Introduction - AODA Alliance



TOC \o "1-3" \h \z \u Introduction PAGEREF _Toc535568561 \h 81. Overview PAGEREF _Toc535568562 \h 82. Who Are We? PAGEREF _Toc535568563 \h 93. What Is In This Brief and How to Read It PAGEREF _Toc535568564 \h 104. The Sources of This Brief's Contents PAGEREF _Toc535568565 \h 125. The AODA - How It Works PAGEREF _Toc535568566 \h 136. What Questions This Independent Review Should Ask PAGEREF _Toc535568567 \h 137. What We Told the 2014 Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review – A Short Summary PAGEREF _Toc535568568 \h 148. Right Off the Top – The Pressing Need for This Independent Review to Recommend that the New Ontario Government Immediately Lift Its Freeze on the AODA Health Care and Education Standards Development Committees PAGEREF _Toc535568569 \h 20Chapter 1 The Big Picture – How is Ontario Doing? PAGEREF _Toc535568570 \h 231. Introduction PAGEREF _Toc535568571 \h 232. Recommended Findings PAGEREF _Toc535568572 \h 233 Recommendations Regarding the Big Picture PAGEREF _Toc535568573 \h 244. What the 2014 Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review Said PAGEREF _Toc535568574 \h 255. Ontario is Not On Schedule to Become Accessible to Ontarians with Disabilities by 2025 PAGEREF _Toc535568575 \h 296. Why is Ontario So Far Behind Schedule for Becoming Accessible to People with Disabilities by 2025? PAGEREF _Toc535568576 \h 317. The Urgent need for the Ontario Government to Develop a Multi-Year Plan for Ensuring that Ontario Reaches Full Accessibility by 2025 PAGEREF _Toc535568577 \h 358. The Need for Substantial Reform at the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario PAGEREF _Toc535568578 \h 419. Need for Substantially Improved Openness and Public Accountability of the Ontario Government's Activities on Implementing and Enforcing the AODA PAGEREF _Toc535568579 \h 44Chapter 2 The Ongoing Unmet Need for the AODA's Effective Enforcement PAGEREF _Toc535568580 \h 611. Introduction PAGEREF _Toc535568581 \h 612. Recommended Findings PAGEREF _Toc535568582 \h 613. Recommendations on the AODA's Enforcement PAGEREF _Toc535568583 \h 624. What the 2014 report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review Found on the AODA's Enforcement PAGEREF _Toc535568584 \h 645. Insufficient Government Action on AODA Enforcement Since the 2014 report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review PAGEREF _Toc535568585 \h 693. Wynne Government Imposes a Meagre Five Monetary Penalties under the AODA for 2015, 2016 and 2017 Combined PAGEREF _Toc535568586 \h 734. Wynne Government's June 3, 2015 Headline-Grabbing Crackdown on AODA Violators Did Not Materialize Over Two and a Half Years Since the Government Promised It PAGEREF _Toc535568587 \h 735. Troubling Levels of AODA Violations among the Small Number of Organizations that the Wynne Government Examined More Closely PAGEREF _Toc535568588 \h 786. Only One On-Site AODA Inspection Since the AODA Was Enacted in 2005? PAGEREF _Toc535568589 \h 797. A Minuscule Number of AODA Inspectors and Directors for All of Ontario. PAGEREF _Toc535568590 \h 818. Government Had Funds on Hand for More AODA Enforcement PAGEREF _Toc535568591 \h 829. If and When the Wynne Government Actually Takes AODA Enforcement Action, It Can Have an Impact PAGEREF _Toc535568592 \h 8310. Three Years Later, Wynne Government Has Still Not Implemented the 2014 Recommendation on Effective Public Reporting to the Public on Its AODA Enforcement PAGEREF _Toc535568593 \h 8311. Failure to Effectively Publicize the Government's Toll-Free Number for Reporting AODA Violations PAGEREF _Toc535568594 \h 8612. Conclusion: A Pressing Need for Prompt New Government Action on AODA Enforcement PAGEREF _Toc535568595 \h 866. Developments Since the June 2018 Ontario Election PAGEREF _Toc535568596 \h 86Chapter 3 Current AODA Accessibility Standards Don't Ensure Ontario Will Become Accessible to People with Disabilities by 2025 PAGEREF _Toc535568597 \h 891. Introduction PAGEREF _Toc535568598 \h 892. Recommended Findings PAGEREF _Toc535568599 \h 893. Recommendations Regarding Deficiencies in Current AODA Accessibility Standards PAGEREF _Toc535568600 \h 904. What We Told the 2014 Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review PAGEREF _Toc535568601 \h 915. What the 2014 report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review Found PAGEREF _Toc535568602 \h 936. The Mandatory 5-Year Reviews to Date of Existing Accessibility Standards Have Failed to Lead to These Standards Being Effectively Strengthened PAGEREF _Toc535568603 \h 1037. Developments Since the June 2018 Ontario Election PAGEREF _Toc535568604 \h 133Chapter 4 The Need for New Accessibility Standards, Including a Strong and Comprehensive Built Environment Accessibility Standard PAGEREF _Toc535568605 \h 1341. Introduction PAGEREF _Toc535568606 \h 1342. Recommended Findings PAGEREF _Toc535568607 \h 1353. Recommendations Regarding Next Accessibility Standards to be Developed PAGEREF _Toc535568608 \h 1364. Excessive Multi-Year Government Delays in Deciding Whether to Develop a New Accessibility Standard PAGEREF _Toc535568609 \h 1385. The Pressing Need for A Residential Housing Accessibility Standard PAGEREF _Toc535568610 \h 1426. The Pressing Need for a Strong and Effective AODA Built Environment Accessibility Standard PAGEREF _Toc535568611 \h 1427. The Need for the Ontario Government to Decide Promptly on the Other Accessibility Standards that Ontario Needs to Create PAGEREF _Toc535568612 \h 171Chapter 5 The Need to Substantially Reform the Standards Development Process Under the AODA PAGEREF _Toc535568613 \h 1771. Introduction PAGEREF _Toc535568614 \h 1772. Recommended Findings PAGEREF _Toc535568615 \h 1773. Recommendations on Improving the Process for Developing New Accessibility Standards and Revising Existing Standards PAGEREF _Toc535568616 \h 1804. The former Ontario Government's Failed and Now-Abandoned Reforms to the Standards Development Process PAGEREF _Toc535568617 \h 1835. The Government's Failure to Appoint Some of the Mandatory Five-Year Reviews of Existing Accessibility Standards By the AODA's Mandatory Deadline PAGEREF _Toc535568618 \h 1916. Excessive Delays in Setting Up New Standards Development Committees PAGEREF _Toc535568619 \h 1927. The New Ontario Government's Unwarranted Freeze on the Work of Standards Development Committees PAGEREF _Toc535568620 \h 1958. Inappropriate Government Attempts to Unduly Restrict the Work of Standards Development Committees PAGEREF _Toc535568621 \h 2029. Need to Ensure the Openness and Public Accountability of Standards Development Committees PAGEREF _Toc535568622 \h 21110. Insufficiency of the Publicly-Posted Minutes of Some if Not Many Standards Development Committees PAGEREF _Toc535568623 \h 21511. The Previous Government's Excessive Requirement that a Standards Development Committee Decision Requires a 75% Super-Majority Vote PAGEREF _Toc535568624 \h 21712. Putting the Cart Before the Horse – Previous Minister's Direction to Standards Development Committees to Set Priorities in Their First Six Months PAGEREF _Toc535568625 \h 22213. Ensuring that the Public Can Fully and Effectively Take Part in All Upcoming Public Consultations on Proposals for AODA Accessibility Standards PAGEREF _Toc535568626 \h 22414. Accessibility Directorate Overstepping Its Proper Role in the Work of Standards Development Committees PAGEREF _Toc535568627 \h 22715. Standards Development Committees Not Fulfilling Their Duty to Recommend an Accessibility Standard PAGEREF _Toc535568628 \h 22916. Weak Work Product from Recent Standards Development Committees PAGEREF _Toc535568629 \h 23017. The Standards Development Process Requires More Extensive Involvement by the Ontario Human Rights Commission PAGEREF _Toc535568630 \h 23018. Insufficient Consulting of the Disability Community During the Work of Standards Development Committees PAGEREF _Toc535568631 \h 23119. The Former Government's Broken 2007 Election Promise to Provide Staff Support to Disability Sectors on Each Standards Development Committee PAGEREF _Toc535568632 \h 23220. Ministry's Recent Failure to Publicly Consult on a Standards Development Committee's Final Recommendations PAGEREF _Toc535568633 \h 23321. The Government's Repeatedly Failing to Comply with the Statutory Deadline for Deciding on Making an Accessibility Standard after One is Recommended PAGEREF _Toc535568634 \h 23422. Purporting to Make Amendments to the 2011 Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation Without Obeying the AODA's Mandatory Process for Revising an Accessibility Standard PAGEREF _Toc535568635 \h 235Chapter 6 Public Education on Accessibility Remains Insufficient PAGEREF _Toc535568636 \h 2441. Introduction PAGEREF _Toc535568637 \h 2442. Recommended Findings PAGEREF _Toc535568638 \h 2443. Recommendations on Public Education on the AODA PAGEREF _Toc535568639 \h 2454. What the 2014 Final Report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review Found PAGEREF _Toc535568640 \h 2475. The Former Ontario Government's Action Since the final report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review PAGEREF _Toc535568641 \h 2506. Developments since the June 2018 Ontario Election PAGEREF _Toc535568642 \h 257Chapter 7. The Government's Failure to Effectively Ensure that Public Money Is Never Used to Create, Perpetuate or Exacerbate Disability Barriers PAGEREF _Toc535568643 \h 2581. Introduction PAGEREF _Toc535568644 \h 2582. Recommended Findings PAGEREF _Toc535568645 \h 2583. Recommendations on Ensuring Public Money Is Not Used to Create, Perpetuate or Exacerbate Barriers PAGEREF _Toc535568646 \h 2594. What the final report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review Said PAGEREF _Toc535568647 \h 2625. 2014-2018: Another Four Years of Using Public Money to Create New Barriers PAGEREF _Toc535568648 \h 2626. Reflections PAGEREF _Toc535568649 \h 2827. Developments Since the June 2018 Election PAGEREF _Toc535568650 \h 283Chapter 8. Ensuring that All Ontario Laws Do Not Authorize or Require Disability Barriers PAGEREF _Toc535568651 \h 2851. Introduction PAGEREF _Toc535568652 \h 2852. Recommended Findings PAGEREF _Toc535568653 \h 2863. Recommendations on the Government's Duty to Review Ontario Statutes and Regulations for Accessibility Barriers PAGEREF _Toc535568654 \h 2874. What The report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review Said PAGEREF _Toc535568655 \h 2875. What the Former Ontario Government Did Since 2014 PAGEREF _Toc535568656 \h 2886. Developments Since the 2018 Ontario Election PAGEREF _Toc535568657 \h 307Chapter 9 Making Ontario and Municipal Elections Accessible to Voters and Candidates with Disabilities PAGEREF _Toc535568658 \h 3101. Introduction PAGEREF _Toc535568659 \h 3102. Recommended Findings PAGEREF _Toc535568660 \h 3103. Recommendations on Ensuring Municipal and Provincial Elections are Barrier-free for Voters and Candidates with Disabilities PAGEREF _Toc535568661 \h 3104. What the 2014 Mayo Moran Report Found PAGEREF _Toc535568662 \h 3115. Ontario Government Action or Inaction on Accessible Elections since the 2014 report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review PAGEREF _Toc535568663 \h 3126. Developments Since the June 2018 Ontario Election PAGEREF _Toc535568664 \h 322Chapter 10 Ontario Government - Leading by Example, But by What Example is it Leading? PAGEREF _Toc535568665 \h 3231. Introduction PAGEREF _Toc535568666 \h 3232. Recommended Findings PAGEREF _Toc535568667 \h 3243. Recommendations on the Ontario Government Leading By Example on Accessibility PAGEREF _Toc535568668 \h 3254. What the 2014 report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review Said PAGEREF _Toc535568669 \h 3265. Action by the Former Ontario Government since 2014 PAGEREF _Toc535568670 \h 3306. Developments Since the June 2018 Ontario Election PAGEREF _Toc535568671 \h 370Chapter 11 The Unmet Need for a Strong and Effective Ontario Strategy to Substantially increase the Employment of Ontarians with Disabilities PAGEREF _Toc535568672 \h 3731. Introduction PAGEREF _Toc535568673 \h 3732. Recommended Findings PAGEREF _Toc535568674 \h 3733. Recommendations to Improve Employment Opportunities for People with Disabilities PAGEREF _Toc535568675 \h 3744. What the 2014 Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review Report Found PAGEREF _Toc535568676 \h 3755. What the Former Ontario Government Did from 2014 to 2018 PAGEREF _Toc535568677 \h 3766. Developments Since the June 2018 Ontario Election PAGEREF _Toc535568678 \h 400Appendix – Recommended Findings and Recommendations in this Brief, Listed Chapter By Chapter PAGEREF _Toc535568679 \h 402Chapter 1 The Big Picture – How is Ontario Doing? PAGEREF _Toc535568680 \h 402Recommended Findings PAGEREF _Toc535568681 \h 402Recommendations Regarding the Big Picture PAGEREF _Toc535568682 \h 402Chapter 2 The Ongoing Unmet Need for the AODA's Effective Enforcement PAGEREF _Toc535568683 \h 403Recommended Findings PAGEREF _Toc535568684 \h 403Recommendations on the AODA's Enforcement PAGEREF _Toc535568685 \h 404Chapter 3 Current AODA Accessibility Standards Don't Ensure Ontario Will Become Accessible to People with Disabilities by 2025 PAGEREF _Toc535568686 \h 406Recommended Findings PAGEREF _Toc535568687 \h 406Recommendations Regarding Deficiencies in Current AODA Accessibility Standards PAGEREF _Toc535568688 \h 406Chapter 4 The Need for New Accessibility Standards, Including a Strong and Comprehensive Built Environment Accessibility Standard PAGEREF _Toc535568689 \h 408Recommended Findings PAGEREF _Toc535568690 \h 408Recommendations Regarding Next Accessibility Standards to be Developed PAGEREF _Toc535568691 \h 409Chapter 5 The Need to Substantially Reform the Standards Development Process Under the AODA PAGEREF _Toc535568692 \h 412Recommended Findings PAGEREF _Toc535568693 \h 412Recommendations on Improving the Process for Developing New Accessibility Standards and Revising Existing Standards PAGEREF _Toc535568694 \h 414Chapter 6 Public Education on Accessibility Remains Insufficient PAGEREF _Toc535568695 \h 418Recommended Findings PAGEREF _Toc535568696 \h 418Recommendations on Public Education on the AODA PAGEREF _Toc535568697 \h 419Chapter 7. The Government's Failure to Effectively Ensure that Public Money Is Never Used to Create, Perpetuate or Exacerbate Disability Barriers PAGEREF _Toc535568698 \h 422Recommended Findings PAGEREF _Toc535568699 \h 422Recommendations on Ensuring Public Money Is Not Used to Create, Perpetuate or Exacerbate Barriers PAGEREF _Toc535568700 \h 423Chapter 8. Ensuring that All Ontario Laws Do Not Authorize or Require Disability Barriers PAGEREF _Toc535568701 \h 426Recommended Findings PAGEREF _Toc535568702 \h 426Recommendations on the Government's Duty to Review Ontario Statutes and Regulations for Accessibility Barriers PAGEREF _Toc535568703 \h 427Chapter 9 Making Ontario and Municipal Elections Accessible to Voters and Candidates with Disabilities PAGEREF _Toc535568704 \h 428Recommended Findings PAGEREF _Toc535568705 \h 428Recommendations on Ensuring Municipal and Provincial Elections are Barrier-free for Voters and Candidates with Disabilities PAGEREF _Toc535568706 \h 428Chapter 10 Ontario Government - Leading by Example, But by What Example is it Leading? PAGEREF _Toc535568707 \h 429Recommended Findings PAGEREF _Toc535568708 \h 429Recommendations on the Ontario Government Leading By Example on Accessibility PAGEREF _Toc535568709 \h 431Chapter 11 The Unmet Need for a Strong and Effective Ontario Strategy to Substantially increase the Employment of Ontarians with Disabilities PAGEREF _Toc535568710 \h 432Recommended Findings PAGEREF _Toc535568711 \h 432Recommendations to Improve Employment Opportunities for People with Disabilities PAGEREF _Toc535568712 \h 433Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance United for a Barrier-Free Ontario for All People with Disabilities aodafeedback@ Twitter: @aodaalliance Brief of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance to the David Onley Third Independent Review of the Implementation and Enforcement of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act January 15, 2019Introduction 1. OverviewIn October 2017, the AODA Alliance released an online video that depicted serious accessibility problems at the Ryerson University's brand-new Student Learning Centre. It quickly garnered thousands of views online, lots of attention on social media and good conventional media coverage. It secured so much attention because so many are shocked that public money is still being used to create new barriers against people with disabilities – a reality with which Ontarians with disabilities are, sadly, all too familiar.Over two years earlier, on February 13, 2015, the former Ontario Government issued a long-awaited news release. It made public the final report of the Second Mandatory Independent Review of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA), which the Ontario Government had appointed former University of Toronto Law Dean Mayo Moran to conduct. That report revealed serious problems with the Government's implementation and enforcement of the AODA, resulting in frustrating, slow progress for people with disabilities. It was a cruel irony that in that same news release, the former Ontario Government declared itself a "global leader" on accessibility. Amplifying that cruel irony, the Government released the Moran report in an inaccessible PDF format, without ensuring that it was also available at that time in a readily-available alternative format such as MS Word, so that people with disabilities such as vision loss could read it. Almost four years after the Government released the Moran Report, Ontarians with disabilities still live in a province full of far too many disability barriers, when they try to get a job, go to school, ride public transit, shop in stores, or deal with their government. There has been progress on accessibility in Ontario, but it is painfully slow and too-often faltering. All Ontarians lose out – the 1.9 million Ontarians who now have a disability, and the rest of all Ontarians, who are bound to get a disability later in life, as they age.What can Ontario do about this plight, from which no one is now benefitting? We provide the answer in this brief. This is the AODA Alliance's brief to the Third Mandatory Independent Review of the implementation and enforcement of the AODA. In February, 2018, the Ontario Government appointed the Hon. David Onley to conduct this AODA Independent Review under section 41 of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA).In this brief, we describe what has been done to implement and enforce the AODA. We show that Ontario is not on schedule for becoming accessible to people with disabilities by 2025 (the AODA's mandatory deadline). We back our assessments with detailed description of dates, events and efforts. We identify the key findings that we urge the Third AODA Independent Review to make. We also offer detailed and constructive recommendations on what must be done to get Ontario back on schedule to be accessible by 2025. We urge this AODA Independent Review to adopt our proposed findings and recommendations. This brief makes it clear that the time to raise awareness has passed. It is time to raise action! When action on accessibility improves, the awareness and culture change will follow.Ontario's new Government is presented with an extraordinary opportunity and a clear challenge. The new Government has the opportunity to do a much better job of implementing the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (for which all parties voted in 2005) than did the former Ontario Government. The new government's challenge is that it must act boldly, and must act now. If the current Government does not act swiftly to take the steps set out in this brief in its current term of office, it may well be too late, after the 2022 Ontario election, for the Ontario Government to take all the needed action to ensure that Ontario becomes accessible to people with disabilities by 2025.We acknowledge with profound and abiding appreciation the help of all the volunteers who have assisted, directly or indirectly in the efforts of the AODA Alliance over the years, culminating in the preparation of this brief. We also express our deep gratitude to the many within the Ontario Government, at the public service and political levels, high and low, and those with the opposition parties, past and present, who have tried with deep commitment and passion to get more action on accessibility. Where progress has been too slow, it is despite their efforts, too often finding that they were swimming upstream against waves of bureaucracy. To all those who candidly shared helpful information with us, and whose contributions cannot be here identified, we are forever indebted to them as well, for their invaluable contribution to our efforts. In our non-partisan campaign for accessibility in Ontario for over 1.9 million people with disabilities, there are many, many unsung heroes. We are saddened that too many who helped along the way did not live to see the progress we have made.2. Who Are We?The AODA Alliance has extensive experience with the design, implementation and enforcement of accessibility legislation in Ontario and elsewhere. Founded in 2005, we are a voluntary, non-partisan, unincorporated grassroots coalition of individuals and community organizations. Our mission is: "To contribute to the achievement of a barrier-free Ontario for all persons with disabilities, by promoting and supporting the timely, effective, and comprehensive implementation of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act." To learn about us, visit: coalition is the successor to the non-partisan grassroots Ontarians with Disabilities Act Committee. The ODA Committee advocated for more than ten years, from 1994 to 2005, for the enactment of strong, effective disability accessibility legislation. Our coalition builds on the ODA Committee’s work. We draw our membership from the ODA Committee's broad, grassroots base. To learn about the ODA Committee's history, visit: have been widely recognized by the Ontario Government, by all political parties in the Ontario Legislature, within the disability community and by the media, as a key voice leading the non-partisan campaign for accessibility in Ontario. In every provincial election since 2005, any party that has made election commitments on accessibility has done so in letters to the AODA Alliance. Our efforts and expertise on accessibility for people with disabilities have been recognized in speeches on the floor of the Ontario Legislature, and beyond. Our website and Twitter feed are widely consulted as helpful sources of information on accessibility efforts in Ontario and elsewhere. We have achieved this as an unfunded community coalition.Beyond our work at the provincial level in Ontario, over the past four years, the AODA Alliance has been active, advocating for strong and effective national accessibility legislation for Canada. We have been formally and informally consulted by the Federal Government and some federal opposition parties on this issue. The AODA Alliance has spoken to or been consulted by disability organizations, individuals, and governments from various parts of Canada on the topic of designing and implementing provincial accessibility legislation. For example, we have been consulted by the Government of Manitoba and by Barrier-Free Manitoba (a leading grassroots accessibility advocacy coalition in Manitoba) in the design and implementation of the Accessibility for Manitobans Act 2013. We twice made deputations to a Committee of the Manitoba Legislature on the design of that legislation. We have been consulted by the BC Government on whether to create a BC Disabilities Act, and by Barrier-Free BC in its grassroots advocacy for that desired legislation.We have also been consulted outside Canada on this topic, most particularly, in Israel and New Zealand. In addition, in June 2016, we presented on this topic at the UN annual international conference of state parties to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.3. What Is In This Brief and How to Read ItThis Brief is written As a sequel or An Addendum to the AODA Alliance's detailed June 30, 2014 Brief to the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review. It can be downloaded at That earlier brief detailed progress made and shortfalls in the key areas that the AODA addresses, up to the middle of 2014. Since then, as this brief explains in detail, the Ontario Government did far too little to address the problems that our 2014 brief to Mayo Moran identified. With too few exceptions, many if not most of our recommendations to Mayo Moran, and the recommendations to the Government that the Moran report itself made, went unimplemented by the Government. As such, as of early 2019, Ontario finds itself largely in the same predicament as we found ourselves as of June 30, 2014, but with four and a half fewer years to get caught up. This brief includes a series of chapters that are each an addendum to the corresponding part of our 2014 brief to Mayo Moran. Each chapter of this brief alerts the reader to the part of our 2014 brief to Mayo Moran that it supplements. The reader might find it most helpful to first read the relevant part of our brief to Mayo Moran, followed by the corresponding chapter of this brief. In each chapter of this brief, we introduce a specific topic. We then offer a list of findings that we ask this AODA Independent Review to make. We then list our specific recommendations on that topic. After that, we set out key passages on that topic in the 2014 Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review report. The rest of chapter of this brief gives the history of events on that topic since 2014. That longer discussion provides the foundation for the findings and recommendations that the chapter urges upon the AODA Independent Review. Here is a short tour through this brief's chapters:This introductory chapter to this brief introduces the AODA Alliance and the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA). It identifies the key questions that we ask this AODA Independent Review to address in its report. It summarizes what we told the 2nd AODA Independent Review conducted by Mayo Moran in 2014, as a starting point for this brief's discussion. Finally, it identifies one key issue that we urge this AODA to address right off the top, if possible by a short interim report. Chapter 1 of this brief addresses some important "big picture" considerations that underpin everything we discuss throughout the balance of the brief.Chapter 2 of this brief addresses problems with the AODA's enforcement. It is an addendum to Part II of our 2014 brief to Mayo Moran. Chapter 3 of this brief addresses insufficiencies in the AODA accessibility standards that have been enacted to date in Ontario. It is an addendum to Part III of our 2014 brief to Mayo Moran.Chapter 4 of this brief explores the need for additional accessibility standards in Ontario, in important areas such as the accessibility of the built environment. It is an addendum to Part IV of our 2014 brief to Mayo Moran.Chapter 5 of this brief identifies problems with the process that the Government has used under the AODA for developing new accessibility standards and for conducting the mandatory 5-year review of an existing accessibility standard. It is an addendum to Part V of our 2014 brief to Mayo Moran.Chapter 6 of this brief examines efforts at educating the public on accessibility. It is an addendum to Part VI of our 2014 brief to Mayo Moran. Chapter 7 of this brief investigates whether the Ontario Government has ensured that public money is never used to create or perpetuate disability barriers. It is an addendum to Part VII of our June 30, 2014 brief to Mayo Moran.Chapter 8 of this brief looks at what the Ontario Government has done to review its statutes and regulations to ensure that they do not authorize or require any barriers against people with disabilities. It is an addendum to Part VIII of our 2014 brief to Mayo Moran. Chapter 9 of this brief reviews what has been done to ensure that provincial and municipal elections in Ontario are accessible to voters and candidates with disabilities. It is an addendum to Part IX of our 2014 brief to Mayo Moran. Chapter 10 of this brief takes a look at what the Ontario Government has done to fulfil its oft-repeated claim that it is leading by example on accessibility. It is an addendum to Part X of our 2014 brief to Mayo Moran. Finally, Chapter 11 of this brief looks at what the Ontario Government has done, apart from enacting the 2011 Employment Accessibility Standard, to expand employment opportunities for people with disabilities in Ontario. It is an addendum to the discussion of this topic in Part X of our 2014 brief to Mayo Moran.At the end of this brief is an Appendix which sets out, chapter by chapter, the findings we urge this AODA Independent Review to reach, and the recommendations we ask this Independent Review to make.4. The Sources of This Brief's ContentsThe analysis and recommendations in this brief are drawn from our many years of volunteer advocacy work in the area of accessibility for people with disabilities. Our perspectives and recommendations draw on feedback we have garnered from our own research and from conducting a great many town hall meetings around Ontario over the years, as well as from vast amounts of feedback received via email and social media. It comes from countless discussions with individuals and organizations in the disability community, and with government officials, with politicians of all political stripes, with obligated organizations, with researchers and academics, with accessibility consultants and from many exchanges with disability advocates. This is enriched by feedback from government officials and disability advocates in other provinces and other countries. This brief's contents relies upon and builds on research, findings and recommendations in our many previous briefs to the Ontario Government, including our briefs to the first AODA Independent Review conducted by Charles Beer in 2009-10, and our brief to the second AODA Independent Review conducted by Mayo Moran 2014. It draws on our many regular AODA Alliance Updates that can be found on our website at In addition, to prepare this brief, we have invited feedback from our supporters, from the disability community and the public in general, through our email updates and through social media. In addition, on November 23, 2018, we made a draft of this brief public for input from the community. We welcome feedback from our supporters, which helps us finalize a brief such as this. On November 23, 2018, we sent the public draft of this brief to the Ontario Government, with a request to be alerted to any possible factual inaccuracies in that draft. Back in 2014, we made the same request of the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario. Back then, the Accessibility Directorate was kind enough to agree to provide feedback on our 2014 brief to Mayo Moran before we finalized it. We hope that the Ontario Government would be agreeable to do the same again in 2018, with this brief. However, unfortunately, the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario refused our request. In her November 27, 2018 email to the AODA Alliance, Assistant Deputy Minister Ann Hoy wrote:"Thank you for sending us your draft brief. While we appreciate you providing input to the reviewer, it is not a part of the process for staff to fact check any submissions. Thank you for your commitment to accessibility in Ontario." 