human rights code says buildings and spaces shall not discriminate against them, so why are we as accessibility consultants warning people that following the building code is not getting them to that level and that there's a liability gap?
If it's required in those higher pieces of legislation, the building code should say that too, and it's part of the reason we hear so much push-back or concern, such as “Where does it say in the building code that we have to do that? Why is it in the human rights code but not in the building code?”
Again, as I said, one thing the government could do.... They provide funding to our educational institutions for post-secondary training. Of course, training the designers is a key part of understanding what accessibility looks like. People often mistakenly say, “Accessibility is ugly, and it's hard, and it's expensive,” but that's because they're doing it too late and they haven't spent time, especially during their developmental years, thinking about how amazing accessibility can be. We're not accessing their skills.
Also, one point David Lepofsky made was about attaching requirements so that no federal money is spent on creating new barriers. Whether that's putting requirements in our procurement policies while we wait for the building code to finally get up to speed, how we use accessibility consultants or making sure accessibility requirements are done further upstream, it has to be there right from the start, which is what you say in the legislation: “accessibility from the start”. If we don't do those things, we're missing major parts of the answers that, unfortunately, will feed back into the training and rethinking.