5. The AODA - How It WorksThe AODA seeks to implement the right of persons with disabilities to full participation and inclusion in society that the Ontario Human Rights Code and s. 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantee to all persons with disabilities. That includes people with all kinds of disabilities, visible and visible disabilities, such as physical, mental sensory, communication, learning, intellectual, mental health or other disabilities.The AODA endeavours to achieve this without persons with disabilities having to individually sue, one barrier at a time, to achieve the goal of a barrier free society. It also seeks to achieve this by giving obligated organizations in the public and private sector more detailed and specific directions on what they need to do than those organizations obtain from the broad and general wording of the Ontario Human Rights Code and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.The AODA requires the Ontario Government to lead Ontario to become fully accessible to all persons with disabilities by 2025. In this brief, when we say "the Government" we refer to the Ontario Government. To achieve this, the AODA requires the Government to make all the accessibility standards needed to achieve that goal, and to effectively enforce them. The Government also must provide the public, including obligated organizations, with the knowledge, training and other tools needed to ensure that Ontario reaches this goal. 6. What Questions This Independent Review Should AskWe propose that to discharge its mandate, this Independent Review should ask these questions, which we address throughout this brief:Is Ontario now on schedule to achieve full accessibility for people with disabilities by 2025, as the AODA requires?Has the Government effectively used all its powers and fulfilled all its obligations under the AODA in order to ensure that Ontario reaches full accessibility for people with disabilities by 2025?Does the Government now have in place a comprehensive and effective action plan for ensuring that Ontario reaches full accessibility by 2025?Has the Government fulfilled all of its obligations regarding the implementation and enforcement of the AODA, and regarding disability accessibility generally?What actions are needed to ensure that Ontario reaches full accessibility by 2025?It is vital that this Independent Review not be misdirected into asking the wrong question. The question confronting this AODA Independent Review is not whether Ontario has made some progress, or whether accessibility has improved. If the AODA's goal was merely to improve accessibility for people with disabilities in Ontario, that weak and tepid goal would be fulfilled by installing one new ramp or retrofitting one website in Ontario. 7. What We Told the 2014 Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review – A Short SummarySadly, we have had to report in this brief much the same frustrating information about slow progress on accessibility as we reported four and a half years ago to the 2014 Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review. It may help this AODA Independent Review to know, in a summary form, what we told Mayo Moran four and a half years, as a point of comparison.Our June 30, 2014 brief to Mayo Moran summarized its conclusions and recommendations as follows:“Ontario is not on schedule for reaching full accessibility by 2025.The AODA requires the Ontario Government to lead the public and private sectors, to become fully accessible by 2025. To achieve this, the Government has two major duties, and a third supportive role. First, it must develop and enact all the accessibility standards needed to ensure that Ontario reaches full accessibility by 2025. Second, it must effectively enforce those standards, to ensure full compliance. Third, as a subsidiary duty to support the first two, the Government must deploy effective public education on the AODA to reinforce compliance. Despite a range of good efforts by the Government, the Government is now failing at all of these tasks.The Charles Beer 2010 AODA Independent Review found that, to ensure Ontario reaches full accessibility by 2025 the Ontario Government must show new leadership on the AODA, to revitalize, institute transformative change and breathe new life into its implementation. Since then, the Government has done none of this, even though it implemented some of the Beer report's recommendations.The Government is not effectively enforcing the AODA. Yet the Government promised to effectively enforce it, has ample enforcement powers, unused budget and an internal enforcement plan available. The Government failed to enforce the AODA even when it knew of rampant AODA violations among private sector organizations with at least 20 employees. The Government attempted for months to suppress this information from coming to public light. The Government has no good reason for failing to effectively enforce the AODA, and, after being driven to enforce it by adverse publicity, for having only used paltry efforts to only enforce one of many enforceable AODA duties, the duty of private sector organizations with at least 20 employees to file an accessibility self-report under the Customer Service Accessibility Standard. The Government's failure to effectively enforce the AODA contributes to Ontario falling behind schedule for full accessibility by 2025. It undermines the efforts of those who try to persuade and motivate obligated organizations to comply with the AODA. It is unfair to obligated organizations who comply with the AODA, especially if their competitors do not. It creates a harmful disincentive against investing a person's or organization's limited time and scarce resources to take part in the development of accessibility standards, or other consultations vital to the AODA's effective implementation. The need for the AODA's effective enforcement is amplified because in 2006, the Government privatized enforcement of human rights. This made it harder for persons with disabilities (and other discrimination victims) to challenge barriers, one at a time, by complaints filed under the Ontario Human Rights Code.It was good for the Government, in 2005-2006, to decide that the first AODA accessibility standards to be created would address barriers in customer service, transportation, employment, information and communication, and in the built environment. However, the accessibility standards enacted to date in these areas, while helpful, are grossly insufficient to effectively ensure that all recurring barriers in those fields are removed and prevented by 2025. Several requirements are too weak. They mostly if not totally deal with preventing new barriers, but not removing existing barriers. They don't address a number of important recurring barriers. Their time lines are often too long. They wrongly create exceptions, exemptions and defences that are broader than the undue hardship defence in the Human Rights Code. We and the Ontario Human Rights Commission unsuccessfully pressed the Government to ensure that AODA accessibility standards be at least as strong as the Human Rights Code's accessibility requirements. As a result, obligated organizations face the risk of multiple litigation over the same barrier. It was counterproductive for the Government to administratively carve out of the AODA the important area of the built environment. It did so by addressing built environment barriers inside buildings only via amendments to the Ontario Building Code. These are not also incorporated in an AODA accessibility standard. This broke the Government's repeated promises to enact a Built Environment Accessibility Standard under the AODA. Also dragging Ontario behind schedule for full accessibility by 2025, the Government took an unwarranted number of years to enact its modest regulations addressing some barriers in the built environment. The Government has not kept its 2009 promise to address the need for retrofitting of existing buildings which are not undergoing a major renovation, and barriers in residential housing, via an AODA accessibility standard. As such, Ontario's built environment is now not on schedule for full accessibility by 2025, or ever. The Government's unexplained and unjustified multi-year dithering over which AODA accessibility standards to create next has squandered important time, as the 2025 deadline grows closer. The Government has taken longer to decide which accessibility standards to next make than it takes to develop an accessibility standard. This delay cannot be justified by the fact that Ontario had a minority government from October 2011 to June 2014. As the Government dithered, old barriers remained in place. New ones were created that could have been prevented. There are still residual problems with the process for developing AODA accessibility standards, despite the Government's reforms to date. The Government has consolidated responsibility for developing proposals for the content of all new accessibility standards in the Accessibility Standards Advisory Council (ASAC), acting as a Standards Development committee, with the possibility of other members being added. This has not yet yielded any of the benefits that it was expected to deliver.The Government's efforts on AODA public education, while helpful, have been too limited and delayed. This too has held Ontario back behind schedule for full accessibility by 2025. The Government, as far as we can tell, has not kept its 2007 promise to promote public education on accessibility aimed at school children, and at key professionals such as architects. Despite producing some good educational materials on accessibility, there are also some very troubling instances of Government public statements that undermine efforts at accessibility. The Government's failure to provide effective accessibility public education makes it likely that fewer organizations are complying with the AODA. In rare instances when the Government has of late started limited enforcement steps, too often there is push-back, because the obligated organizations say they hadn't known of their obligations or appreciated why they are beneficial. Despite our many efforts and some progress, the Government still has in place no comprehensive, monitored policy to ensure that public money is never used to create, perpetuate or exacerbate disability barriers. A number of huge opportunities were lost. Even though we made some progress in the 2011 summer, the Government has in some instances continued to engage in conduct that can create new barriers against persons with disabilities, using public money. The Government has been very tardy in addressing its 2007 election promise to review all Ontario laws for accessibility barriers. In 2007, the Government called this review "the next step toward our goal of a fully accessible Ontario." Almost seven years later, despite progress at the speed of a turtle, this promised review is still years away from completion, due to Government lethargy. The longer laws remain on the books that require or permit disability accessibility barriers, the longer it will take Ontario to reach full accessibility. Voters and candidates with disabilities continue to face preventable barriers when trying to exercise their fundamental legal and constitutional rights in municipal and provincial elections. These include barriers impeding them from attending an All Candidates Debate, from getting into a polling station and/or from being able to independently mark their own ballot in private and verify their choice. To become fully accessible, Ontario must ensure that municipal and provincial elections become fully accessible for voters and candidates with disabilities. Elections accessibility continues counterproductively to be addressed in isolated silos in the Ontario Government. The Government wastefully requires the same barriers to be separately tackled in the provincial and municipal levels, and separately in each municipality. Legislative reforms in 2009 and 2010 have not solved this problem. Ontario still does not have the accessible elections action plan we were promised in 2007, or the further progress towards accessible Ontario and municipal elections we were promised in 2011. Telephone and internet voting, as a solution, is thankfully spreading in municipal elections but is unjustifiably stalled at the provincial level. The Ontario Government has taken some commendable steps to achieve accessibility within its own house. Yet there are a series of stunning examples of the Government leading by a very poor example, setting back progress towards a fully accessible Ontario. This has included, among other things, palpable violations of the AODA and the Ontarians with Disabilities Act 2001. The Government needs to take significant action to better ensure that the Ontario Public Service becomes a fully accessible employer and service mendable efforts by the Government in the past two years to improve the AODA's implementation have not made a positive difference. This includes its moving lead responsibility for implementing and enforcing the AODA from the Community and Social Services Ministry to the Economic Development, Trade and Employment Ministry. There has been enough time for such measures to make a difference. We have not seen accessibility effectively incorporated into the work of the Economic Development, Trade and Employment Ministry. Its promised strategy to increase private sector employment for persons with disabilities has been much talk and delayed action. We have seen no progress on getting Ontario businesses to produce accessible goods and services, for use by persons with disabilities here and abroad.The continued periodic elusiveness of one specific cost-free, easy-to-provide accommodation provides a good illustration of the roadblocks we too often encounter, and of the Government's failure to effectively lead by example. We have had a seemingly-endless battle in our unsuccessful effort to get Government to consistently ensure that whenever it posts a PDF document on its public websites or internal intranet, it also posts that document in an accessible format such as an accessible MS Word or HTML document. Accessibility has not been effectively entrenched within the Ontario Public Service on a day-to-day basis. It is too often seen as a superficial "add-on" that pops up infrequently and is someone else's responsibility. The Government's 2011 pledge to integrate accessibility as a fundamental principle when it comes to making vital decisions that affect the daily lives of Ontarians, has not become a reality in the Ontario Public Service for the most part. A serious deep-rooted problem with the AODA's implementation is demonstrated by the ordeals that Ontario's disability community has had to undergo for many years, for example:to get the Government to enforce the AODA, and to find out what the Government has done on its enforcement.to get the Government to keep its promise to enact the Built Environment Accessibility Standard, and to decide which accessibility standards it would next develop;to get the Government to implement an effective, monitored and enforced program to ensure that public money is never used to create, perpetuate or exacerbate disability barriers.to get the Government to undertake and complete its promised review of all Ontario laws for accessibility barriers.to get the Government to implement effective measures for ensuring that municipal and provincial elections in Ontario are fully accessible.The Government's recurring foot-dragging cannot be written off as simply the inevitable delay in government. This Government has shown itself to be capable of prompt and bold action on the disability accessibility front, when it wishes. From October 2003 to October 2004, as a new, inexperienced Government, it quickly and effectively conducted a broad, open and inclusive public consultation and developed Bill 118, the proposed AODA. Since the 2011 summer, the Government's progress on accessibility has ground down to a virtual stand-still. Among the many causes for this has been a stunning lack of leadership on this issue within the Government, and the Government's failure to put in place effective measures to ensure that accessibility is taken seriously across the government, and that all its accessibility promises are kept. The result is that Ontario falls further behind schedule for full accessibility by 2025, while many Government accessibility promises languish, unkept.It is critical for Ontario to now develop, make public, and implement a comprehensive plan for ensuring that our province gets back on schedule, and reaches full accessibility by 2025. Unless that plan is developed now, and unless the Government quickly gets to work on developing all the remaining accessibility standards needed to ensure full accessibility, the Government in the next four years will condemn Ontario to miss the 2025 goal of full accessibility. Our brief therefore presents a series of recommendations to:ensure that the AODA is effectively enforced.strengthen the accessibility standards that have been enacted to date under the AODA.get the Government to immediately get to work, developing new accessibility standards to address barriers in health care, education and residential housing.keep the Government's commitment to address retrofits of built environment barriers in existing buildings that are not undergoing any major renovation, through the standards development process.enact under the AODA an accessibility standard that incorporates the Ontario Building Code's accessibility requirements, as amended in 2013.ensure that the Government promptly identifies all the other accessibility standards that need to be developed to ensure Ontario becomes accessible by 2025, and gets to work developing them.further reform the process for developing new accessibility standards and for revising existing standards under the AODA.expand public education on accessibility, aimed at obligated organizations, at school children, at key professions such as architects, and at the general public.ensure that public money is never used to create, perpetuate or exacerbate barriers against persons with disabilities.substantially speed up and complete the Government's review of all Ontario statutes and regulations for accessibility barriers that it promised in 2007.enact new, effective legislation and implement new strategies to ensure that municipal and provincial elections in Ontario are fully accessible to persons with disabilities, including the option of telephone and internet voting which at least 44 Ontario municipalities already use.ensure that the Ontario Government itself obeys Ontario's accessibility laws, and leads by a good example on accessibility."8. Right Off the Top – The Pressing Need for This Independent Review to Recommend that the New Ontario Government Immediately Lift Its Freeze on the AODA Health Care and Education Standards Development Committees Before diving into the range of issues that this brief explores in depth in the following chapters, we wish as an important preliminary matter to urge this AODA Independent Review to recommend as soon as possible that the Ontario Government should immediately lift its 7-month freeze on the work of the Health Care Standards Development Committee and the two Education Standards Development Committees that have been appointed under the AODA. We encourage this Independent Review to issue a short interim report, in order to make this recommendation, and to get it in the Government's hands as soon as possible. Heading 7 in Chapter 5 of this brief addresses the need for Ontario to develop and enact an Education Accessibility Standard to tear down the disability accessibility barriers facing students with disabilities in Ontario's education system, and a Health Care Accessibility Standard to tear down the barriers facing patients with disabilities in Ontario's health care system. Students with disabilities face too many disability accessibility barriers in Ontario's education system. Patients with disabilities face too many barriers in Ontario's health care system. That chapter addresses the pressing need for the new Ontario Government to lift its freeze on the work of three Standards Development Committees which were already at work before the 2018 Ontario election. These committees were developing recommendations for an Education Accessibility Standard and a Health Care Accessibility Standard. It took us many years and tenacious advocacy to eventually get the former Ontario Government to agree to develop new AODA accessibility standards to address those barriers. In 2017, the former Government appointed a Health Care Standards Development Committee. In Early 2018, it appointed a K-12 Education Standards Development Committee and a Post-Secondary Education Standards Development Committee. They were hard at work when their work was frozen last June, in the wake of the June 2018 Ontario election. Their work remains frozen to this day.Chapter 5 explains why it is essential for these Standards Development Committees to be allowed to resume their work without further delay, and for this seven-month freeze to be lifted. In our unsuccessful efforts over the past seven months to get this freeze lifted, the new Government has never claimed that Ontario's education system and health care system are barrier-free for people with disabilities, or that there is no need for people with disabilities to have accessibility in the areas of health care or education. However, just days ago, we learned that the Government has said that it is waiting for the report of this AODA Independent Review before it decides whether to lift its freeze on the work of those Standards Development Committees. On January 9, 2019, we received a copy of the December 20, 2018 letter from Minister for Accessibility and Seniors Raymond Cho to the chair of the K-12 Standards Development Committee. In that letter, Minister Cho stated:"I am writing to update you on the status of the K-12 Education Standards Development Committee.As you know, the Hon. David Onley’s Third Legislative Review of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act is currently underway and nearing its submission date. At Mr. Onley’s request, he has been granted a one-month extension to complete his work, and his report is now due on January 31, 2019. I am looking forward to reading his assessment of the AODA and any proposed recommendations. In this regard, we will be waiting to review Mr. Onley’s report before considering the best path forward to further improving accessibility in Ontario.Since taking office in June, our new Government for the People has acted swiftly and with determination to implement change that will get Ontario back on track. Once we have analysed and carefully considered the Review, we intend to move forward with the same determination to break down barriers, improve accessibility and make Ontario open for business for everyone. Your committee has already done meaningful work exploring barriers faced by kindergarten to Grade 12 students. As the Minister for Seniors and Accessibility, I appreciate your valuable contribution. I wish you a happy holiday season and look forward to working with you in the New Year."Before this, the Government had not made any public statement that it was awaiting this AODA Independent Review's report before deciding on the future of these Standards Development Committees. The Government has known of the existence of this AODA Independent Review for months. Had the Government earlier said that it was awaiting this Independent Review's advice on point, we would have immediately urged this Independent Review to issue a short interim report to recommend that this freeze be lifted. Much public attention in the past months has focused on the new Government's concern to reduce the costs of government. Chapter 5 of this brief offers several recommendations on how the standards development process under the AODA can be conducted in a more cost-effective way. The impact of this freeze has been an increased cost to the public, including people with disabilities. As long as Ontario continues without effective accessibility standards in the areas of health care and education, health care providers and facilities, as well as schools, colleges and universities will continue to create new disability barriers, including doing so with public money. (See further Chapter 7) It will cost the public more for those barriers to later be removed. It also costs the public more when the Government leaves it to each education organization and each health care organization to re-invent the accessibility wheel, rather than having the benefit of the directions of clear and strong accessibility standards in these areas.There is no need for the Government to study and decide on the other issues that this Independent Review will address before it decides on lifting the freeze on these Standards Development Committees. Last fall, the Government was able to decide, without the benefit of this Independent Review's report, to lift its freeze on the work of the Employment Standards Development Committee and the Information and Communication Standards Development Committee. As is documented in Chapter 5, the new Government, when in opposition, was sufficiently familiar with these issues to demand that the former Ontario Government agree to develop an Education Accessibility Standard, and to appoint a Standards Development Committee to work on it. Any further delay in deciding on lifting the freeze only continues to hurt students with disabilities and patients with disabilities. An immediate, short interim report making the recommendation requested here would help more swiftly bring that delay to an end. If this Independent Review does not issue an interim report on this topic, then we encourage this Independent Review to place a recommendation to lift this freeze close to the start of its final report to the Government, so that it is prominent.Chapter 1 The Big Picture – How is Ontario Doing?1. Introduction Before the following chapters' detailed discussion of each of the major facets of the Ontario Government's implementation and enforcement of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA), this chapter first takes a look at the "big picture." It addresses some common themes that the later chapters' discussions, proposed findings and recommendations explore in greater detail.This chapter considers first whether Ontario is on schedule for reaching accessibility for people with disabilities by 2025. It concludes that we are not. This chapter then identifies the key causes for Ontario's being behind schedule. That is not to say that nothing has been done, or that no progress has been made. Rather, our conclusion is that while there has been some progress, it has continued to be far too slow, compared to what is readily achievable in Ontario with proper leadership from our Government.This chapter then addresses the need for new Ontario Government leadership on accessibility, as both the 2010 Charles Beer AODA Independent Review and the 2014 Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review had earlier urged. It addresses the need for Ontario to develop and implement a comprehensive multi-year plan to lead Ontario to accessibility by 2025. The rest of this brief fills in many details of what that plan should include.This chapter then takes a look at the lead office within the Ontario Government, charged with leading the AODA's implementation and enforcement, the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario. We address the need for significant reform there. Finally, this chapter explores the excessive confidentiality and secrecy that the Ontario Government has too often sought to achieve with the AODA's implementation and enforcement, including the development and review of AODA accessibility standards. This chapter concludes by showing how the reforms recommended in this brief fit well within the agenda of Ontario's new Government, elected in June 2018. This all sets the stage for the more specific topics considered in the following chapters.2. Recommended Findings We recommend that this AODA Independent Review make these findings:* There has been progress on accessibility since the AODA's enactment. However, this progress has been far too slow. * Ontario is not now on schedule for becoming accessible to people with disabilities by 2025. At the present rate of progress, Ontario will not even come close to reaching full accessibility by 2025. A dramatic improvement is needed now to the AODA's implementation and enforcement.* Since the 2014 report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review, the Ontario Government did not show the renewed leadership and revitalized approach to the AODA's implementation that the Moran report recommended.* There is a pressing need to revitalize the AODA's implementation, as both the 2010 Charles Beer AODA Independent Review and the 2014 Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review recommended. This revitalization never took place in response to those reports' recommendations.* The Ontario Government has never had and now has no comprehensive plan for leading Ontario to reaching accessibility by 2025. There is a clear and present need for such a plan.* There is a clear need for substantial reform at the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario, the Government office that has lead responsibility for the AODA's implementation and enforcement, such as the development of AODA accessibility standards. This is so despite the fact that there are many hard-working, dedicated people working at various positions in the Accessibility Directorate.* The Ontario Government has tried to shroud the AODA's implementation and enforcement, including the development and review of AODA accessibility standards, with far too much secrecy. The public is entitled to expect the AODA's implementation and enforcement, including the development and review of AODA accessibility standards, to be open, transparent and publicly accountable.3 Recommendations Regarding the Big Picture We therefore recommend that:The Ontario Government must act promptly to re-vitalize and breathe new life into the implementation and enforcement of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA). This should start with strong new leadership from the top, including the Premier, the Cabinet and the senior leaders within the Ontario Public Service.The Ontario Government should act quickly to adopt, implement and make public a comprehensive multi-year plan for effectively leading Ontario to become accessible by 2025, which includes the issues regarding the AODA's implementation and enforcement that are addressed in this brief.There should be substantial reform at the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario so that it better provides the leadership on the AODA's implementation and enforcement that Ontario needs.As is addressed in further detail elsewhere in this brief, the Ontario Government's implementation and enforcement of the AODA, including the development and review of AODA accessibility standards, should be carried out in an open, public transparent and accountable way. The Ontario Government's current pre-occupation with excessive secrecy and confidentiality should be eliminated. For example, members of and presenters at Standards Development Committees should not be asked or required to sign non-disclosure agreements. 4. What the 2014 Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review Said The 2014 report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review included:* "Put simply, how are we doing on dismantling barriers to accessibility and ensuring the inclusion of persons with disabilities? The Review received a great deal of feedback on this issue. The AODA is a novel regime, a fact which inevitably entails certain challenges. At this half-way point to the 2025 date, it seems clear that much good work has been done and considerable learning has taken place. However, the novelty of the regime has also meant that the pace of change has been slower than many hoped. Although the AODA overall continues to be positively viewed – including by people with disabilities – the rate of progress is a widespread source of concern.Lived Experience of Persons with DisabilitiesAccording to many people with disabilities, their day-to-day experience proves we are not on schedule. For example, a presenter in Toronto called the AODA the “Great Disappointment Act” while a speaker in London said we could be facing a lost generation because of the slow rate of change. One called 2025 “a joke” because of continued discrimination; another felt it was a pipe dream. Other participants said they felt frustrated, angry or let down. One asked, “How much longer do we have to wait?” – while another observed that “change is not trickling down – things have not changed for persons with disabilities.”“You will get to your destination faster if you are honest about where you actually are.” – A municipal accessibility advisory committee memberMost of these concerns were not so much with the AODA itself, as with the very slow pace that has characterized its implementation. Some people with disabilities stressed that they were better off with the AODA than without it, and the efforts that have gone into implementation in the public sector were widely acknowledged. One disability group observed that specialized transit in general has become substantially more accessible in a number of municipalities. Despite the frustrations, the AODA is still regarded with pride and hope by most of the people with disabilities I met. The AODA was referred to as “a step in the right direction to improve lives”, “landmark legislation” or “good regulation in its infancy.” Clearly, the AODA continues to be seen as having transformational potential.Nevertheless, during the Review a host of examples were cited of barriers facing people with disabilities nine years after the enactment of the AODA. Though I cannot capture all of it, a cross-section of this input follows.Access to Goods and ServicesMany people with disabilities have confronted personal issues with access to goods and services, despite the Customer Service standards. For example, one person with a disability told of being talked down to in a threatening way by staff of a government program. A ServiceOntario office gave a customer with a white cane a piece of paper with a number on it and told him to watch the video screen. A shop in Windsor refused to admit two women in wheelchairs, and many businesses are still denying access to guide dogs. A store clerk refused to help a person with a disability fill out a form for a points card – an accommodation that would have cost nothing. All in all, businesses may be doing more paperwork and filing more forms under the Customer Service standard, said one participant, but little change is happening at the storefront level.Travellers have the strong impression that Ontario is far behind the United States as far as accessibility goes. Individuals with hearing loss often find they are expected to bring their own interpreter or facilitator, even when the service provider is responsible for two-way communication. People with speech and language disabilities not caused by hearing loss worry about the lack of awareness and availability of simple tools such as alphabet boards and communications assistants in hospitals. More generally, it is felt that police, health care professionals and social service workers, in their day-to-day interaction with the public, “don’t have a clue” about deafness and other disabilities and the impact on people’s lives.Travellers have the strong impression that Ontario is far behind the United States as far as accessibility goes. One presenter, who is blind, explained that the biggest difference was in awareness – in the United States the welcome received when entering a business was always positive, as opposed to what was described as avoidance and marginalization found when using services in Ontario. Another speaker remarked that restaurant employees in the U.S. are used to reading menus to customers out loud instead of suggesting they order one of the specials. One participant said that if you try renting a cottage, bed and breakfast or room in Ontario’s main tourist areas with a service animal, you are probably out of luck.The Review also heard that although the Customer Service standard requires organizations to make information about their customer service feedback process readily available, many are not doing so effectively. The result is that few people know that there is an avenue that could help to correct problems and organizations do not receive the feedback that could enable them to remedy problems and improve their customer experience. Moreover, some participants suggested that people may be reluctant to use feedback mechanisms for fear of being seen as troublemakers. Access to InformationCustomer service is more and more closely linked to access to information. The Review heard that obtaining information in usable formats remains a major problem. This is particularly so for people who are blind or have low vision.During the Review, many examples were given to make this point. Numerous participants indicated that private sector websites are largely inaccessible. The Presto smart card, being introduced for transit fares, shows the card balance on a screen but has no audio jack. Independent shopping in grocery stores is described as pretty much impossible because information is not accessible on products – expiry dates, ingredients and prices – or from in-store staff. One woman said things she used to do in person must now be done online and problems with screen-reading technology make this difficult. And perhaps most worrisome, the Review was told that all too often even the Ontario Government publishes documents only as inaccessible PDF files when it would be easy to also post them in accessible Word or HTML formats.Accessible TransportationAccording to many people with disabilities who participated in the consultations, transportation barriers continue to restrict employment and participation in the life of the community. The Review was told that people with disabilities in Toronto are frustrated that many subway stations lack elevators and other accessibility features and that the TTC has declared it does not have the funding to make the final 17 stations accessible by 2025. Moreover there was concern that in at least some stations, the new subway cars have too wide a gap and too high a step for a wheelchair to get safely onto the platform.The overall impression from the consultations with persons with disabilities is one of continued support for the AODA, mingled with frustration that its slow implementation has resulted in rather modest change on the ground.Elsewhere in the province, the Review was told, some 200 standards violations were observed on a regional bus system over a period of six months – mainly a failure to call stops. Able-bodied passengers sometimes refuse to give up courtesy seats to people with disabilities, forcing them to get off and wait for the next bus. The malfunctioning of a wheelchair lift on an intercity bus, which trapped a woman with a disability, was cited as showing the inadequacy of staff training. The point was made that training should include not only how to operate equipment but what to do if it breaks down. Better training was also urged to show drivers how to tie down wheelchairs with straps and to sensitize them not to drive off before people in wheelchairs have backed into their spots safely.Built EnvironmentPerhaps the most overwhelming number of concerns with barriers were those raised about the built environment, specifically access to buildings and public spaces. Again, many examples were cited to the Review – including provincial government offices located in inaccessible premises, or even relocating to inaccessible buildings. Participants told of brand new private sector buildings with no power doors, a new city park that was inaccessible to people with mobility devices, and hospital renovations completed without way-finding for people who are blind. A new playground banned children in wheelchairs from using a splash pad because it was felt the wheels could damage the surface.Perhaps the most overwhelming number of concerns with barriers were raised about the built environment.Many people also reported that facilities that are marked accessible may not be in fact. A Thunder Bay woman who uses a wheelchair found that supposedly accessible washrooms in a recently renovated city hall and hospital could not accommodate her and she was told it would cost too much to fix them now. Restaurants that advertise as accessible often have stairs and don’t have power doors and accessible washrooms. A small business owner reported that most business networking events are inaccessible – and invited anyone who wants to see how accessible Ontario is to borrow her wheelchair for a day.Access to EmploymentThe Review heard that the AODA has made little difference on the employment front. People with mental health issues still face stigma in the job market and in the workplace. Employees with episodic disabilities, such as HIV/AIDS or multiple sclerosis, may need flexible work schedules but often are not offered this accommodation. The Review was told that managers frequently overestimate how much accommodation will cost and conclude they can’t afford to hire someone with a disability. Employers are sometimes unfair in interpreting medical certificates, leading to inadequate individual accommodation plans. Small CommunitiesThe Review was also told of the special challenges facing small and rural communities – both the barriers facing people with disabilities and the difficulties local organizations have in removing them. In smaller towns, for example, taxis are often the only viable form of public transit, but more often than not are inaccessible or in short supply. As one speaker put it, “...those of us with disabilities living in rural communities have been left out of the AODA.” Public sector representatives from small communities also discussed the difficulty they had accessing the resources or expertise needed to meet AODA obligations.Generally speaking, the overall impression from the consultations with persons with disabilities is one of continued support for the AODA, mingled with frustration that its slow implementation has resulted in rather modest change on the ground."* "A further concern involving the Government of Ontario itself was the slow pace of the Government’s promised review of provincial laws and regulations to identify and then remove accessibility barriers. Premier McGuinty promised this review during the 2007 election campaign and reiterated the commitment during the 2011 campaign. In 2013 the Government stated that, by the end of 2014, 13 ministries will have reviewed 51 statutes and considered steps to remove any barriers identified. Disability stakeholders pointed out that this leaves about 700 other statutes, as well as 1,500 regulations, still to be examined. The Government was urged to complete the review of all legislation by 2015, and all regulations by 2016."* "These then were the main themes that emerged from the consultations regarding how Ontario is currently doing in meeting its goals under the AODA. The overall picture is mixed. Participants in the consultations from all of the various sectors of Ontario society strongly supported the AODA and believe that its aspirations are important both individually and collectively. At the same time, there was a strong sense that the implementation of the Act has not matched up. The pace of change is seen as agonizingly slow by persons with disabilities, while the complexity of the regime and the inadequacy of support for implementation mean that the obligated sectors are nonetheless struggling with compliance."* "Closely related to the themes of enforcement, compliance support and OPS accessibility that emerged during the consultations, was the refrain of the need to revive government leadership. Participants often mentioned the recommendation in the Beer Report for the Government to revitalize the implementation of the AODA. Mr. Beer urged the Government to “breathe new life” into the AODA by building momentum for change internally, across the obligated sectors and among the public at large. However, the general impression conveyed to the Review is that, despite the progress that has been made and the considerable learning that has taken place, the momentum seems to have stalled. The overall perception is that the pace of change is extremely slow and much remains to be done to achieve the goals under the AODA. In the words of a participant in an online session, “We need to get the momentum started again so that accessibility will go forward until 2025 and onward from there”.A number of reasons were cited to explain why AODA implementation has not delivered the expected results. Among these, commentators from all sectors stressed the lack of awareness of the legislation and the lack of enforcement – the result, some said, of an absence of government leadership. The Government was also said to be neglecting its responsibilities to get its own house in order and to develop all standards necessary to reach an accessible Ontario. To reassert provincial leadership, disability stakeholders called on the Government to establish a three-year action plan describing the steps it will take, with timelines, to ensure Ontario becomes fully accessible by 2025.“We need to get the momentum started again so that accessibility will go forward until 2025 and onward from there”. – A participant in an online session"5. Ontario is Not On Schedule to Become Accessible to Ontarians with Disabilities by 2025There clearly has been progress in Ontario in the area of accessibility since the AODA's enactment in 2005. Ontario is further ahead than it would have been, had the AODA not been enacted. Ontario is to be commended for enacting the AODA in 2005, with unanimous all-party support.However, as people with disabilities told the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review over four years ago, this progress has been far too slow. Ontario is not now on schedule for becoming accessible to people with disabilities by 2025. At the present rate of progress, Ontario will not even come close to reaching full accessibility by 2025. A dramatic improvement is needed now to the AODA's implementation and enforcement.Our June 30, 2014 brief to the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review said the following, which remains accurate to this day, four and a half years later:"In the lived experience of persons with disabilities with whom we are in contact, and from whom we regularly hear, and from our own observations of progress to date, the majority of the many existing barriers confronting persons with disabilities in Ontario are still not being removed. At the same time, despite some progress, new barriers continue to be created." Our June 30, 2014 brief to Mayo Moran also offered this conclusion, which also remains true to this day, in late 2018:"We are now close to the halfway point in the twenty-year period that the AODA gives Ontario to reach full accessibility. Yet we have not seen anything close to 50% progress toward full accessibility. We conclude this, even generously allowing for initial time needed to get the apparatus for the AODA's implementation up and running. There is conclusive proof that Ontario is not on schedule for full accessibility by 2025. If every obligated organization covered by the AODA did everything that is required of them under the accessibility standards enacted to date by the deadlines set out in those accessibility standards, Ontario would not become fully accessible by 2025, or ever. This brief's detailed exploration of the accessibility standards enacted to date amply demonstrates this.Even if that alone were not proof positive, we offer an additional compelling basis for this conclusion. In its 2010 final report, the Charles Beer Independent AODA Review (the first Independent Review conducted under the AODA, four years after the AODA was enacted) in effect found that for Ontario to achieve full accessibility by 2025, it would be necessary for the Ontario Government to show new leadership on the AODA, to revitalize its implementation of the AODA and breathe new life into the AODA's implementation. It found that “transformative change (i.e. in how the Government implements the AODA) is necessary to achieve accessibility by 2025.” This needed to be much more than mere tinkering with the AODA's implementation.According to the Beer Report, the degree of change required could not occur in a “business as usual” environment. The Report concluded that: “…it is essential to raise the profile of the goals and objectives of the act and apply a renewed and refocused sense of commitment and leadership.” It concluded that: “structural changes” are needed. The Report called for significant improvements to the AODA’s implementation, in order for Ontario to be able to reach the AODA’s deadline of full accessibility by 2025. It found: “It is critical that the government build a broader public awareness and understanding about the AODA and that the necessary tools and supports be available for the obligated sectors.” ……Finally, we are aware of no credible person who claims that Ontario is now on schedule for full accessibility by 2025…"As addressed further in Chapter 10 of this brief, the 2014 Mayo Moran Report repeated the call for the Ontario Government to show new leadership on accessibility and the AODA's implementation. It pointed specifically to the need for new leadership by Ontario's premier. This brief documents at length that the needed new leadership was not shown. As a result, 2025 is less than six years away, while Ontario continues to lag behind schedule for accessibility by that deadline. We need this AODA Independent Review to give the new Government of Ontario a clear roadmap of how to get back on schedule. Our proposed findings and recommendations provide the building blocks for that roadmap, starting with the broad topics we address in the rest of this chapter.6. Why is Ontario So Far Behind Schedule for Becoming Accessible to People with Disabilities by 2025?Pervading this brief is a fundamentally important question: Why is Ontario so far behind schedule for becoming accessible by 2025? How did Ontario find itself in this predicament over 13.5 years after the AODA was enacted, and less than 6 years before the 2025 deadline for becoming accessible? It is important for this AODA Independent Review to consider this question, in order to formulate appropriate reform recommendations that will hit the mark. We here identify several causes for Ontario's current accessibility predicament. We do not list them in order of importance or significance. These causes combine together to produce the problem Ontario now faces.Before listing these causes, we must address one factor that is clearly not a cause for this predicament. The problem is not that the Ontario Government didn't know what needs to be done to get Ontario on schedule for full accessibility by 2025. What needs to be done has been very clear for years. The AODA spells much of it out in the legislation itself. Two successive Government-appointed AODA Independent Reviews, the 2010 Charles Beer AODA Independent Review and the 2014 Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review, each gave the Ontario Government clear and productive recommendations. The Government has had ample avenues to get input and advice. AODA Standards Development Committees have given the Government detailed recommendations. The Accessibility Standards Advisory Council has been available to advise the Government. For three years, the Government also had the benefit of the position of Special Advisor on Accessibility, reporting to the minister responsible for the AODA. As well, community organizations like the AODA Alliance have given the Government advice and detailed recommendations through formal consultation sessions, and informal meetings and discussions. Time and again, this advice pointed in the same direction. As well, needed action has often been spelled out in election promises, by some or all of the political parties, including the Ontario Liberal Party that brought forward the AODA in 2004-2005 and that was in power for most of the time since then. Opposition parties raised concerns and suggestions in debates in the Legislature and through informal discussions with Government MPPs.Thus, we turn our attention to the causes for this predicament. Prominent among these, especially in recent years, is the fact that there has been a troubling lack of concerted and effective leadership on this issue from Ontario's Premier and from the Premier's Office. This chapter later discusses this. Both the 2010 Charles Beer AODA Independent Review Report and the 2014 Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review Report called for the Ontario Government to show new leadership on the AODA's implementation and enforcement. Both reports called for the AODA's implementation to be revitalized, and for new life to be breathed into it. The 2014 final report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review specifically called for new leadership by the Premier, as a priority. Despite these strong recommendations from authoritative reviews that the former Ontario Government itself appointed, none of this new leadership and revitalization ever materialized. For example, Premier Wynne never kept her 2014 written election promise to the AODA Alliance that she would instruct her ministers on their accessibility obligations and commitments. As this chapter and Chapter 10 discusses, she did not include many if not most of these commitments and obligations in her Mandate Letters to her ministers. No doubt, the ministers got the implicit message from this that these simply were not priorities.Closely related to that cause for Ontario's predicament, the lack of effective leadership on this issue thereafter appears to have trickled down to the senior political levels within the Ontario Government. Within any large organization like the Ontario Government, if there is a lack of effective leadership at the top on an issue, this risks spreading in the organization as a negative signal. When this persists over time, it becomes even more embedded within the organization's DNA and harder to change. That clearly appears to have occurred within the Ontario Government in the case of the accessibility issue. After the AODA was enacted, there has too often been a demonstrable lack of sustained political will on this issue in the party in power. Ministers periodically make encouraging speeches. During elections, political parties make encouraging pledges on accessibility. Yet at an operational level, it has quite infrequently gone beyond this at senior levels within the Ontario Government. This is so even though there were individuals within the governing party's caucus, and even within its Cabinet, that wanted to do much more on accessibility. By now, most of the MPPs who advocated for the enactment of the AODA and who voted for it have left politics. Their replacements came into public life without having taken part in the events leading to the AODA's enactment. Further contributing to this predicament are problems at the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario, addressed further later in this chapter and in Chapter 5. The Accessibility Directorate is the Government office that is responsible for leading the AODA's implementation and enforcement. Here again, within the Accessibility Directorate were any number of dedicated, hard-working individuals who wanted to do a good job. However, despite this, problems persisted. Our brief offers several recommendations to fix this recurring problem. As Chapter 10 details, the Ontario Public Service appears more generally too often to have served as a barrier to progress on accessibility. There are some within the Ontario Public Service who are dedicated supporters on this issue. However, as an overall organization, it too frequently has served as a collective drag on progress, and even an impediment or opponent to progress. Chapter 10 of this brief shows that the Ontario Government including the Ontario Public Service has not ensured that it is a fully accessible service-provider and employer. The Ontario Government repeatedly claims to lead by example, but continues to lead by a poor example. Over the years, we have met with successive deputy ministers responsible for the operations of the Ontario Public Service as an employer and service-provider, and with successive Secretaries of Cabinet to highlight this problem and to offer constructive solutions, too often without needed success for our efforts.Making the foregoing worse as a cause of this problem has been the Government's excessive secrecy around the operations of the Government on this issue, addressed later in this chapter and in Chapter 5. As but one example, the Ontario Government went to excessive lengths to throw obstacles in the AODA Alliance's path when we tried to get access to information about the AODA's enforcement in 2013 and 2015. They even sent an armada of fully five lawyers to an Information and Privacy Commission hearing in opposition to the AODA Alliance, in order to further that goal. Similarly, undue secrecy surrounds the work of AODA Standards Development Committees, and conceals the Government's planning process for new public infrastructure. Thus, bureaucrats and private contractors can with impunity resist efforts at ensuring that this new infrastructure is accessible, without being subject to effective and timely public scrutiny or accountability. Chapters 1, 2, 5 and 7 7 further address this. Also slowing progress has been the lack of a multi-year provincial plan for the AODA's implementation and enforcement to get Ontario to reach the 2025 deadline on time. This chapter later explores this. Progress on accessibility has also been slowed by weak and ineffective AODA enforcement. Chapter 2 addresses this in detail. Those who violate the AODA, even knowingly and repeatedly, have little if anything to fear in the way of real and practical consequences. This is so despite the Government knowing of rampant AODA violations in the private sector for years, and despite ample unused funds being on hand for AODA enforcement.Also slowing progress on accessibility has been the fact that the AODA accessibility standards enacted to date, while helpful, are too weak and limited, as Chapter 3 addresses. Even if fully obeyed, the existing AODA accessibility standards won't ensure that obligated organizations will become accessible by 2025, or ever. The Ontario Government has done very little to address this problem which the 2014 final report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review had amply documented. Chapter 4 of this brief also shows several important areas where new accessibility standards are needed under the AODA, including, for example, a strong, effective and comprehensive Built Environment Accessibility Standard. Our efforts to get the Ontario Government to develop and enact a Health Care Accessibility Standard for patients with disabilities and an Education Accessibility Standard for students with disabilities have met with years of foot-dragging by the previous Government, exacerbated by more foot-dragging by the new Ontario Government.Creating new accessibility standards and reviewing the sufficiency of existing accessibility standards every five years is core to the AODA's capacity to lead Ontario to 2025 as a fully accessible province. The process for developing new AODA accessibility standards and for conducting periodic reviews of existing standards is fraught with problems, as Chapter 5 demonstrates. Chapter 5 of this brief shows that there is a need to substantially reform and strengthen the process for developing AODA accessibility standards. Also exacerbating this predicament, there remain serious problems with the Ontario Government's efforts at educating the public, including obligated organizations, about accessibility and the AODA. As but two examples, there is a pressing need for schools to provide students with curriculum on accessibility standards, and for there to be mandatory accessibility training for professionals in fields like architecture and interior design. Chapter 6 describes this problem and recommends reforms.Further slowing progress towards 2025, there remain in place several levers of readily available public power that the Ontario Government could easily and far more effectively use to promote progress on accessibility, but which the Government has not effectively used. Chapter 7 of this brief demonstrates that the Ontario Government has failed to ensure that public money is never used to create or perpetuate disability accessibility barriers. Chapter 8 of this brief shows that the Ontario Government has not effectively reviewed all Ontario laws to ensure that they do not create or permit disability accessibility barriers. This is so even though all parties in the 2007 election promised that such a review would be completed. Chapter 9 of this brief explains that the Ontario Government has not acted effectively to ensure that provincial and municipal elections in Ontario are accessible to voters and candidates with disabilities.Finally, Chapter 11 shows that there is a pressing need for the Ontario Government to implement a strong and effective new strategy, beyond enacting an Employment Accessibility Standard, to substantially increase the opportunities for the employment of people with disabilities in Ontario. The former Ontario Government promised action in this area. Yet it dragged its feet for years, and then announced a strategy in June 2017 that is too weak and high-level.All of the above explains the causes for Ontario being behind schedule up to the June 2018 Ontario election. Over the past seven months since then, an additional cause has arisen. The new Ontario Government has not implemented any new action to kick-start new efforts on the AODA's implementation and enforcement. In addition, it injected more delay, by maintaining for months a freeze on the work of AODA Standards Development Committees. This is addressed in Chapters 4 and 5. That freeze was lifted later last fall in the case of two of the frozen Standards Development Committees. That freeze remains in effect for three other Standards Development Committees, as is addressed at several points in this brief, including in the Introduction.It is, of course, entirely understandable that a new Government will take some time to get up to speed on the wide range of issues it must handle. However, to reduce this risk, we had provided assistance to Ontario's new government early on, by:* Briefing Ontario's Progressive Conservative Party over the months in advance of the election on key accessibility issues that the Government is facing.* Last spring, sending all party leaders a detailed list of commitments on disability accessibility that we sought in the June 2018 election. It briefs all parties on the key issues.* Sending Premier Doug Ford and Minister for Accessibility and Seniors Raymond Cho detailed letters in July 2018 that spell out the key actions needed in this area, as are referenced throughout this brief.All political parties have agreed that Ontario should become accessible to people with disabilities by 2025, and that the Ontario Government, through the AODA, should lead our concerted efforts towards that goal. Any comprehensive strategy to get Ontario back on schedule needs to address all the multiple causes for our current predicament of being far behind schedule. This brief offers concrete and constructive recommendations to that end. At one time or other, and often on many occasions, we have pressed the Ontario Government to take all of these measures. As this brief details, in a good number of cases, the former Ontario Government promised any number of these actions, but too often failed to keep its word. We urge this AODA Independent Review to make all the recommendations we propose so that Ontario's new Government and the public have a constructive action plan that can be implemented to kick-start a new era of faster and more effective progress on accessibility.7. The Urgent need for the Ontario Government to Develop a Multi-Year Plan for Ensuring that Ontario Reaches Full Accessibility by 2025There is a pressing need for the Ontario Government to develop and implement a multi-year plan for ensuring that Ontario reaches full accessibility by 2025. It is not good enough to take piecemeal actions on accessibility from time to time, even though such piecemeal steps can, of course, be helpful. Such individual steps, alone, have not kept Ontario on schedule for Ontario to become accessible to people with disabilities by 2025. As that deadline gets closer and closer the need for a comprehensive multi-year plan has gotten more and more pressing.We have urged the Ontario Government to develop such a plan for several years. For example, we advocated for this to the Premier and to successive ministers and deputy ministers responsible for the AODA's implementation and enforcement. Despite this, no comprehensive plan was ever created. As such, Ontario has fallen further and further behind schedule.The only plan that the former Ontario Government ever announced that even hinted at partially serving this need was a commendable multi-year plan by the Ministry of the Attorney General, early in the 2010s, aimed at ensuring that the court system becomes accessible to court participants with disabilities by 2025. Even though it has led to commendable progress, Ontario is not on schedule for ensuring that Ontario's courts become accessible by 2025. The Ontario Public Service has adopted two successive multi-year accessibility plans, as are required under the AODA. these included some helpful features. However, they suffered from three serious deficiencies. First, they were not designed to ensure that the Ontario Public Service reaches full accessibility by 2025. Second, they were lofty in intent, but weak on implementation. Third, they only addressed the Ontario Public Service as an employer and service-provider. They did not aim at Ontario as a whole meeting the 2025 deadline. For example, the most recent Multi-Year Accessibility Plan commits to implementing universal design in new Government infrastructure. Yet the experience of serious accessibility problems in the planned New Toronto Courthouse, addressed in Chapter 7 of this brief, illustrates that this commitment was not translating into practice.There has only been one occasion to our knowledge in the past 13.5 years when the minister or ministry that is responsible for the AODA, said they were releasing a multi-year plan for bringing Ontario to the goal of accessibility by 2025. On June 3, 2015, to mark the AODA's ten year anniversary, and to mark the halfway point in the AODA's 20-year time line for reaching full accessibility, Economic Development Minister Brad Duguid unveiled his Government's plan entitled "The Path to 2025". That plan's very name, and the fanfare which the former Ontario Government sought to generate around it, aimed at creating the impression that this was a ten-year plan that would get Ontario to the AODA's goal of accessibility by 2025. That plan included some modest ingredients. However, it was very weak. It was entirely incapable of bringing Ontario to full accessibility by 2025, or ever. Within hours of its public release, Economic Development Minister Duguid candidly conceded to the media that it is a 12-month plan, not a 10-year plan. In the June 3, 2015 Canadian Press article on this announcement by reporter Michelle McQuigge, Economic Development Minister Duguid was quoted as follows:"This isn't a 10-year plan. This is really a 12-month plan that gets us going into the next decade with a lot of momentum behind us," he said."That article also included:"The Ontario government says its latest plan to address the needs of people with disabilities is meant to re-energize a movement that has lost momentum in recent years.Brad Duguid, minister of economic development, employment and infrastructure, said Wednesday that the plan is aimed at bringing the province closer to compliance with the Access for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA), which went into effect 10 years ago.The latest batch of projects is being released at the half-way point between the act's implementation and the deadline to make the entire province accessible by 2025."I think that over the last couple of years, it's understandable, it's a 20-year program, we've seen a bit of a flag in momentum," Duguid said in a telephone interview."Well, as of today, I think we're successfully reinvigorating momentum with a number of new, ambitious programs.""The June 6, 2015 AODA Alliance Update offered an analysis of that plan. It concluded that while it included some helpful measures, it fell far short of what Ontarians with disabilities need. That Update included:"Because the Government was planning events to mark the 10-year anniversary of the AODA's enactment, we made public in advance a list of the 10 measures we called on the Government to initiate to honour this important date. We here assess the Government's June 3, 2015 Accessibility Action Plan against that list.Substantially expand the Government's enforcement of the AODA. For example, the Government should at the very least, reverse the Government's 2015 cuts to the annual number of organizations to be audited under the AODA. In 2013 and 2014, this was around 2,000 per year. In 2015, the Government cut this to 1,200.Our Comments: The Accessibility Action Plan does not do this. However Economic Development Minister's announcements in the June 3, 2015 Toronto Star includes action on this front, as is discussed mit to develop new accessibility standards to address barriers in education and in residential housing, with completion dates to be set, and institute time lines for selecting all other accessibility standards needed to ensure that Ontario reaches full accessibility by 2025. This should include, among other things, action on needed retrofits in existing buildings. Our Comments: The Government's June 3, 2015 Accessibility Action Plan does not do this. It only repeated the Government's announcement from earlier this year that it is doing preliminary research on a Health Care Accessibility mit to now bring together representatives from business, the public sector and the disability community to quickly give the Government a list of options to effectively strengthen the current Customer Service Accessibility Standard, in order to ensure that Customer Service becomes truly accessible.Our Comments: The Government's June 3, 2015 Accessibility Action Plan does not do this. It vaguely states that the Government will enact changes to the Customer Service Accessibility Standard. It does not say when, or which changes. It has not consulted with the disability community and other stakeholders on what we needed added to the Customer Service Accessibility Standard. The proposals it received from the Accessibility Standards Advisory Council in the 2014 fall are woefully inadequate and, in some ways, are harmful.Unveil a multi-year plan for substantially expanded effective public education on the AODA, including reaching the broader public, educating children in school, and key professionals and students training to become key professionals e.g. architects, planners, doctors, nurses, and lawyers. Our Comments: The Government's June 3, 2015 Accessibility Action Plan and media statements announce short term measures on public education especially regarding the Employment Accessibility Standard. They do not detail a multi-year plan. They do not announce anything regarding educating children in school, and key professionals and students training to become key professionals e.g. architects, planners, doctors, nurses, and lawyers.Establish a comprehensive program to provide obligated organizations with information, practice directions, an advice hotline, and other resources so obligated organizations don't each have to reinvent the wheel when trying to become accessible.Our Comments: The Government's June 3, 2015 Accessibility Action Plan and media statements address this but only in general terms.Announce a comprehensive and effective plan of specific new actions to effectively incorporate accessibility into the Ontario Public Service as an employer and service-provider. This should include a comprehensive barrier-review of the Public service, the designation of a new full-time deputy minister to be called the Ontario Government Chief Accessibility Officer, a plan for the Government to periodically audit its own front-line accessibility, and assigning each Ministry's "Accessibility Lead" position to be a full time post in the office of their Ministry's deputy minister.Our Comments: The Government's June 3, 2015 Accessibility Action Plan includes nothing on this. Announce timing for an Omnibus Bill to be introduced in the Legislature, to address accessibility barriers in the first 50-55 Ontario statutes that the Government has reviewed for barriers over the past several years. As well, announce specific plans for reviewing all other Ontario statutes and regulations for accessibility barriers, to be completed in the next three years, to be followed by another omnibus bill. Our Comments: The Government's June 3, 2015 Accessibility Action Plan does not do this. It suggests that a bill will be brought forward, but does not set a date. The Government suggests that this will be limited to a very narrow range of barriers in the legislation reviewed to date. We call on the Government to substantially expand this. Announce an immediate consultation on accessibility barriers in provincial and municipal elections facing voters with disabilities, and a target date for introducing a Bill into the Legislature to fix these. New elections accessibility legislation should go into effect before the next provincial and municipal elections.Our Comments: The Government's June 3, 2015 Accessibility Action Plan did not do this. According to media tweets on Twitter on June 4, 2015, Premier Wynne announced plans that day for an election reform bill. However these tweets suggest that Premier Wynne shot down any action on telephone and internet voting. We need telephone and internet voting to substantially improve the accessibility of provincial elections to voters with disabilities. Announce a short term blitz for getting as many restaurants, stores, hotels, and other tourism/hospitality organizations as possible to improve their accessibility before the 2015 Pan/ParaPan American Games begin. Our Comments: The Government's June 3, 2015 Accessibility Action Plan did not do this. Announce a comprehensive government-wide program for ensuring that no public money is ever used to create or perpetuate disability accessibility barriers, and to ensure that recipients of any Government grant or loan must make added accessibility commitments as a condition of receiving that grant or loan.Our Comments: The Government's June 3, 2015 Accessibility Action Plan did not do this.As a result, we stand behind our assessment, released to the public on June 3, 2015, that the Government's June 3, 2015 Accessibility Action Plan includes some helpful and commendable measures. However, it falls far short of the measures needed to get Ontario back on schedule for full accessibility by 2025. It does not implement key recommendation in the final report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review."We now have the benefit of additional knowledge that we did not have three and a half years ago, when we issued that contemporaneous analysis of the former Government's June 3, 2015 "Path to 2025" plan. This added knowledge includes two key points that make that plan even less worthwhile than we were led to believe at that time.First, as addressed further in Chapter 2 of this brief, a major part of the former Ontario Government's announcement that day was a Government commitment to ramp up the number of obligated organizations it would annually audit to 4,000 per year, with the increase to gradually begin in 2016. As Chapter 2 of this brief shows, our efforts, including a hard-fought Freedom of Information application, led us to later reveal that this new crackdown never took place.Second, the other biggest announcement of new action on June 3, 2015 was a promised modest Government incentive to get private employers to hire a limited number of more people with disabilities. As Chapter 11 of this brief further explores, we did not then know that the former Ontario Government had already received an interim report from its own Government-appointed Partnership Council on disability employment. That council had specifically advised against such incentives, because they are of dubious long-term effectiveness. Put simply, the Government decided to take an action that its own advisory council advised against.Had we known this information at that time, we would have been less willing to say that the "Path to 2025" plan had worthwhile elements.Despite our asking, neither the former Ontario Government nor the current Government have announced a subsequent multi-year plan to get Ontario to full accessibility by 2025.For example, our July 10, 2016 introductory letter to Accessibility Minister Tracy MacCharles recommended:" b) Ontario Needs a Comprehensive Plan for the Government to Lead Us to Full Accessibility by 2025The final report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review identified the need for the Government to create a multi-year plan designed to get Ontario to full accessibility by 2025. Over a year ago, on June 3, 2015, the Government announced a strategy entitled "The Path to 2025: Ontario's Accessibility Action Plan" That title made it sound like it was a multi-year plan designed to get Ontario all the way to full accessibility by 2025. However, it unfortunately was not a 10-year plan. Economic Development Minister Duguid, who led the creation of this plan, candidly told the Canadian Press on June 3, 2015, that it was more like a 12 month plan. Those 12 months now having expired, you take on this leadership role, with no plan in place to ensure that Ontario reaches full accessibility by 2025."In the spring 2018 Ontario election, our April 3, 2018 letter to the leaders of the major parties sought an election commitment to:"#5. Within six months of taking office, and after consulting the public including people with disabilities, to announce a comprehensive action plan for ensuring that the Government fulfils its duty to lead Ontario to accessibility by 2025. No such plan now exists."Our July 17, 2018 briefing note for the new Government's Minister for Accessibility and Seniors Raymond Cho included:"b) Ontario Needs But has No Comprehensive Plan for the Government to Lead Us to Full Accessibility by 2025The 2014 final report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review identified the need for the Government to create a multi-year plan designed to get Ontario to full accessibility by 2025. No such comprehensive plan has ever been created.Over Three years ago, on June 3, 2015, the previous Government announced a strategy entitled "The Path to 2025: Ontario's Accessibility Action Plan" That title made it sound like it was a ten-year plan that was designed to get Ontario all the way to full accessibility by 2025. However, it was not a 10-year plan. The previous Government's Economic Development Minister Duguid, who led the creation of that plan, told the Canadian Press on June 3, 2015, that it was more like a 12 month plan. After those twelve months were up, no multi-year comprehensive plan was ever adopted to succeed it."8. The Need for Substantial Reform at the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario The Accessibility Directorate of Ontario is the lead Ontario Government office that has responsibility to lead the AODA's implementation. It leads such activities as the development and mandatory review of accessibility standards, the enforcement of the AODA, and the conduct of public education on the AODA and on accessibility standards.The Accessibility Directorate is part of the Ontario Public Service. It is not independent of the Government. Instead, it is subject to political oversight by the minister responsible for the AODA. It is led by an Assistant Deputy Minister, who reports to a deputy minister, and to the minister responsible for the AODA.The front-line employees with whom we have directly interacted at the Accessibility Directorate have been hard-working, professional and dedicated. However, we have been very concerned that for the past half-decade, the Accessibility Directorate, including its leadership has needed substantial improvement. We have raised serious concerns about this with the former Government at many levels. We have witnessed no improvement.Our July 10, 20-16 letter to Minister for Accessibility, Tracy MacCharles, identified this issue as a priority for her, as she took on the role that she would hold for the ensuing two years. Yet over that time, we saw this problem persist. In our July 10, 2016 letter to Minister MacCharles, we wrote:" e) The Accessibility Directorate of Ontario Has Significantly Disengaged Itself from the AODA AllianceAnother challenge facing you is the fact that the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario has significantly disengaged itself from the AODA Alliance in the past three years. Before the past three years, the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario regularly reached out to us for formal and informal discussions. At times we had weekly contact with the Directorate. We commendably were given early "heads up" on upcoming initiatives, and were often consulted well in advance. We did not need to resort to Freedom of Information applications. We were typically consulted in a full and effective way, long before major decisions were made affecting Ontarians with disabilities. This worked to our mutual benefit. Over the last three years, this constructive relationship has substantially dried up. In recent months, we have a times not even been notified of major announcements on the AODA. Sometimes we receive blast emails from the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario. On other occasions, we only indirectly learn of new Government announcements after the fact, via the grapevine or through Google searches. For the most part, and with only a few exceptions, the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario has only reached out to us during this period when it is conducting formal structured consultation processes. This too often seems to have occurred after the Government had largely if not totally decided on its direction. This is not consistent with Premier Wynne's commitment in her May 14, 2014 letter to the AODA Alliance, setting out your Government's 2014 election pledges on disability accessibility, as follows:"Our government regards our current relationship with you as one of great importance and sees our partnership as a step towards fostering a more accessible and inclusive province. The Ontario Liberal Party will continue to safeguard the interests of Ontarians with disabilities and ultimately achieve our goal of full accessibility by the year 2025. We see the AODA Alliance as a principal partner in achieving this goal." We do not know why this change has occurred. We have no reason to believe that it was the result of any political direction. It was certainly not at our request or on our initiative."Our concerns on this topic were corroborated by feedback we received time and again from both outside and inside the Ontario Government. We saw no indication that this persistent problem was the result of any political directions from above. Even though we raised this concern directly with the Accessibility Directorate, as well as with more senior officials in the Ontario Government, the Accessibility Directorate's leader never reached out to us in any way to try to rectify this situation. Our interactions with the Accessibility Directorate have always been reciprocally polite and respectful. However, we have seen no improvement, nor any effort by the Accessibility Directorate at improvement.In late 2016, the former Ontario Government retained an outside consulting firm to conduct an operational review of the Accessibility Directorate. That review sought input from the AODA Alliance. We gave it detailed input about our concern. We tried to get access to the report that resulted from that review. We had to resort to a Freedom of Information application. As addressed further later in this chapter, the former Government vigourously resisted that Freedom of Information application. As a result of that external review, the former Ontario Government announced a reorganization of the Accessibility Directorate. However, this included no change in the leadership at the Accessibility Directorate, and no change in the persisting problems that we identified. From our vantage point, that re-organization was a mere bureaucratic shuffling of the deck, with no real consequences where they were most needed.We raised this concern in our April 3, 2018 letter to the leaders of Ontario's major parties, when seeking election commitments. We wrote:" Reform the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario The Accessibility Directorate of Ontario is responsible for leading the implementation of the AODA. We have raised concerns with the Government about the fact that the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario has become far more disengaged from the AODA Alliance as a key stakeholder in this area, over the past five years. See e.g. the AODA Alliance's July 10, 2016 letter to Ontario's Minister of Accessibility."Since the June 7, 2018 Ontario election, we also raised these concerns as a serious priority in the AODA Alliance's July 17, 2018 briefing note to the new Minister for Accessibility and Seniors, Raymond Cho. We wrote:" f) There Are Recurring Problems at the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario A significant challenge facing you concerns the operations of the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario. Created under the AODA. It has major responsibility for the AODA's implementation and enforcement.There are good and hard-working people in the Directorate. Yet Despite this, we identify two major concerns. The previous Government did not rectify these, despite our requests. First, the Accessibility Directorate has significantly disengaged itself from the AODA Alliance over the past five years. Before that, the Accessibility Directorate regularly, and at times frequently reached out to us for formal and informal discussions. At times, we had weekly contact with the Directorate. We commendably were given early "heads up" on upcoming initiatives. We did not need to resort to Freedom of Information applications. We were typically consulted in a full and effective way, long before major decisions were made that affect Ontarians with disabilities. This worked to our mutual benefit. Over the last five years, this constructive relationship substantially dried up. This has been due to action or inaction by the Directorate's leadership. We have at times not even been notified of major announcements on the AODA. Sometimes we receive blast emails from the Accessibility Directorate. On other occasions, we only indirectly learn of new Government announcements after the fact, via the grapevine or through Google searches. For the most part, and with only a few exceptions, the Accessibility Directorate has only reached out to us during this period when it is conducting formal structured consultation processes. This too often seems to have occurred after the previous Government had largely if not totally decided on its direction. We do not know why this change occurred. It was certainly not at our request or on our initiative. As a result of this, we had too often to go to the deputy minister, minister, or Premier's office for any real and substantive dealings. Second, the Accessibility Directorate has been overstepping its role, in the work of Standards Development Committees appointed under the AODA. These Committees are intended to give their own independent advice to the Government on what a specific accessibility standard should include. Your Government is best served when the Standards Development Committee is left free to give its own advice, without the Accessibility Directorate attempting directly or indirectly to steer or influence it. At most, the Accessibility Directorate should serve as a neutral administrative support to these Committees, without overstepping that role. However, we have observed and have heard from others that the Accessibility Directorate is attempting to infuse its priorities and views into the work of these Committees, at times in a nuanced an subtle way. This needs to stop now."Among the actions we asked the new Minister for Accessibility and Seniors to take were these, in that briefing note:"10. Get the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario to restore the robust relationship it had prior to the most recent five years with the AODA Alliance. 11. Get the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario to stop trying to directly or indirectly influence the agenda, work and recommendations of Standards Development Committees."We do not know if the new Ford Government has taken any action to address this concern. Our concerns regarding the Accessibility Directorate's attempts to micro-manage the standards development process are addressed further in Chapter 5 of this brief.The Accessibility Directorate requires leadership that is bold, not timid, and that demonstrates leading-edge expertise in the area of disability accessibility. As with any similar Government office that works with stakeholders in different sectors, it needs to foster and maintain good, active, and ongoing working relationships with key stakeholders. It needs leadership that takes pro-active measures when a major stakeholder reaches out with concerns.Chapters 2 (enforcement) and 5 (standards development process) in this brief each recommend that parts of the Accessibility Directorate's functions should be moved to a public agency that is independent of the Ontario Government. Whether or not those steps are taken, significant reforms to the Accessibility Directorate are needed.9. Need for Substantially Improved Openness and Public Accountability of the Ontario Government's Activities on Implementing and Enforcing the AODA A recurring theme addressed at different points in this brief is the pressing need for the Ontario Government to be much more open, transparent and accountable with respect to its work on the AODA' implementation and enforcement. Openness promotes public confidence in the Government's activities. The AODA anticipates a very open process. The minister responsible for the AODA is required to make public an annual progress report on the AODA's implementation. The former Ontario Government promised annual reports and plans regarding AODA enforcement. The AODA itself imposes a series of openness requirements on the work of Standards Development Committees - provisions for which people with disabilities advocated vigorously during the campaign that led to the AODA's enactment. Moreover, the former Ontario Government promised to be the most open and transparent Government in Canada.Despite this, we too often ran into roadblocks. In fairness, there were a good number of instances when specific minister, ministerial staff, public servants and others tried to be open and helpful. For that, we were and are very appreciative. However, an overall sense too often pervaded that secrecy is the norm and openness/accountability is the exception. For example, Chapter 2 relates some of the difficulties we encountered when trying to get information about the AODA's enforcement. Chapter 5 relates the pervasive view of the Government that the work of Standards Development Committees is "confidential", even though the AODA establishes much the opposite, and authorizes no such confidentiality. Chapter 8 describes our uphill battle, trying to get the former Ontario Government to keep its 2007 election pledge to review all Ontario laws for accessibility problems. As Chapter 8 shows, we had difficulty getting anything moving on this issue for years, and had ongoing difficulty finding out how it was progressing. This story too often repeated itself with issue after issue. We here describe in some more detail one context where this was especially vexing. At times, the Government voluntarily gave us information we requested on the AODA's enforcement or implementation. However, there were some especially vexing situations where we had to resort to Freedom of Information applications to get that information. We ultimately forced the Government to give us most, if not all, of what we were seeking. However, we had to go to absurd lengths and invest substantial amounts of effort to succeed. We don't know how much of this emanated from the management at the Accessibility Directorate, or from other levels within the Ontario Public Service. We anticipate that at least at some points, there was some level of political involvement, though at other times we were told that this sort of issue is usually dealt with within the Ontario Public Service, and not at the political level. All we can do with certainty is to describe the lengths to which we had to go to compel a measure of openness. It is a saga of the Government spending an inexcusable amount of public resources in a largely-failed effort to block openness and accountability.In early 2013, we wrote John Milloy, the minister responsible for the AODA, to ask for information on the AODA's enforcement. For months we got no answer. We ran a daily count on Twitter of the number of days that this request went unanswered.On August 15, 2013, AODA Alliance chair David Lepofsky submitted our first Freedom of Information application to the Government, to unearth what the Government knew about private sector compliance with the AODA, and to reveal what the Government was doing to enforce the AODA. The Government said it would answer if we paid $2,325. AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky asked the Government to waive the fee under Ontario's Freedom of Information legislation, as a financial hardship. He pointed out that the AODA Alliance has no money. Ontario's Freedom of Information laws allow for a fee waiver where the fee presents a financial hardship.On October 21, 2013, the Ontario Government asked the AODA Alliance to provide the AODA alliance's financial statements. It said it needs these to help decide whether the Government will waive the steep $2,325 fee.In response, on October 22, 2013, David Lepofsky wrote the Government to let it know that we have no financial statements. The AODA Alliance is an informal unincorporated community coalition. It has no money, no bank accounts, no real or personal property, and thus, no financial statements to provide.During Question Period in the Ontario Legislature on October 29, 2013, NDP Opposition MPP Cheri DiNovo tried without success to get answers from the Wynne Government on why the Government wanted to charge AODA Alliance chair David Lepofsky the steep sum of $2,325 to get answers to his August 15, 2013 Freedom of Information Act request. She asked the minister with lead responsibility for developing new accessibility standards under the AODA and for enforcing that legislation, Dr. Eric Hoskins. Dr. Hoskins replied by applauding his Government’s work. However he ducked Ms. Di Novo’s important question. On October 31, 2013, the Toronto Star ran a hard-hitting editorial. It called on the Ontario Government to at last make public its plans for enforcing the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act. The Star backed the Freedom of Information application that AODA Alliance chair David Lepofsky filed. It said:"The government is refusing to give details on the success or failure of accessibility standards for the disabled. NATHAN DENETTE / THE CANADIAN PRESS Published Wed Oct 30 2013 Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne has promised "open and transparent." Now's her chance to fulfill that promise. Premier Kathleen Wynne has promised an “open and transparent” government more times than it’s possible to count. So it’s particularly perplexing that Ontario’s Ministry of Economic Development has refused to give a volunteer group for the disabled important information on hard-won rights for equality. They’re looking for details on the compliance and enforcement of the province’s standards for accessibility in private businesses and organizations. In other words, the very information that would prove whether the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act is actually working — or not. The government’s response so far isn’t anywhere close to “open and transparent.” That’s a shame. Wynne must prove her promises of accountability are principled and not just empty words. The information should be provided as soon as possible, for the benefit of all Ontarians who are disabled. The public should not be kept in the dark about the successes or failures of the law. Since the roll-out of the new rules won’t be completed until 2025, it’s especially important to keep a close watch on the system. Problems — like lack of compliance and enforcement — should be fixed as soon as possible. If the act fails to embrace the needs of the disabled in everyday life — something as simple reaching an office in a wheelchair — then what’s the point of moving forward with new rules that don’t work? The obfuscation began in January when David Lepofsky, chair of the volunteer group Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance, asked the ministry for information that would determine if the new standards were having any effect. Lepofsky, who is blind, wanted to know how businesses had to file the new online compliance reports; how many actually did file; and what, if any, enforcement action, including hefty fines, was taken against those not following the new rules. “They made a fundamental commitment to us and we want to know what they’re doing about it,” Lepofsky says. It’s a reasonable request for accountability. Companies with 20 or more employees are among those that are now supposed to fill out these online reports. They must state whether they comply with the act’s accessibility standards, which focus on areas like employment, transportation and customer service. One question, for example, asks if service dogs are allowed on the premises. The ministry’s response was unfortunate. Lepofsky said he received no response despite months of requests for the electronic data. He gave up in August and filed a freedom of information request. Instead of getting the files, he received a letter informing him of a $2,325 charge to process his request — an impossible amount for his small volunteer group to pay. On Tuesday, NDP MPP Cheri DiNovo asked about the request in the legislature and received a similarly opaque answer from Economic Development Minister Eric Hoskins, who said a five-year routine review of the act is underway. Unfortunately, that response doesn’t meet the premier’s new transparency standards. As DiNovo says, “It’s egregious that no one knows whether the law is being enforced.” She’s right. Since DiNovo raised the issue, the government has offered to lower the freedom of information processing fee. That may be well-intentioned but it’s an insignificant development, to say the least. Ontarians have a right to scrutinize the implementation of important standards that — on paper — support the basic rights of so many. It’s a sad statement that a government that uses transparency as a slogan won’t allow disabled citizens to see whether there’s any truth to the act’s promise for change."As a result of the opposition pressure in the Legislature and the Toronto Star editorial, the Ontario Government decided to give us all the documents we sought, and not to charge its search fee. The resulting disclosures showed that the Government knew of rampant AODA violations, but had imposed no monetary penalties or compliance orders against any private sector organizations. The disclosures also revealed that the Government had ample unspent funds on hand in the Accessibility Directorate that could have been used for AODA enforcement.These revelations, all directly due to the appellant’s 2013 FIPA application, led to changes in AODA enforcement. This was further helped by a Toronto Star November 19, 2013 editorial that was triggered by the Freedom of Information disclosure. It declared:“Imagine a blind person with a guide dog is turned away from a store or restaurant. Not only is that refusal a sign of bad judgment, it's also a breach of Ontario's accessibility law. Unfortunately, the 2005 legislation that promised equal access for the disabled within Ontario businesses has actually accomplished very little. And that should be an embarrassment for the provincial government. After all, the Liberals got a moral boost by passing the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act. But the reality is that the act is little more than whimsical window dressing because the vast majority of businesses don't comply with the basic rules. To make matters worse, the government has done nothing to enforce those rules. It's a sham. As the Star's Laurie Monsebraaten reports, 70 per cent of Ontario's private businesses with 20 or more employees (about 360,000 across the province) have not bothered to comply with the law's most basic reporting requirements. That rule says businesses had to file an electronic report with the government by Dec. 31, 2012, detailing how they accommodate disabled customers, train staff and listen to feedback. The time to take action is long overdue. The government should immediately tell the public, through a comprehensive plan, how it will finally enforce these hard-won rights. This plan must detail follow-up for inspections, compliance orders and fines. It is these requirements that give the law teeth and it's now clear that without proper enforcement, little improvement will be made. The data analysis comes from lawyer David Lepofsky, of the non-profit Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance. According to Lepofsky's analysis, using government documents obtained through a freedom of information request, not one of the businesses in violation has faced a compliance order or fine. That's just wrong. It's not bad enough that it took the Ministry of Economic Development 11 months to provide Lepofsky with the information he requested. Now, as he says, it turns out that the laws are largely irrelevant, and it's clear why the government did not want to produce the documents. It's not going to harm businesses to answer questions, especially for such basic rules as accepting service dogs or training workers to interact with people of various disabilities. And it's not too much to demand that the government fulfil its promise for equality - or just admit that it's doing nothing to help the disabled.”If one fast-forwards to June 4, 2015, about one and a half years later. AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky had to resort to another Freedom of Information application, to get updated information about the AODA's implementation and enforcement. This time, the Ontario Government told him that he would have to pay $4,250 for the requested information, just under double the proposed fee for the 2013 Freedom of Information application. We asked the Government to again waive its fee, as it had done in 2013. On our request, the Ministry decided to release some of the information we requested at no charge, on the basis that the Ministry said it involved minimal search time. However, the Ministry refused to waive its fee for the rest of the requested information. In a manifestation of the kind of bureaucratic mentality that gives public servants a bad name, the Government claimed it was irrelevant that it had given similar requested information to AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky in 2013, while then dropping its proposed $2,325 fee. in 2015, the Government took the position that it had in fact not waived the Freedom of Information fee in 2013.In the case of this 2015 Freedom of Information application, the Government again asked for the AODA Alliance's financial statements. We again told the Government we had none. The Government said we had provided no evidence of any financial hardship. We then gave the Government a solemnly affirmed affidavit, attesting to the key facts showing that the AODA Alliance had no money. The Government still would not waive its fee. AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky had to appeal to the Information and Privacy Commission. The Government mounted a full-throated defence. It did not budge during a mediation process.When it came time to appear before the Information and Privacy Commission, to argue why the Government should receive its $4,250 fee, the Government sent an armada of fully five lawyers and one law student to the hearing. It no doubt was spending far more on lawyers to fight against the AODA Alliance than the fee it was supposedly trying to collect. At that hearing, the Government admitted for the first time that it did not dispute that the AODA Alliance had no money. It had refused to admit this for the preceding 18 months. It nevertheless argued that demanding that full fee was not a financial hardship for a disability coalition with no money, because the AODA Alliance had not tried to fund-raise. The AODA Alliance argued that it should not have to go begging.On July 28, 2018, over two years after our June 4, 2015 Freedom of Information application was filed, the Information and Privacy Commission released its ruling. The AODA Alliance's August 1, 2017 news release bore this headline:"Information and Privacy Commission Orders the Wynne Government to Reveal Its Plans for Enforcing Ontario's Accessibility Law, and Finds the Government Tried to Charge the AODA Alliance, an Unfunded Disability Coalition, over Five Times the Fee It Could Justify – Disability Coalition Presses the Government to Make "Freedom of Information" Free".It stated in part:" On July 28, 2017, David Lepofsky, The chair of Ontario's widely-recognized non-partisan AODA Alliance and a visiting professor at the Osgoode Hall Law School, won key parts of his appeal to Ontario's Information and Privacy Commission, against the Wynne Government's refusal to waive a hefty $4,250 fee to get access to information he seeks on the Government's implementation and enforcement of Ontario's landmark Disabilities Act, though it was not a hundred percent victory for him….…In its July 28, 2017 decision, the Information and Privacy Commission ruled against the Wynne Government on several key points:* On a pivotally important point, the Information and Privacy Commission rejected the Government's efforts to charge Lepofsky any fee to get copies of the Government's actual policies on how it will enforce the Disabilities Act.* The Information and Privacy Commission ordered the Government to disclose at no charge the details of its spending on public education campaigns on disability accessibility, called the "Enabling Change" program.* The Information and Privacy Commission found the Wynne Government failed to justify more than 80% of the $4,200 fee that the Government tried charging Lepofsky for the information he requested two years ago. The Information and Privacy Commission knocked the fee down from $4,200 to $750, a reduction of over 82%. In other words, the Government tried to charge Lepofsky over five times the fee that the Government actually justified. * The Information and Privacy Commission did not rule on whether the Government should have waived the original $4,200 fee. However, it ruled that it would not order the Government to waive the reduced $750 fee. The Commission went with the Wynne Government and against Lepofsky on that issue, even though the Information and Privacy Commission made four powerful findings against the Government:Rejecting the Government's contrary claim, the Information and Privacy Commission agreed it would be a financial hardship to charge the fee to the grassroots non-partisan disability coalition that Lepofsky leads, which the Government eventually admitted has no funds or bank accounts. Under Ontario's Freedom of Information law, when deciding whether to waive a fee, the Government and the Information and Privacy Commission must consider if it is "fair and equitable" to waive the fee, considering, among other things, if the fee imposes a "financial hardship." "192]Overall, I find that the payment of the fee would cause the appellant financial hardship and this factor weighs in favour of the appellant."The Information and Privacy Commission rejected the Government's claims that nothing in Lepofsky's Freedom of Information application bore on public health and safety, and that the public interest in the information Lepofsky sought was completely irrelevant. To decide whether to order the Government to waive the fee, the Information and Privacy Commission must also consider if that would be "fair and equitable," having regard to whether disclosing the information would benefit public health and safety."[242]I do, however, find that dissemination of the information related to items 5, 11, 15, 16, and 18 would benefit public health or safety by disclosing a public health or safety concern about the enforcement or compliance with the AODA or contribute meaningfully to the development of understanding of this important public health or safety issue. I agree with the appellant that proper enforcement of the AODA benefits the health and safety of those who require accessibility to access goods and services, including health care services." The Information and Privacy Commission found that when deciding whether it is "fair and equitable" to waive a fee, it is relevant to consider if the request for information is in the public interest. The Government had argued that the public interest was totally irrelevant, even though the Government conceded that the AODA Alliance's goal of improving AODA compliance is in the public interest (para. 165 of the ruling). "[196]Nevertheless, since the findings in the Mann case that the sole test is whether any waiver would be fair and equitable, the presence of a public interest in the subject matter of a request is a possible consideration in the determination as to whether a fee waiver is fair and equitable."The Information and Privacy Commission made several strong findings against the Government, showing Lepofsky was always willing to try to resolve this dispute, while the Government did not take several steps it should have, to be cooperative with him. (See e.g. paras. 15, 20, 22-25, 28-35, 51-59, and 85-90 of the decision)……Unknown to Lepofsky until the eve of this hearing, the Wynne Government actually searched out and gathered all the documents Lepofsky requested two years ago. It did so even though Lepofsky had not agreed to pay any fee, and had told the Government in advance of its search that he would ask for the fee to be waived. Therefore, the Government is not saving the public any money by mounting this legal barrage against Lepofsky. Much the reverse. Even worse, the Government is acting contrary to Premier Wynne's commitment to run the most open and transparent government in Canada. "Since they already did the search for the documents I requested, since the Information and Privacy Commission ruled this fee is a financial hardship, and since this is all about the public interest and public health and safety, it's time the Government stopped throwing barriers in our path and simply gave us the information we sought and which they already gathered," said Lepofsky. "What possible public interest can the Government serve, by keeping secret the information already collected on a Government computer, waiting for the Government to simply hit the `send' key?""As a result of this Information and Privacy Commission ruling, the August 7, 2017 Toronto Star included a powerful editorial that called for the Wynne Government to demonstrate more action and less secrecy when it comes to accessibility for people with disabilities. It included:"Less secrecy, more actionOntario's privacy commission ruled last week that the provincial government was overcharging advocate David Lepofsky and his organization, the Access for Ontarians with Disabilities Alliance, for a freedom of information request. Lucas Oleniuk/Toronto Star David Lepofsky just wants to make sure the province is doing what it promised to do. A disability advocate and lawyer, Lepofsky has worked tirelessly since the McGuinty Liberals passed the landmark Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) in 2005, holding the government to account as it moves toward its goal of a fully accessible Ontario by 2025. Too often, however, what he has found is failure - and too often the province has tried to keep him from discovering the frequently disappointing truth. Last week, Ontario's privacy commission ruled that the government was overcharging Lepofsky and his organization, the Access for Ontarians with Disabilities Alliance, for a freedom of information request related to the province's progress. The government had tried to charge the group a prohibitive $4,200 for the information, which Lepofsky requested about two years ago, on the basis that the documents did not pertain to public health or safety and therefore did not qualify for a fee waiver. Lepofsky, who is blind, rightly countered that accessibility issues are public health issues. The commission agreed and ruled that $750 was the appropriate charge. The government's two-year fight to levy the outsized fee seems to be part of a troubling pattern of obfuscation. In 2013, Lepofsky submitted a Freedom of Information request to take stock of how the act was being enforced and was charged more than $2,000. Outcry in the media eventually prompted the government to drop the fee. This recalcitrance is particularly disturbing given the government's shoddy record of enforcing the AODA. The information Lepofsky eventually obtained in 2013 showed that some 70 per cent of businesses with 20 or more employees were not complying with the act, which aims to tear down barriers, both physical and figurative, for Ontarians with disabilities. And some $24 million in public funds earmarked for enforcement of the law had not been spent. The Wynne government's first instinct upon meeting the bad press that followed was to loosen the rules rather than start enforcing them. But in 2015, on the 10th anniversary of the accessibility act, the government relented, admitting that it had fallen behind. It assured voters that it would still meet its 2025 goal and committed to a crackdown on the legislation's many violators. It was the details of this plan that Lepofsky was after with his latest Freedom of Information request. "What is the government trying to hide?" Lepofsky asked after last week's ruling. Given the province's history of inaction on accessibility and its apparent aversion to transparency on the issue, that's a very good question. We eagerly await the forthcoming documents. Lepofsky and the province both say they want the same thing. They want to ensure that people with disabilities have the same access to jobs, education, public services, restaurants and stores as anyone else in this province. They want buildings and bureaucracies alike to be designed with the challenges of living with a disability in mind. This is what the AODA promises to accomplish. And the Liberal government often points to this act, passed 12 years ago, as proof of its commitment to the rights of people with disabilities. If the government is sincere in that commitment, it should stop fighting Lepofsky and his fellow advocates and start working alongside them to ensure that this good law is being enforced and that its laudable goal is truly realized."The most recent installment in the saga of the Ontario Government's excessive secrecy surrounding the AODA standards development process took place under Ontario's new Government, just days before a draft of this brief was made public. As addressed further in Chapter 5, the Employment Standards Development Committee (which is conducting a mandatory 5-year review of the 2011 Employment Accessibility Standard) invited the AODA Alliance to make a presentation to it at its November 21, 2018 meeting. After that presentation's scheduling was finalized, the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario notified the AODA Alliance by email that anyone attending from the AODA Alliance at that meeting would be required to sign a non-disclosure agreement. On the night before this presentation, the text of the required non-disclosure agreement was emailed to AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky. The Government's proposed non-disclosure agreement can only be described as dramatically-overreaching and draconian. It is well in excess of the non-disclosure agreement that the former Ontario Government asked members of the Education Standards Development Committee to sign earlier this year. We set it out in full below, because it is so striking.We do not know if instructions to use this non-disclosure agreement came from the Accessibility Directorate, from higher levels in the Ontario Public Service, or from the political level of the Government. We emphasize that the Government asked for this non-disclosure agreement from a volunteer who offered to come to a Standards Development Committee in order to assist that committee by preparing and presenting research and input that would assist that committee in best serving the public. As further explained in Chapter 5, that Standards Development Committee is required to report publicly on its meetings via publicly-posted minutes. All of that committee's advice to the Government must also be made public. In that statutory context, the Government's non-disclosure agreement in effect would make virtually everything, if not everything said at the committee meeting, including anything said by the presenter, potentially banned from public disclosure. The only exception would be if the presenter can themselves affirmatively prove after the fact that the information was previously known to them. The Government's proposed agreement includes:“Nothing in this Agreement shall prohibit or limit the Undersigned's use of information the Undersigned can demonstrate is (i) previously known to the Undersigned, (ii) independently developed by the Undersigned, (iii) acquired by the Undersigned from a third party not under similar non-disclosure obligations to the Ministry, or (iv) which is or becomes part of the public domain through no breach by the Undersigned of this Agreement."The presenter must, by this agreement, agree in advance to pay all of the Government's legal fees and costs in any claim by the Government to enforce the agreement (presumably whether or not the Government wins that legal case). The proposed agreement includes:“The Undersigned acknowledges that the Confidential Information disclosed and/or made available to the Undersigned hereunder is valuable to the Ministry and that any threatened or actual breach of this Agreement would cause irreparable injury to the Ministry, for which monetary damages would be inadequate. Accordingly, the Undersigned agrees that the Ministry shall have the right to seek an immediate injunction enjoining any such breach or threatened breach of this Agreement. The Undersigned agrees to be responsible for all costs, including but not limited to legal fees, incurred by the Ministry in any action enforcing the terms of this Agreement."Under this agreement, a presenter risks the Government claiming that something the presenter said or heard was confidential, and hence is banned from disclosure. This is a massive intrusion on the constitutional right to freedom of expression, guaranteed by s. 2(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.The Government's proposed agreement tries to get the AODA Alliance to agree that the Government has given us something of value in exchange, to make this a binding agreement. In fact, the Government was giving AODA Alliance nothing of material value. The Government's agreement includes:"IN CONSIDERATION of the Ministry within the government of Ontario (“Ontario”) disclosing to the Undersigned certain confidential, proprietary, copyrighted, and/or trade-secret information of Ministry (“Confidential Information”), the Undersigned agrees as follows:…"No community advocate or other presenter should ever be asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement in these circumstances, much less one that is so draconian. AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky did not sign the agreement. Yet he proceeded without difficulty to present to the Employment Standards Development Committee on November 21, 2018. The committee members felt entirely free to ask good and probing questions about the AODA Alliance's recommendations, and to get answers to them.The text of the entire agreement that the Government presented to the AODA Alliance was as follows:"NON-DISCLOSURE AGREEMENTBETWEEN:HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN, in right of Ontario as represented by the Minister for Seniors and Accessibility(hereinafter called “Ministry”)- and - First Name – Last Name, Organization(hereinafter called the “Undersigned”)IN CONSIDERATION of the Ministry within the government of Ontario (“Ontario”) disclosing to the Undersigned certain confidential, proprietary, copyrighted, and/or trade-secret information of Ministry (“Confidential Information”), the Undersigned agrees as follows:Confidential Information means information in oral and/or written form that (a) relates to the Ministry and (b) has been identified, either orally or in writing, as confidential by the Ministry or otherwise classified as confidential by Ontario. It may include, for example but without limitation, information concerning government policy plans, labour relations matters, Ministry client information and other confidential Ontario information.The Undersigned may use the Confidential Information for purposes only to fulfil his or her obligations to the Ministry. The Undersigned will not, at any time, use the Confidential Information in any other fashion, form, or manner or for any other unauthorized purpose. The Undersigned agrees not to disclose the Confidential Information in any manner to anyone other than employees of the Ministry and other authorized persons within Ontario who have a need to know for the purpose set forth above and who have acknowledged in writing their obligations. hereunder and have agreed to abide by the terms hereof. The Undersigned shall not disclose the Confidential Information to any other party, except as may be required by law.Any Confidential Information in whatever form is, as between Ministry and the Undersigned, the property of Ontario and shall remain so at all times. The Undersigned may not copy any Confidential Information for any purpose without the express prior written consent of the Ministry, and if consent is granted, any such copies shall contain such proprietary rights notices as appear on the original thereof. Any copies of the Confidential Information that the Ministry may have permitted the Undersigned to make, or other written material incorporating Confidential Information, shall be the sole property of Ontario and must be returned to the Ministry or destroyed upon the first to occur of (a) completion of the Undersigned’s use of the same for the purpose described above or (b) request by the Ministry. Nothing in this Agreement shall prohibit or limit the Undersigned’s use of information the Undersigned can demonstrate is (i) previously known to the Undersigned, (ii) independently developed by the Undersigned, (iii) acquired by the Undersigned from a third party not under similar non-disclosure obligations to the Ministry, or (iv) which is or becomes part of the public domain through no breach by the Undersigned of this Agreement.Except as permitted hereunder, no license under any trade secrets, copyrights, or other rights of Ontario is granted by this Agreement or any disclosure of Confidential Information hereunder.The Undersigned acknowledges that the Confidential Information disclosed and/or made available to the Undersigned hereunder is valuable to the Ministry and that any threatened or actual breach of this Agreement would cause irreparable injury to the Ministry, for which monetary damages would be inadequate. Accordingly, the Undersigned agrees that the Ministry shall have the right to seek an immediate injunction enjoining any such breach or threatened breach of this Agreement. The Undersigned agrees to be responsible for all costs, including but not limited to legal fees, incurred by the Ministry in any action enforcing the terms of this Agreement.The Undersigned shall promptly advise the Ministry in writing of any unauthorized use or disclosure of Confidential Information of which the Undersigned becomes aware and shall provide reasonable assistance to the Ministry to bring about the cessation of such unauthorized use or disclosure.This Agreement is subject to all applicable laws, including the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act.10.The Undersigned may not assign this Agreement without the prior written consent of the MinistryThe Agreement shall become effective as of the date last signed. The provisions hereof shall survive return of the Confidential Information to the Ministry or other disposition as authorized by the Ministry…."10. Why Strong Action on Accessibility Fits within the Agenda of Ontario's New Government Strong, effective Government action on accessibility fits well within the agenda of Ontario's new Government. In addressing this, we emphasize that this AODA Independent Review, like the AODA Alliance, is strictly non-partisan. Accessibility for Ontarians with disabilities is a non-partisan issue. All parties in the Legislature have, at various times, brought forward legislation or amendments, and pressed for more action on accessibility. All parties have emphasized that disability barriers eventually hurt everyone, since everyone eventually is bound to get a disability. Each party has emphasized that accessibility is good for people with disabilities, for all members of the public, and for business. Ontario's Progressive Conservative Party has made written election commitments on the need for disability accessibility legislation in elections in 1995, 2007, 2014 and 2018. These letters were signed by PC leaders Mike Harris, John Tory, Tim Hudak, and most recently, by Doug Ford. On October 29, 1998, when Mike Harris was Ontario's premier, the Legislature unanimously passed an historic resolution. It adopted eleven important principles that a strong and effective Disabilities Act should fulfil. Each PC MPP in the Legislature voted for that resolution. In 2005, all parties, including each PC MPP, voted unanimously to pass the AODA, and gave it a standing ovation. The AODA requires Ontario to become accessible to people with disabilities by 2025. It requires the Government to lead Ontario to that goal by enacting and effectively enforcing regulations called accessibility standards. During the 2005 clause-by-clause debate on the AODA, the PC Party proposed amendments at the request of our predecessor coalition, to make the bill even stronger. After the AODA was enacted, the PC leader congratulated the Government for passing it. On a number of occasions while in opposition, the Ontario PC Party has put questions to the Ontario Government at our request, to press for more action on the AODA's implementation. In his May 15, 2018 letter to the AODA Alliance, Doug Ford continued the PC Party's commitment to this legislation and its goal, reaffirming: "Making Ontario fully accessible by 2025 is an important goal under the AODA and it’s one that would be taken seriously by an Ontario PC government." That record fits within a bigger picture. In each of the three Canadian provinces which enacted accessibility legislation, namely Ontario (2005), Manitoba (2013) and Nova Scotia (2017), that legislation unanimously passed. Each Conservative Party supported it. Similarly, last fall, when the House of Commons passed Bill C-81, the proposed Accessible Canada Act, it was unanimously supported, including by the Conservative Party of Canada. On behalf of the disability community, the Conservative Party of Canada proposed amendments in the House of Commons that would have strengthened Bill C-81 – amendments which the Federal Government voted down. Looking more broadly. The Americans with Disabilities Act was proudly signed into law in 1990 by Republican US President George H.W. Bush. Earlier, when he was US Vice President, President Ronald Reagan appointed him to chair a national de-regulation task force. The Americans with Disabilities Act was supported in the US Congress by Democrats and Republicans alike, including by Senator Bob Dole, who later ran for president as Republican nominee. The need for the Ontario Government to lead Ontario to disability accessibility by 2025 aligns with the PC Party's current agenda. In Doug Ford's May 15, 2018 letter to the AODA Alliance, he committed: "Your issues are close to the hearts of our Ontario PC Caucus" and "they will play an outstanding role in shaping policy for the Ontario PC Party."He committed during the 2018 election to lead a Government "for the people". At least 1.9 million of the people of Ontario now have a disability. The rest are bound to later get a disability, as they grow older. "The people" are, at some time in their lives, all people with disabilities. The Government has announced the goal to make Ontario open for business. This needs to include ensuring that Ontario is open for employees, job-seekers, business owners and customers with disabilities. The new Government said it aims to be responsible in the use of taxpayers' money. We suggest it was irresponsible for public money to be used in the past to create or perpetuate accessibility barriers against people with disabilities, as we address further in Chapter 7. An ounce of barrier prevention is worth many pounds of cure. A firm commitment to accessibility saves taxpayers the expense of re-doing projects after the fact, to fix accessibility barriers that should have been prevented. Clear and time-based accessibility standards promote stability for businesses, who can then plan with those standards in mind. In Doug Ford's May 15, 2018 letter to the AODA Alliance, written during the 2018 election campaign, he made a number of important points. These show why it is so important for the AODA to be effectively implemented. As we explain in Chapter 3, the 2011 AODA Employment Accessibility Standard, now under review by the Employment Standards Development Committee, needs to be strengthened to ensure that the workplaces of tomorrow are barrier-free for job-seekers and employees with disabilities. To do so fits well within the position of the PC Party. In his May 15, 2018 letter to the AODA Alliance, Doug Ford wrote: "When it comes to people with disabilities, we have a moral and an economic responsibility to focus on their abilities and not just on what holds them back. Our family members, friends and neighbours who have a disability of some kind are a wellspring of talent and determination…. …It's also completely unacceptable that someone should be passed over for a job because of the myth that people with disabilities can't do the work. We have a moral and social responsibility to change this." As Chapter 9 of this brief shows, voters with disabilities can still encounter unfair voting barriers in elections in Ontario. Fixing this problem with new legislation is well within the PC Party's record. It was commendable that in 2010, when the Legislature was considering bill 231 (intended to modernize Ontario elections), the PC Party proposed a number of good amendments at our request to make voting fully accessible to voters with disabilities. The previous Government defeated those amendments. Further showing that action in this area fits within the new Government's agenda, in his May 15, 2018 letter, Doug Ford also wrote: "There's no good reason why a person with a disability should not be able to cast a vote in an election." Creating, enacting and enforcing a strong Education Accessibility Standard under the AODA falls well within the PC Party's platform and perspective. While in opposition, the PC Party helped us in Question Period over the past three years to get the previous Government to agree to create an Education Accessibility Standard under the AODA. Moreover, in his May 15, 2018 letter to the AODA Alliance, Doug Ford also wrote:"The Ontario PC Party believes our education system must minimize barriers for students with disabilities, providing the skills, opportunities and connections with the business community that are necessary to enter the workforce." Developing needed accessibility standards, including in the area of the built environment, is also well within the PC Party's platform. As well, Doug Ford wrote: "This is why we're disappointed the current government has not kept its promise with respect to accessibility standards. An Ontario PC government is committed to working with the AODA Alliance to address implementation and enforcement issues when it comes to these standards. Ontario needs a clear strategy to address AODA standards and the Ontario Building Code's accessibility provisions. We need Ontario's design professionals, such as architects, to receive substantially improved professional training on disability and accessibility." Doug Ford's May 15, 2018 letter highlighted Christine Elliot's important role within the PC Party on disability issues. The PC Party designated her to speak on behalf of the Ontario PC Party at the May 16, 2018 provincial all-candidates' debate on disability issues, held in Toronto. She there made important commitments on the PC Party's behalf, on issues such as the AODA's implementation and enforcement, on ensuring that students with disabilities can fully participate in education at school, colleges and university, on ODSP reform, on the need for affordable, accessible and, where needed, supportive housing, and other topics. In his letter, Doug Ford expressed a strong desire to work with the AODA Alliance on disability accessibility issues. He wrote: "Building a strong, open dialogue with your organization is most certainly a priority for our party. We encourage you to continue this dialogue and share your ideas and solutions for Ontarians with disabilities." The new Government ran for office on a platform to try to make the Ontario Government a more efficient operation. This brief identifies a number of troubling inefficiencies in how the Ontario Government has approached accessibility and recommends cost-effective improvements. The new Government ran for office on an agenda to reduce the number of regulations, particularly as they apply to businesses. That platform doesn't stand in the way of the Government effectively implementing and enforcing the AODA, including through the enactment of needed accessibility standards under the AODA. The points made above give illustrations where AODA accessibility standard regulations fit within the PC agenda. Moreover, it was not the new Government's platform to eliminate all regulations in Ontario, or to refuse to ever enact any new regulations in any circumstance. Conservative governments with a strong de-regulation agenda can nevertheless enact and enforce regulations where they are needed. As noted above, US Vice President Bush led a national de-regulation task force in the US, and yet, when later elected president, proudly supported the enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act, a landmark new regulatory law. Moreover, Ontario's Conservative Party had a similar platform in favour of a reduction in regulatory burdens when its MPPs unanimously voted to pass the AODA. That party, with that platform, made commendable efforts on behalf of Ontarians with disabilities to get the AODA's regulatory requirements strengthened in 2005, when it was still a bill before the Legislature.As well, nothing in Premier Ford's May 15, 2018 letter to the AODA Alliance, quoted earlier, signals any reluctance to or objection to the use of regulatory measures to achieve accessibility for people with disabilities in Ontario. As just noted above, and as is addressed at various points in this brief, the PC Party did not run on a platform to reduce the AODA's implementation and enforcement. When in opposition, the PC Party supported the AODA Alliance's efforts to get a new regulation developed in Ontario under the AODA, an Education Accessibility Standard. The new Government is concerned about regulatory burdens on small business. The AODA was carefully designed so that accessibility standards need not be "one size fits all." accessibility standards can and do set different requirements for big business than for small businesses, and can set different timelines for big business than for small business. In fact all accessibility standards to date enacted under the AODA do so. If anything, accessibility standards to date exempt or provide substantially reduced provisions for small business. Finally, in the end, any AODA accessibility standard regulations do not impose any new substantive obligations on businesses or other organizations. Rather, they implement the rights which are already guaranteed to people with disabilities under the Ontario Human Rights Code, and where applicable, the Charter of Rights. If those regulations are developed properly and are effective, they can help businesses in Ontario make money. Accessibility means a business gets access to a wider customer base and a wider pool of potential employees. They help a business retain existing employees as they acquire disabilities, through illness, injury or the natural aging process. They are able to serve a huge international market. There are upwards of one billion people with disabilities around the world.Therefore, Ontario's new Government should be open to consider, to accept and to welcome the recommendations for action that this brief proposes. Chapter 2 The Ongoing Unmet Need for the AODA's Effective Enforcement1. Introduction It has been widely recognized and repeatedly reported in the media that the AODA has not been effectively enforced, despite the former Ontario Government's repeated promises to effectively enforce this legislation. Part 2 of the June 30, 2014 AODA Alliance brief to Mayo Moran demonstrated the importance for the AODA to be effectively enforced. It also documented the former Ontario Government's failure to keep its promise to effectively enforce the AODA, up to the spring of 2014. In this chapter of this brief, we bring the situation up to the present. In short, the former Ontario Government continued to fail to effectively enforce the AODA for the past four years, even though it had unused funding on hand that could be used for enforcement, and even though the Government knew of rampant AODA violations in the private sector. The limited enforcement that the former Ontario Government did deploy was weak and limited in scope.2. Recommended Findings We recommend that this AODA Independent Review make the following findings:* For years, the AODA has not been effectively enforced, even though the former Ontario Government knew for years about unacceptably high levels of AODA non-compliance, particularly within the private sector. Enforcement efforts have been too weak. * This ineffective AODA enforcement does a disservice to Ontarians with disabilities, to the broader public, and to all the obligated organizations who have opted to comply with the AODA. * The former Ontario Government did not significantly improve AODA enforcement after the 2014 Mayo Moran Report called for strengthened enforcement. To the contrary, within a week of the former Ontario Government's public release of the final report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review in February 2015, the former Ontario Government instituted a substantial cutback of the already-weak AODA enforcement. In June 2015, the former Ontario Government announced that it had a new plan for increased AODA enforcement, to begin in 2016. Subsequent Government records and the results of an AODA Alliance Freedom of Information application demonstrate that this never took place.* The former Ontario Government failed to effectively publicize the Government's promised toll-Free number for the public to report AODA violations, for purposes of AODA enforcement. * It is important to make AODA enforcement independent of the Ontario Government. The Ontario Government should not enforce the AODA against itself. Moreover, independent enforcement of the AODA will better ensure effective enforcement of the AODA. AODA enforcement should not be subject to any political involvement.* While enforcement is not the only way to get obligated organizations to comply with the AODA, it is one important way to do so. The failure to effectively enforce the AODA has contributed to low rates of AODA compliance.* The failure to effectively enforce the AODA also works against the efforts of those who try to get obligated organizations to comply, such as accessibility consultants. Those consultants can point to strong enforcement powers in the AODA. However, the fact that only five monetary penalties were imposed in 2015, 2016 and 2017 combined, is ample proof that obligated organizations need not fear any real consequences if they don't comply with the AODA.* It is not sufficient for AODA enforcement to take the form of "paper audits", where Government officials review an obligated organization's documentary records on AODA compliance, such as records of an obligated organization's accessibility policy and of its staff training on accessibility. Effective auditing or inspections need to include on-site examination of the actual accessibility of the obligated organizations, not just its accessibility paper trail.3. Recommendations on the AODA's Enforcement We therefore recommend that:AODA enforcement should be substantially strengthen, including effectively using all AODA enforcement powers, enforcing all AODA accessibility requirements, and enforcing the AODA in connection with all classes of organizations that must obey the AODA. The Government should not just enforce the requirement of certain obligated organizations to file an accessibility self-report. The Government should effectively enforce AODA requirements vis à vis both the public and private sectors, and vis à vis all classes of organizations within each sector. AODA enforcement should be transferred outside the Ministry responsible for the AODA, and be assigned to an arms-length public agency to be created for AODA enforcement. The number of inspectors and directors appointed with AODA enforcement powers should be significantly increased.Among other things, Ontario Government and local municipal inspectors and investigators under other legislation should be given a mandate to enforce the AODA when they inspect or investigate an organization under other legislation or by-laws.A core feature of AODA enforcement should be the on-site inspection of a range of obligated organizations each year on the actual accessibility of their workplace, goods, services and facilities, not a mere audit of their paper records on accessibility documentation.The Accessibility Directorate of Ontario and any successor body assigned responsibility for AODA enforcement should publicly release and promptly post detailed information on AODA enforcement actions at least every three months. It should report on how many obligated organizations are actually providing accessibility, and not, as too often is the case at present, how many organizations simply tell the Government that they are providing accessibility. This should include prompt reports of quarterly results and year-to-date totals, broken down by sector and size of organization. At a minimum, it should include such measures as the number of notices of proposed order issued, the total amount of proposed penalties, the number of orders issued and total amounts and number of penalties imposed, the number of appeals from orders and the outcome, the total amount of penalties including changes ordered by the appeal tribunal, and the orders categorized by subject matter.Obligated organizations should be required to report to the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario or any successor AODA enforcement agency on accessibility complaints received via their required AODA feedback mechanisms, and on how they were resolved, while protecting individual privacy.New ways for crowd-sourced AODA monitoring/enforcement should be created, such as the Government beginning to post all online AODA compliance reports from obligated organizations in a publicly-accessible searchable data base, and by requiring each obligated organization to post its AODA accessibility policy and its AODA compliance report on its own website, if it has one.To reverse the public perception that the Government is not and will not be effectively enforcing the AODA, the Government should immediately and widely publicize its enforcement plans and its intention to substantially increase its efforts at AODA enforcement. This should not be limited to postings on a Government website. The Government should develop an effective strategy for ensuring that municipalities effectively enforce the Ontario Building Code's accessibility requirements as well as any built environment accessibility requirements in AODA accessibility standards, including providing effective training tools on the Ontario Building Code accessibility requirements that can be used by municipal enforcement officials;monitoring levels of enforcement and compliance at the municipal level across Ontario regarding the Ontario Building Code accessibility requirements.4. What the 2014 report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review Found on the AODA's EnforcementThe topic of enforcement came up time and again in the 2014 final report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review. It was a centrally important focus of feedback from the public to Mayo Moran. Here are some key passages, the large majority of which we endorse:* "EnforcementThere can be no doubt of one central theme that emerged loud and strong from all of the consultations, and that is the vital importance of robust, effective and visible enforcement to the integrity of the AODA regime. A wide range of stakeholders reported that the lack of visible enforcement is a critical impediment that is holding Ontario back from achieving the 2025 goal for an accessible province. Just as the Ontarians with Disabilities Act was criticized by the disability community as “toothless”, some now feel the same way about the AODA. This concern, it should be noted, is by no means limited to disability advocates. Others including business groups observed that the Government has shown little appetite to wield the substantial enforcement mechanisms contained in the legislation. The result as reported to the Review is a very mixed message about the importance of the AODA.The pace of change is seen as agonizingly slow by persons with disabilities, while the complexity of the regime and the inadequacy of support for implementation mean that the obligated sectors are nonetheless struggling with compliance.Much of the enforcement discussion focused on the private sector. Figures released by the Government in November 2013 showed that only about 30 per cent of the 51,000 organizations with 20 or more employees that were required to file compliance reports had done so. Based on publicly available information, participants said there was no evidence of penalties having been imposed for non-compliance, undermining efforts to persuade organizations to meet their obligations. These statistics were said to bear out the anecdotal impression that businesses are not complying well. (Further enforcement information is presented in the Reviewer’s Comments and Recommendations section.)Disability stakeholders described the tolerance of such non-compliance as a “stunning contrast” with the way government enforces other laws, such as environmental protection measures. A number of consultants and disability groups that work with the private sector feel some businesses are waiting to see who gets fined and will not move until they see enforcement happening. As one participant put it, how effective would speed limits be without speeding tickets? Many called for the Government to take steps to ensure non-compliant organizations correct their infractions in a timely fashion. The Review was frequently told that a few high-profile fines could make a big impact. Despite weak public education efforts by Government, some disability stakeholders felt that the private sector has still had ample notice of the AODA’s requirements. Hence, they did not believe that enforcement should be delayed while publicity campaigns are ramped up.A wide range of stakeholders reported that the lack of visible enforcement is holding Ontario back from achieving the 2025 goal for an accessible province. One asked, “How effective would speed limits be without speeding tickets?”Disability groups, business and the public sector all urged the Government to be more transparent about its enforcement activities. Data on compliance levels and enforcement actions overall and by sector and class of organization should be compiled in periodic reports. Government should also make its enforcement intentions known, to counter the perception that non-compliance with the AODA has no consequences.Various ideas were tabled for strengthening the enforcement function. One was to empower and train inspectors under other legislation to check for AODA compliance whenever inspecting or investigating an organization for any reason. Another suggestion, along similar lines, was to require each ministry to take responsibility for AODA compliance and enforcement in the sectors within its mandate. In health care, a suggestion was made to link AODA compliance to the annual hospital accreditation process. Regarding the Information and Communications standard, there was a proposal to achieve economies of scale by hiring one company to audit all public sector websites. Another suggestion was to send summer students with disabilities to visit business premises to test the accessibility of plaints ProcessThe most frequently mentioned enforcement idea was the introduction of a new tool: a complaints process for the AODA. It was repeatedly observed that no such mechanism now exists, forcing people who encounter barriers to file complaints with the Human Rights Tribunal – a cumbersome and time-consuming process. Some participants pointed out that a complaints system was especially needed because the Government is not doing enough proactive enforcement through audits and inspections. A number of options for a complaints process were put forward. For example:?Set up an accessible, toll-free telephone number to report AODA violations, such as the confidential tip line for abuse of the federal Temporary Foreign Worker Program.?Empower municipalities or municipal accessibility advisory committees to operate a local complaints process and track and report on complaints.?Create an Ombudsman for an Accessible Ontario or give the existing Ombudsman of Ontario the power to investigate complaints of AODA non-compliance. (It was noted that further study would be needed as Ombudsmen generally have the power only to make recommendations and not to impose penalties.) ?Establish a complaints process in hospitals and other health care facilities to address concerns of patients and families. The most frequently mentioned enforcement idea was the introduction of a new tool – a complaints process.Another alternative was to build on the feedback process that organizations are currently obliged to establish under the Customer Service standard. This would be done by requiring organizations to compile and disclose data on the number and nature of complaints received as well as on their responses. It was also suggested that organizations identify contacts to engage in a dialogue with people concerned about barriers. Contact points were also proposed for customers to obtain information about the accessible services an organization offers, which would be especially helpful for publicly funded services.* "A number of reasons were cited to explain why AODA implementation has not delivered the expected results. Among these, commentators from all sectors stressed the lack of awareness of the legislation and the lack of enforcement – the result, some said, of an absence of government leadership. The Government was also said to be neglecting its responsibilities to get its own house in order and to develop all standards necessary to reach an accessible Ontario. To reassert provincial leadership, disability stakeholders called on the Government to establish a three-year action plan describing the steps it will take, with timelines, to ensure Ontario becomes fully accessible by 2025.“We need to get the momentum started again so that accessibility will go forward until 2025 and onward from there”. – A participant in an online session"* "Recommendation 2: Enforce the AODAA dominant theme in many of the submissions to the Review was the critical importance of enforcing the AODA and of making known the results of that enforcement. It should be noted that this view was widely shared by a number of different constituencies. Because of this, and because of the complexity and the helpful feedback received by the Review, I have addressed this issue in considerable detail below.As many have pointed out to this Review, reliable information regarding enforcement of the AODA is difficult to locate. However, according to current information made available to the Review, all public sector organizations with obligations have filed the first two accessibility reports, due in 2010 and 2013. Following up, the ADO conducted 277 audits of public sector organizations between 2010 and 2012 and more public sector audits are under way in 2014. These are desk audits of documentation to confirm that an organization is meeting all requirements, as reported. If noncompliance is found, the ADO negotiates a compliance plan indicating the steps the organization will take to meet its obligations, such as revision of customer service policies or training of more staff.In the private sector, however, statistics released by the Government in November 2013 in response to a Freedom of Information request showed that only about 30 per cent of organizations with 20 or more employees that were required to file compliance reports as of December 2012 had done so. The number of filed reports increased from 15,293 as of November 2013 to 17,904 as of October 2014, according to information the ADO provided to the Review. The ADO completed more than 1,900 private sector audits in 2013, with more audits under way in 2014. Starting in late 2013, the ADO sent notices of proposed orders to private sector organizations that had not filed reports, with 2,500 notices issued by year-end. The ADO has not publicly released information on the number of orders – as opposed to proposed orders – actually issued, or on the amount of penalties proposed or imposed. The Review is aware that the Licence Appeal Tribunal has heard a number of appeals of enforcement actions under the AODA.Although it is beyond the scope of this Review to set out a detailed plan for the enforcement of the AODA, the consultations identified a number of elements that ought to form part of any enforcement plan. The following recommendations are offered in order to assist in the development of an enforcement plan, or in the refinement of a plan the Government may already have developed.A.Prepare and make public an enforcement plan.Because of the uncertainty that has existed concerning the enforcement of the AODA, it is especially important for the Government to develop and make public an enforcement plan in a timely way. If the enforcement plan has not been released by the time this Report is published, I urge the Government to release it immediately. I emphasize that the credibility of the AODA regime at this juncture depends to a significant extent on confidence in the enforcement plan. Timeliness and public release of this plan are key factors in building the credibility that the AODA requires to achieve its crucial goals.B.Build transparency into the enforcement plan.Since sharing information can among other things help to enhance compliance, transparency is an increasingly significant feature of modern regulatory systems. Indeed, transparency is a common practice within the Government of Ontario itself. For example, the Ministry of Labour posts the number of employment standards inspections, investigations and prosecutions as well as lists of employers convicted, nature of offences and fines. It also identifies the top five complaints for each year. Similarly, the Ministry of Government and Consumer Services has a searchable online public record that lists businesses that have been charged and/or convicted under consumer protection legislation or that have not responded to the Ministry regarding a complaint. The Ontario Energy Board website posts annual complaints data for electricity retailers and natural gas marketers, by company (number of complaints per 1000 contracts). In this context, it is important for the AODA enforcement plan to incorporate transparency. Making the results of AODA enforcement activities known in a timely way will achieve key accessibility objectives including encouraging greater compliance as well as enabling consumers and others to direct their choices to organizations that support accessibility.I emphasize that timeliness is a key aspect of transparency. While time frames vary widely across government, some regulators post enforcement information on a quarterly basis or even more frequently. Given that enforcement was a top issue raised during the consultations for this Review, I recommend that the ADO release information on AODA enforcement actions at least every three months. This information should be posted promptly and should reflect quarterly results as well as year-to-date totals, broken down by sector and size of organization. At a minimum, it should include such measures as:?Number of notices of proposed order issued?Total amount of proposed penalties?Number of orders issued and total amount of penalties imposed?Number of appeals from orders and the outcome?Total amount of penalties including changes ordered by the appeal tribunal?Orders categorized by subject matter. C.Incorporate feedback into compliance and enforcement efforts. The designers of the AODA purposefully and thoughtfully chose a non-complaints system. They did so for good reason – such systems often get bogged down in dealing with individual situations and end up being unable to effect more systemic change. Nonetheless, perhaps the concern that was most frequently voiced to the Review was that there was no obvious mechanism for giving feedback on compliance with the AODA.Although the AODA is not complaints-based legislation, the ADO does have a process for receiving complaints, either directly or through the ServiceOntario contact centre. The ADO redirects complaints by encouraging individuals to contact obligated organizations directly to provide feedback on accessibility barriers (through the process required under the Customer Service standard). As well, individuals who believe they have been discriminated against are advised of their option to file a complaint with the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario.The Review was told that the ADO compiles this input and uses it to some extent to target educational and enforcement activity. However, most complaints received are unrelated to AODA violations and mainly concern barriers that are not covered by the standards, such as building retrofits. The ADO indicated that the name of the person making the complaint is generally not recorded, as individuals are informed of the other mechanisms available to resolve their concerns. The ADO does not release public information on complaint volume, subject matter or responses.It is clear from the consultations, and from a review of best practices, that ensuring meaningful and well-publicized feedback mechanisms will be important to the enforcement plan. Premier Wynne’s recent commitment to establish an accessible toll-free phone number to report AODA violations would undoubtedly be a great step forward in accomplishing this and I support rapid implementation of this commitment. Moreover, I would suggest broadening this tool to enable online as well as mail-in reporting, to provide the public with a choice of feedback options.The enforcement plan should explain clearly what will be done with this feedback. Because the AODA is not a complaints-based system, the use of the information will naturally be general and not specific. Reporting of violations usually will not lead to the investigation of individual cases. However, it is essential to communicate that the feedback will be used in a meaningful way, such as focusing enforcement activities as well as informing educational and outreach activities.It is common for feedback mechanisms under regulatory regimes to begin with the obligated organization directly. For example, under the Employment Standards Act, the employee first alerts the employer about the issue. Similarly, insurance consumers contact the company first before proceeding to an industry ombudservice. Consumer protection legislation also asks consumers to first share their concerns with the relevant business. Channeling concerns directly to the organization in question is often the best route to achieving compliance in the most timely fashion.Indeed for this reason feedback requirements are already part of the Customer Service standard, which obliges organizations to establish a process for receiving and responding to feedback on the way they provide goods or services to persons with disabilities – including the steps that are to be taken if a complaint is received. Under the standard, information about the process must be readily available to the public, and organizations with 20 or more employees must prepare a document on the process and give a copy to anyone who requests one.I recommend that the requirement for a feedback mechanism be extended beyond the Customer Service standard to encompass all of the other standards as the obligations come into effect. In addition to gathering feedback, I further recommend that organizations make public not just the process for feedback but also the types of complaints and their response, in order to enhance both transparency and compliance. The identity of people making complaints should not be disclosed.Moreover, reporting to the ADO on any complaints received and how they were resolved could be an extremely useful part of regular AODA reporting by obligated organizations. This information could then be integrated with data on complaints made directly to the Government, assisting the ADO to track areas where more education or support is needed as well as to guide enforcement activities. Presentation and analysis of the complaints data on an anonymous, sectoral basis, along with a discussion of how that data was used to shape priorities, should form part of regular public reporting by the ADO."5. Insufficient Government Action on AODA Enforcement Since the 2014 report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent ReviewThe Wynne Government's February 2015 immediate Response to the final report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review Enforcement Recommendations Was to Do the Opposite of What Mayo Moran Recommended. The former Ontario Government released the final report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review to the public on February 13, 2015, after having had at least three months to study it. In its response to that report, released the same day, the former Ontario Government claimed to be a world leader on accessibility. Its February 13, 2015 news release stated:"Ontario is proud to be a global leader in accessibility."Less than one week later, the former Ontario Government took the extraordinary and profoundly harmful step of cutting AODA enforcement audits for that year by over 30%. This led the former Ontario Government to receive negative media coverage. As a result, four months later, the Government announced on June 3, 2015, in honour of the AODA's 10th anniversary, that starting in 2016, the Government would crack down on AODA violators. As is further detailed later in this chapter, we later revealed that this crackdown never ended up taking place.On April 18, 2018, the AODA Alliance made public a detailed 5-year analysis of the former Ontario Government's efforts at enforcing the AODA. This was the result of very extensive work. It was based on data unearthed from the Ontario Government. Some of that information was only obtained after we resorted to Freedom of Information applications. Our report on five years of AODA enforcement is the most thorough and objective assessment of AODA enforcement that is available outside the Government, as far as we could determine.We here quote extensively from the AODA Alliances April 18, 2018 five-year report on AODA enforcement. That report summarized its findings:"Our conclusion is that the Government has not kept its promise to effectively enforce the AODA. It has taken far too few steps and has made it difficult to keep track on a current basis of what it is doing in this regard. This analysis explores these topics:* Years of Rampant AODA Violations, Well Known to The Wynne Government, Continue To Persist In The Private Sector Even In 2015, 2016 And 2017 * The Wynne Government Imposed a Meagre Five Monetary Penalties under the AODA for 2015, 2016 and 2017 Combined * The Wynne Government's June 3, 2015 Headline-Grabbing Crackdown on AODA Violators Did Not Materialize Over Two and a Half Years Since the Government Promised It * Troubling Levels of AODA Violations among the Small Number of Organizations that the Wynne Government Examined More Closely* There's Been Only One On-Site AODA Inspection Since the AODA Was Enacted in 2005?* There are A Minuscule Number of AODA Inspectors and Directors for All of Ontario.* The Government Had Funds on Hand for More AODA Enforcement* If and When the Wynne Government Actually Takes AODA Enforcement Action It Can Have an Impact* Three Years Later, the Wynne Government has Still Not Implemented a Key 2014 Recommendation on Effective Reporting to the Public on the Government's AODA Enforcement. The Government's Annual Accessibility Compliance and Enforcement Reports Fall Well Short of What a Government-Appointed AODA Independent Review Had Recommended in Late fall 2014.* The Government has failed to Effectively Publicize the Government's Toll-Free Number for Reporting AODA Violations"To give a full picture of the Government's AODA enforcement, we also set out the body of our 5-year report on AODA enforcement, as it explains the key information that this Independent Review will need:"2. Years Of Rampant AODA Violations, Well Known To The Wynne Government, Continue To Persist In The Private Sector Even In 2015, 2016 And 2017 Over four years ago, back on November 18, 2013, the AODA Alliance first made public the fact that the Government knew of rampant AODA violations in the private sector. We now make public the fact that this has continued to persist, to the Government's knowledge, for four and a half years since then. In the face of the huge number of AODA violations, Government efforts to combat this through AODA enforcement have been a mere drop in the bucket. A period of over a half decade of rampant law-breaking began back in 2012. According to Government records, fully 65% of obligated organizations did not file with the Ontario Government a mandatory AODA 2012 accessibility self-report. Some two years after those reports were due, the Wynne Government just gave up on getting that 2012 report filed. The Minister's July 20, 2017 letter to the AODA Alliance, set out below, states:"At the closing of the 2012 reporting period in September 2014, 33,285 or 65 per cent of obligated organizations had not filed the 2012 Accessibility Compliance Report. This statistic will not change as the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario (ADO) then moved on to tracking submissions for the more recent compliance reports, and consequently removed the option to file the 2012 version."Since then, a massive 57% of obligated organizations had not filed their mandatory 2014 accessibility self-report even as long as some two years after it was due. The Minister's July 20, 2017 letter to the AODA Alliance states:"By December 31, 2016, 30,152 or 57 per cent of obligated private sector organizations had not filed the 2014 Accessibility Compliance Report. As with the 2012 version of the report, this statistic will not change. Organizations could not file a 2014 report beyond December 31, 2016 because the 2017 reporting window had opened. As an updated version of the report is now expected, the ADO has removed the option to file the older 2014 version."This means that the Wynne Government also gave up on getting known delinquent organizations to comply with their obligation to file 2014 AODA compliance self-reports. We were never consulted on that decision. We had not learned about it before receiving the documents on which this analysis relies. We would have objected to the Government rewarding law-breakers with such an obvious free pass. Through the back door, the Wynne Government has administratively created an inappropriate statute of limitations on AODA compliance. If an organization does not file a mandatory accessibility self-report, after two years, the Government will just give up on enforcing it for that year. Imagine if the Government decided that if an organization doesn't file its tax returns, it need not worry after two years, because the Government won't bother tracking it after those two years, or asking it to file for the year that the organization missed. The Government's 2015 and 2016 reports to the public on its AODA enforcement, set out below, do not admit that the Government has in effect abandoned any enforcement of the duty to file 2012 and 2014 AODA compliance self-report. Had we not made our inquiries of the Wynne Government and analyzed the results as we do here, the public would not know that the Government had taken the wrong-headed step of rewarding massive AODA violations with an undeserved free pass. This is hardly the effective AODA enforcement that the Ontario Government promised 1.9 million Ontarians with ernment records also reveal a similarly-troubling level of AODA violations in 2017. Regarding the duty of obligated organizations to file accessibility self-reports by the end of year, fully 57% of private sector organizations with at least 20 employees were in violation, known to the Government. Assistant Deputy Minister Ann Hoy's March 7, 2018 letter to the AODA Alliance included this:"2017 was a reporting year for every sector, including roughly 56,000 business/non-profit organizations with 20 or more employees in Ontario.oOver 24,000 reports were submitted from business/non-profit sector organizations by the December 31 deadline, representing an increase of roughly 4,000 reports over the last reporting year in 2014.oBy the reporting deadline, roughly 32,000 business/non-profit organizations with 20 or more employees in Ontario (roughly 57%) had not filed an accessibility report.oEighty-six per cent (692 of 806) of the designated public sector organizations submitted their accessibility compliance report by the reporting deadline."The fact that 14% of public sector organizations had not complied with the requirement to file their 2017 AODA compliance self-report is also troubling. In past years, the Ontario Government has trumpeted higher levels of public sector AODA compliance. In her May 14, 2014 letter to the AODA Alliance, setting out her party's 2014 election pledges on accessibility, Premier Wynne wrote:"To speak to our track record, 99 per cent of Designated Broader Public Sector Organizations have submitted their reports by the deadline to date. If I am elected, I will see to it that this becomes 100 per cent." Four years after writing that, and with the AODA already over 12 years on the books, this public sector backsliding cried out for more substantial enforcement action.Viewed from another perspective, did the Accessibility Minister achieve the progress on AODA enforcement and compliance that the Premier directed her to achieve? The answer is a clear "no".Premier Wynne's September 23, 2016 Mandate Letter to Accessibility Minister Tracy MacCharles set this as a priority for the minister:"Taking steps to increase compliance reporting rates among private/not-for-profit sector organizations by an additional 50 per cent in 2017."As of the end of 2016, 57% of private sector obligated organizations with at least 20 employees had not filed their required 2014 AODA self-report. The Government reported the same 57% of non-complying private sector organizations with at least 20 employees that had not filed their required 2017 AODA self-report. This was certainly not the 50% increase in private sector reporting that the Premier directed the minister to achieve.3. Wynne Government Imposes a Meagre Five Monetary Penalties under the AODA for 2015, 2016 and 2017 Combined Despite these large numbers of ongoing, known rampant AODA violations, the Wynne Government only imposed a paltry three monetary penalties on AODA violations in 2017, and two monetary penalties on AODA violators in 2016. It did not report to us imposing any in 2015. This sends a loud, clear message to obligated organizations that they need not worry about serious financial penalties if they violate the AODA. This is so, even though the AODA includes strong monetary penalty provisions. 4. Wynne Government's June 3, 2015 Headline-Grabbing Crackdown on AODA Violators Did Not Materialize Over Two and a Half Years Since the Government Promised It Three years ago, in the first half of 2015, the Wynne Government was under a great deal of criticism. This is because in February 2015, the Government cut back by over one third on its already-weak AODA enforcement. In his February 19, 2015 letter to the AODA Alliance, Economic Development Minister Brad Duguid announced this massive enforcement cut. He did this, even though one week earlier, the second AODA Independent Review, conducted by Mayo Moran, had recommended strengthened AODA enforcement.Weeks later, in June 2015, the Wynne Government decided to do something about all the bad press it was getting about AODA enforcement in the 2015 spring. It chose to make a splashy announcement about a new AODA enforcement crack-down, as part of its June 3, 2015 celebration of the AODA's tenth anniversary.The Wynne Government therefore fed this story as an exclusive "leak" to the Toronto Star. That led the Star to run a front page headline on HYPERLINK "" June 3, 2015:"Ontario to crack down on accessibility violators"Among other things, that article led with this key passage:"Queen's Park is beefing up compliance and enforcement measures in response to criticism that it has been treating accessibility scofflaws with kid gloves.Starting next year, Ontario's economic development ministry will move to double compliance audits to 4,000, or 1 per cent of Ontario's 400,000 businesses. Under the province's Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, businesses with 20 or more employees were supposed to have filed customer service plans with the government by the end of 2012. But to date, only about 40 per cent have submitted the necessary reports on how they accommodate customers with disabilities, train staff and receive customer feedback. Accessibility advocates have criticized the government's weak response to businesses that continue to flout the law."We were encouraged by that announced new AODA enforcement plan. However, we were also troubled by the fact that the Government had announced no enforcement specifics. In contrast, at the same time as this announcement, the Government released a detailed package of new initiatives regarding other aspects of the AODA's implementation. Why was such an important part of the Government's announcement missing from its entire package of released materials? Therefore, the next day, June 4, 2015, AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky filed a Freedom of Information application. Among other things, he asked the Government to hand over the new enforcement plan that it had announced the day before with so much fanfare, on the Toronto Star's front page.If there was in reality a new AODA enforcement plan, it should have been easy for the Government to find it. After all, the Government just announced it in the media. Yet the Government didn't turn it over to Lepofsky. Instead, the Government mounted an incredible effort to put barriers in the way of the Lepofsky Freedom of Information application. Lepofsky had to appeal to the Information and Privacy Commission over several issues, including this one. Eventually last summer, two years after this announcement, the Government was ordered to hand over the new AODA enforcement plan that it announced on June 3, 2015.There's only one problem. It does not appear that there actually was a detailed specific new AODA enforcement plan. No specific new June 3, 2015 Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act enforcement plan was turned over, with time lines for ramped up enforcement leading to a total of 4,000 obligated organizations to be annually audited.Normally, when the Government works up a new plan or policy like this, and then announces it with much media flourish, there is a robust paper trail within the Government, as it works its way through the policy process. Under the Lepofsky Freedom of Information application we obtained from the Government various documents from that spring, but no detailed plan on ramping up AODA enforcement to 4,000 organizations, and no time lines or specifics. There was a record of the Government considering hiring an outside organization to do enforcement work. However, the Government had been looking at that idea for years.Out of an abundance of caution, AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky wrote Assistant Deputy Minister Ann Hoy on September 13, 2017, to find out if there was such a specific plan among the documents the Government disclosed to him after he partially won his Freedom of Information appeal. That email is set out below. He asked:"On June 3, 2015, the Ministry was reported in the Toronto Star to have announced a new AODA enforcement program to crack down on AODA violators. It announced that starting in 2016, the Government would increase the number of obligated organizations it would audit for AODA compliance, to increase eventually (no date specified) to double the number annually audited previously, namely 4,000. I write to ask if among the documents that the Ministry released to me earlier this week in response to my Freedom of Information application, there is any document or documents that sets out the new AODA enforcement program or plan represented in the June 3, 2015 announcement. If so, can you specify which document or documents?"On October 3, 2017, Assistant Deputy Minister Hoy responded. We set her response out below. It did not point to any specific document setting out the new enforcement plan that the Government announced to the Toronto Star on June 3, 2015. Rather, she pointed to the fact that internally the Government had been talking about aiming for enforcement with 4,000 organizations as far back as 2011. She talked vaguely and generally about efforts to improve enforcement and compliance. However, she clearly did not identify a document dated on or near June 3, 2015, that lays out some new specific AODA enforcement plans akin to the Government's announcement in the June 3, 2015 Toronto Star. Beyond this, we also have further proof from the Government's own records, that shows that the Wynne Government's June 3, 2015 announcement in the Toronto Star of an AODA enforcement crackdown plan was more smoke than reality. This comes from looking at the actual number of obligated organizations that the Government says it has annually audited under the AODA over the past years since making that announcement.As we earlier made public, in 2013 and 2014 each, the Government audited just short of 2,000 obligated organizations each year. Yet in February 2015, the Government cut that number for the 2015 year by over one third, revealing its target of a mere 1,200 in a February 19, 2015 letter from the Economic Development Minister to the AODA Alliance. The Government was blasted for this in the media. That is what led the Government to announce on June 3, 2015 that it would start increasing AODA audits in 2016, to rise to the goal of 4,000.Yet in the ensuing period of almost three years, the number of annually audited obligated organizations has never even returned to the 2013-2014 levels of about 2,000 audited organizations per year, much less has it come anywhere near close to the promised goal of 4,000 audited obligated organizations per year.The numbers of organizations audited since 2014 total:2013: 1,9062014: 1,954 2015: 1,3242016: 1,604 2017: 1,746 The following analysis of Government records shows how we arrived at this:* As for 2015, the Accessibility Minister's July 20, 2017 letter says the Government conducted "1,324 compliance activities." The Government does not say what a "compliance activity" is. It could be something much less than an all-out "audit by an authorized public servant". It could be something as simple as a form letter or phone call from a Government employee, reminding an obligated organization to file its overdue AODA Accessibility self-report. The Government's 2015 Accessibility Compliance and Enforcement Report, set out below, only uses the word "audit" to refer to 324 obligated organizations. * The Government's 2015 and 2016 enforcement reports and the Accessibility Minister's July 20, 2017 letter to the AODA Alliance never refer to conducting any on-site inspections. The Government's 2015 enforcement report only refers explicitly to one instance of visiting an obligated organization. It referred to conducting a site visit to the Ontario Public service. It did not indicate how much of, or what parts of that huge organization it physically visited, or what it physically examined there, if anything. This is further addressed later in this analysis.* The AODA Alliance's June 12 2017 letter had asked the minister how many "audits" and "inspections" had been conducted in 2015 and 2016. The Minister's letter, by talking only of "compliance activities", does not give a direct and clearly responsive answer. * The minister's July 20 2017 letter tried to make the Government's action on enforcement in 2015 look like a positive improvement. It stated: "In 2015, we conducted 1,324 compliance activities, surpassing our public commitment of 1,200."Yet 1,324 compliance activities in 2015(even if all were audits, which we do not know to be the case) falls well short of the almost 2,000 organizations audited in each of 2013 and 2014.* As for 2016, the Accessibility Minister's July 20, 2017 letter stated:"In 2016, the ADO achieved this by completing 1,604 compliance activities, exceeding 2015’s total by 280."Again, this number fell well short of the almost 2,000 organizations audited in 2013 and 2014, respectively. Here again, the Minister used the term "compliance activities", but did not specify any number of audits or inspections. Here again, we do not know from the Minister's July 20, 2017 letter how many of those compliance activities amounted to a full audit.We tried to decipher these figures by also looking to the Government's 2016 Accessibility Compliance and Enforcement Report. It referred to the Accessibility Directorate conducting 1,205 "phase 1 audits in 2016. Phase 1 audits only appear to focus on an obligated organization's duty to file a 2012 and 2014 accessibility self-report. They do not appear to focus on how accessible the organization actually has become. That report describes these audits as follows:"Phase 1 audits focus on an organization’s requirement to submit a self-certified accessibility compliance report online."The Government's 2016 AODA enforcement report referred to conducting 361 Phase 2 audits. That report stated:"In 2016, 361 audits were closed at the Phase 2 level."The report defines a Phase 2 audit as also just an audit of an obligated organization's records on steps that AODA accessibility standards may require. That report defines a Phase 2 audit as follows:"In a Phase 2 audit, documents are requested and reviewed for the purposes of verifying compliance with other requirements beyond reporting."Here again, the only reasonable conclusion is that the Government was only here looking at an obligated organization's records, and not at what is going on site at the organization, regarding accessibility. An obligated organization could presumably write up excellent documents and tell the Government that it is doing what it is supposed to do, without the Government checking to see if an obligated organization took any actual required steps to remove or prevent accessibility barriers. It is not clear if any of the conclusions in any of the Government's AODA enforcement reports include any Government –verified findings, or if they are just summarizing how compliant obligated organizations claim to be.The Government's 2016 Accessibility Compliance and Enforcement Report claims it audited a "selection" of small private sector organizations, but it tellingly never disclosed how many organizations were subject to this. Nothing suggests it went beyond a paper audit.The Government's 2016 AODA enforcement report also referred to an additional 498 AODA audits that a private sector firm conducted on the Government's behalf, in addition to the foregoing numbers. The Government's 2016 Accessibility Compliance and Enforcement Report states:"In addition to the 1,604 compliance activities conducted internally, the pilot resulted in 424 Phase 1 audits among organizations that failed to meet their reporting requirements and 74 Phase 2 audits among organizations that had submitted accessibility reports indicating compliance. The service provider also conducted 700 outreach calls reminding organizations of their compliance requirements."The Government appeared to consider this a pilot project. The 2016 Accessibility Compliance and Enforcement Report says the Government is assessing the data from that private firm's work. The Minister's July 20, 2017 letter does not appear to include this test activity in the Government's enforcement for the 2016 year. Absent a showing that this was as effective as a Government audit, we feel that the Minister was correct not to include these added compliance activities in her July 20, 2017 letter to us. * In 2017, the total number of "compliance activities" that the Government undertook was 1,746. The March 7, 2018 letter to the AODA Alliance from Assistant Deputy Minister Ann Hoy included this:"1,746 compliance activities were conducted in 2017. These activities included Phase 1 and Phase 2 audits (described in the ACER), as well as enforcement activities conducted by an inspector."Over the past two and a half years, the Government has referred to some enforcement blitzes, focuses on specific sectors. However, these do not change the fact that what was announced on June 3, 2015 has in fact not materialized, as far as we can discover.5. Troubling Levels of AODA Violations among the Small Number of Organizations that the Wynne Government Examined More CloselyThe Government's 2015, 2016 and 2017 AODA enforcement reports are written in a way that can create the positive impression that of the small number of organizations that the Government examined more closely, the Government found a high level of AODA compliance. However, a slightly closer look shows quite the opposite.The Government's 2015 AODA enforcement report states:"The Directorate issued compliance plans to 31% of the 324 organizations selected for audit. A compliance plan lays out the steps an organization must take to come into compliance."The Government's 2016 AODA enforcement report states:"We issued compliance plans to 45% (164) of the 361 organizations selected for Phase 2 audit in 2016."The Wynne Government's 2017 Accessibility Compliance and Enforcement Report includes further troubling information on known levels of AODA violations: "In 2016, a selection of small organizations from the business/non-profit sector was audited on three foundational requirements. Their rates of compliance were:?develop accessibility policies: 64%?provide accessibility training: 63%?establish a method to receive and respond to public feedback on accessibility: 92%In 2016, organizations from the designated public sector were audited on the foundational requirement to develop a multi-year accessibility plan. Their rate of compliance was 66%.In 2017, a selection of large organizations from the business/non-profit sector was audited on three foundational requirements. Their rates of compliance were:?provide accessibility training: 63%?establish a method to receive and respond to public feedback on accessibility: 87%?develop a multi-year accessibility plan: 67%In 2017, organizations from the designated public sector were audited on the foundational requirement to develop accessibility policies. This marked the first year in which organizations from this sector were required to have accessibility policies in place that address each of the accessibility standards. In many cases, organizations audited on this requirement had policies in place that needed to be updated to include the requirements of standards that had only recently taken effect, which resulted in a 40% compliance rate overall."6. Only One On-Site AODA Inspection Since the AODA Was Enacted in 2005?We have been asking the Ontario Government over and over about its efforts to inspect obligated organizations on-site. If the Government does not go to the site of an obligated organization, it won't be able to get a good picture of how accessible that organization is to customers and employees with disabilities. To simply audit an obligated organization's paper trail or record-keeping on accessibility falls far short of effective enforcement.As far as we can tell from the information the Government has released to us, we only know of one on-site AODA inspection taking place. In that instance, it was the Ontario Government inspecting itself in 2015!Among the documents which the Ontario Government was forced to disclose to AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky as a result of his June 4, 2015 Freedom of Information application was a December 22, 2014 memo from the deputy minister responsible for the AODA's enforcement to the deputy minister responsible for the operations of the Ontario Public service. In it, one deputy lets another deputy minister that they are about to be inspected. That December 22, 2014 memo from Giles Gherson, Deputy Minister of Economic Development to Wendy Tilford, Deputy Minister of Government and Consumer Services, included:"I am writing to let you know that the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario (the Directorate) intends to conduct a site visit on the Ontario Public Service in the Greater Toronto Area.As you know, the Directorate oversees compliance with the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, 2005 (the Act), and has developed a compliance assurance framework to fulfill this mandate. The framework's progressive approach enables the Directorate to confirm an organization's compliance through the filing of accessibility compliance reports, audits and site visits.Site visits represent an opportunity to: Provide hands-on, in-person assistance, while helping the Directorate ensure that organizations are complying with their accessibility obligations.2. Discuss and review any questions organizations may have with respect to accessibility requirements and how they relate to their business.In line with a progressive approach to overseeing compliance and implementing accessibility requirements, the Directorate will be conducting the first site visit on the Ontario Public Service.This is consistent with past practice and will provide an opportunity to show that the government is a committed champion of accessibility in Ontario.During the site visit, compliance staff from the Directorate will conduct a facility tour, ask to see documentation that is required under the Act, and interview a representative from the selected location. Staff may also, at their discretion, choose to interview employees.The site visit will help to verify the government's compliance with the Act and will be conducted under Section 19 of the Act.The Directorate will be contacting the Diversity Office to notify them of the selected location and date for the site visit, and to finalize the logistics of the visit itself. At that time, the Directorate will be able to answer any questions that the Diversity Office may have."Assistant Deputy Minister Ann Hoy's somewhat non-specific March 7, 2018 letter to the AODA Alliance seems in effect to imply that no on-site inspections have occurred in 2016 or 2017, and that the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario hopes to be able to do some (not indicating how many) in 2018. Almost two thirds into the AODA's 20 year event horizon, the chief law enforcement officials are still figuring out how to do an on-site inspection, it seems. Assistant Deputy Minister Hoy's March 7, 2018 letter to the AODA Alliance includes:"Pertaining to your request for updates regarding AODA-related site visits, I can provide that in 2015-16 the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario continued to develop its inspections framework by designing and carrying out an on-site inspections pilot, further testing its processes and protocols.In 2017, the directorate applied the lessons learned from the inspections pilot and continued to seek additional resources that would allow it to conduct further on-site inspections. In 2018, we look forward to having the capacity to conduct on-site inspections among non-compliant organizations."7. A Minuscule Number of AODA Inspectors and Directors for All of Ontario.Ever since the AODA became enforceable, the Government has had a tiny number of directors and inspectors appointed with enforcement powers under that legislation. As of the 2017 fall, the Wynne Government had only 2 inspectors and 3 directors appointed under the AODA to deploy AODA enforcement powers. The Minister's July 20, 2017 letter to the AODA Alliance states:"Regarding directors and inspectors working within the Government of Ontario, there are currently three directors and two inspectors appointed under the AODA. Further to that, no activities are taking place regarding recruitment or appointment for these positions at this time."As of March 7, 2018, this number had increased by one, so that there are now three directors and three inspectors for the entire province. In sharp contrast, the State of Israel has 12 inspectors, which do on-site inspections, not just audits of an organization's files or paper trail on accessibility. In other words, Israel has twice the inspection force that Ontario does, for a country that is far smaller and has far fewer people. Moreover, Israel's inspectors go into the field and inspect organizations themselves, not just their paper trail or their files on accessibility. In sharp contrast, the Wynne Government's approach to AODA enforcement has largely if not entirely been, at most, to audit an organization's documentary paper trail on accessibility, but not to conduct an on-site audit or inspection of the organization's measures in place to ensure accessibility to customers and employees with disabilities. This makes a big difference. An organization in Ontario can readily fill a file with great documents saying great things on accessibility, without needing to ever actually do much if anything to be accessible to customers and employees with disabilities.For some seven years, the AODA Alliance has urged the Ontario Government to give AODA inspection powers to investigators, inspectors and other officials authorized under other Ontario laws. It costs little if anything to simply add this mandate to the wide range of other enforcement officials that the Ontario Government already deploys around Ontario.In the 2014 election, Premier Wynne promised to consider this. Despite many efforts, we have not been able to get the Government to make public detailed information on what it has tried, and how it has worked.The Government's 2015 Accessibility Compliance and Enforcement Report makes brief reference to this. It shows only very modest efforts, and little information on how it has worked or what exactly the Government is doing now, if anything, or plans to do in the future, on this front. The Government's 2015 Accessibility Compliance and Enforcement Report states:"Finally, in 2015 we: …continued our partnerships with the Ministry of Transportation and the Ministry of Labour to conduct 50 audits respectively, on a pilot project basis: oMinistry of Labour inspectors collected documentation that organizations are required to produce under the Customer Service Standard.oMinistry of Transportation’s Carrier Safety & Enforcement Branch and Regional Operations Branch similarly helped the Directorate in conducting audits among businesses that have a trucking component to their operations"That Report also states that in 2016, the Government will:"continue to work with the Ministry of Transportation to complete the compliance pilot project that began in 2015"The Government's 2016 Accessibility Compliance and Enforcement Report says nothing about doing anything further on this front. It announces no plans to do anything further in 2017.8. Government Had Funds on Hand for More AODA EnforcementIs this protracted inadequate AODA enforcement due to a lack of funds on hand for the Wynne Government to enforce the AODA? The answer remains a resounding "No!"Every Year since the AODA was Enacted in 2005 for which we have been able to obtain budget numbers from the Government, the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario has left unspent ample budgeted funds. These funds could have beefed up AODA enforcement.The most recent budget information that we obtained from the Wynne Government reveals that for over a decade, the Accessibility Directorate has left a significant amount of its annual allocated budget unspent. This means that the Wynne Government had money on hand, that it could have used for more AODA enforcement.In her September 1, 2017 email to AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky, Assistant Deputy Minister Ann Hoy said that in fiscal 2015, a total of $15,071,800 was budgeted for the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario. However, all the Accessibility Directorate spent in that year was $14,433,598 That means $638,202 was available but was not spent.The AODA Alliance earlier showed that from 2005 to 2014-2015, the Accessibility Directorate left a total of $27.5 million of its allocated budget unspent. When we add this new figure of unspent money to that earlier figure, we conclude that from 2005 to 2015-2016, the Accessibility Directorate has left a total of $28.1 million unspent of its allocated budget over those years. That could buy a lot of AODA enforcement.We also asked the Government how much it allocated to the Accessibility Directorate for the last complete fiscal year, namely 2016-2017. We were told that the Accessibility Directorate was allocated $15,071,800. However, in her September 1, 2017 email to AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky, Assistant Deputy Minister Ann Hoy declined to tell us how much the Accessibility Directorate spent in that year. She stated: "The actual results for the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario for the fiscal period 2016-17 are not available for this table as at September 1, 2017. These results will be made available upon the tabling of the 2016-17 Public Accounts with the Legislature." The Government has never given us that requested information over the intervening half year since then. It is hard to believe that as of September 2017 the Assistant Deputy Minister for the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario did not know how much her own division has spent in the previous fiscal year.9. If and When the Wynne Government Actually Takes AODA Enforcement Action, It Can Have an ImpactThe Government's efforts at taking direct enforcement actions, set out in the Government's 2015, 2016 Accessibility Compliance and Enforcement Reports, show that enforcement can have a positive impact, when the Government actually tries it. The Government reported that its enforcement interventions got those organizations that they approached to at least say that they took action to get themselves into compliance. This proves what we have said all along, and what the Government said when it enacted the AODA in 2005. When organizations know there is real and imminent enforcement, they are far more likely to comply. This reinforces the AODA Alliance's call for the Government to beef up its AODA enforcement. The more non-complying organizations that the Government addresses with real enforcement teeth, the more compliance it can produce. 10. Three Years Later, Wynne Government Has Still Not Implemented the 2014 Recommendation on Effective Public Reporting to the Public on Its AODA EnforcementOver four years ago, in late 2014, the second Government-appointed Independent Review of the AODA's implementation and enforcement, conducted by Mayo Moran, submitted its final report to the Wynne Government. It called for beefed-up AODA enforcement. Among its recommendations were the following:"A.Prepare and make public an enforcement plan.Because of the uncertainty that has existed concerning the enforcement of the AODA, it is especially important for the Government to develop and make public an enforcement plan in a timely way. If the enforcement plan has not been released by the time this Report is published, I urge the Government to release it immediately. I emphasize that the credibility of the AODA regime at this juncture depends to a significant extent on confidence in the enforcement plan. Timeliness and public release of this plan are key factors in building the credibility that the AODA requires to achieve its crucial goals.B.Build transparency into the enforcement plan.Since sharing information can among other things help to enhance compliance, transparency is an increasingly significant feature of modern regulatory systems. Indeed, transparency is a common practice within the Government of Ontario itself. For example, the Ministry of Labour posts the number of employment standards inspections, investigations and prosecutions as well as lists of employers convicted, nature of offences and fines. It also identifies the top five complaints for each year. Similarly, the Ministry of Government and Consumer Services has a searchable online public record that lists businesses that have been charged and/or convicted under consumer protection legislation or that have not responded to the Ministry regarding a complaint. The Ontario Energy Board website posts annual complaints data for electricity retailers and natural gas marketers, by company (number of complaints per 1000 contracts). In this context, it is important for the AODA enforcement plan to incorporate transparency. Making the results of AODA enforcement activities known in a timely way will achieve key accessibility objectives including encouraging greater compliance as well as enabling consumers and others to direct their choices to organizations that support accessibility. I emphasize that timeliness is a key aspect of transparency. While time frames vary widely across government, some regulators post enforcement information on a quarterly basis or even more frequently. Given that enforcement was a top issue raised during the consultations for this Review, I recommend that the ADO release information on AODA enforcement actions at least every three months. This information should be posted promptly and should reflect quarterly results as well as year-to-date totals, broken down by sector and size of organization. At a minimum, it should include such measures as:?Number of notices of proposed order issued?Total amount of proposed penalties?Number of orders issued and total amount of penalties imposed?Number of appeals from orders and the outcome?Total amount of penalties including changes ordered by the appeal tribunal?Orders categorized by subject matter." The Government has left the clear majority of this recommendation unimplemented. It only makes public an Accessibility Compliance and Enforcement Report annually. This is often posted weeks or months late. Those reports don't include the totality of the information that the Mayo Moran Report recommended.Therefore, on June 4, 2015, AODA Alliance chair David Lepofsky submitted a Freedom of Information application to the Government. In it, he sought, among other things, the specific information that the final report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review had recommended. Specifically, he asked for this:"5.Please provide information on enforcement action under the AODA taken in 2014 on a quarterly basis, and as an annual total, and for the current year on a quarterly basis to date, and as an aggregated total, broken down by sector (private sector versus public sector) and size of organization, including, e.g.a) The number of organizations audited for compliance with the AODA and any accessibility standards enacted under it. b) The number of organizations that were the subject of an inspection of their premises for compliance with the AODA and any accessibility standards enacted under it, by an inspector, appointed under s. 18 of the AODA, pursuant to s. 19 of the AODA. Included within this is a request to know the number of organizations that an inspector, appointed under s. 18 of the AODA, has physically visited to discharge the powers of conducting an inspection under the AODA. c) The number of notices of proposed compliance orders issued under the AODA, also broken down by the AODA requirement with which there was a lack of compliance.d) Numbers and amounts of proposed monetary penalties under the AODA, also broken down by AODA requirement with which there was a lack of compliance.e) The number of compliance orders issued and numbers and amounts of monetary penalties imposed, each also broken down by AODA requirement with which there was a lack of compliance.f) The number of appeals to the appeal tribunal designated under the AODA, from any AODA orders, and the outcome, also broken down by AODA requirement with which there was a lack of compliance. Please also provide copies of, or links to accessible postings of all appeal tribunal decisions." The Government insisted on a huge $4,250 fee for fulfilling his overall Freedom of Information application. He had to appeal to the Information and Privacy Commission. The Government fought him every step of the way. The Information and Privacy Commission knocked that fee down by over 80%, holding that the Government had substantially overcharged David Lepofsky. Nevertheless a fee remained in place for this part of Lepofsky's request, among other things. The Wynne Government has refused to waive that fee, even though an August 6, 2017 Toronto Star editorial slammed the Government for insisting on that fee.11. Failure to Effectively Publicize the Government's Toll-Free Number for Reporting AODA ViolationsIn the 2014 election, Premier Wynne promised to establish and publicize a toll-free number for the public to report AODA violations, in connection with AODA enforcement. It took months of our advocacy to get this started. While it exists, there is no indication it has been effectively publicized. In fact, the AODA Alliance appears to have done more than the Government to publicize it. As a result of the Government's poor effort on this, the Government's 2017 Accessibility Compliance and Enforcement Report states that a meagre 203 reports have been received on that hotline. We know from our contact with the public that far more AODA infractions are being experienced.12. Conclusion: A Pressing Need for Prompt New Government Action on AODA EnforcementSince we first made this issue public in the 2013 fall, the public and media have focused again and again on the Ontario Government's having repeatedly fallen down on the job of AODA enforcement. This has led to media reports and newspaper editorials blasting the Government for its inadequate enforcement action. What Ontario needs now is real action, such as the ramped-up enforcement and serious crackdown on AODA violators that the Government promised back on June 3, 2015. We also need AODA enforcement taken out of the Government's belly and assigned to an independent arms-length public agency. The Government should not be investigating and enforcing against itself. Its efforts on enforcement should not be subject to so much political constraint. When running for leadership of the Ontario Liberal Party, Kathleen Wynne wrote the AODA Alliance on December 3, 2012, commendably pledging that as Premier, she would ensure that Ontario is on schedule for accessibility by 2025. It is clear to all, including to Ontarians with disabilities, that Ontario is behind schedule for reaching full accessibility by 2025. The lack of effective AODA enforcement has been a major contributing cause."6. Developments Since the June 2018 Ontario Election PC leader and now Premier Doug Ford's May 15, 2018 letter to the AODA Alliance, setting out his party's election pledges on accessibility, included:"This is why we're disappointed the current government has not kept its promise with respect to accessibility standards. An Ontario PC government is committed to working with the AODA Alliance to address implementation and enforcement issues when it comes to these standards."On July 17, 2018, the AODA Alliance sent Minister for Accessibility and Seniors Raymond Cho a briefing note. It included:"c) AODA Enforcement is Far Too WeakThe 2014 final report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review showed a pressing need for the AODA's enforcement to be beefed up. On April 18, 2018, the AODA Alliance made public a 5 year report that shows that the problem of ineffective AODA enforcement has persisted for a half a decade, even though the Ontario Government knew throughout that period of massive violations of the AODA. This inadequate enforcement was not due to budget restrictions. The Accessibility Directorate has had unused budget on hand in every year from 2005 to 2016, that was available to expand AODA enforcement. We have revealed time and again over the past five years that the previous Government had known throughout about rampant AODA violations among private sector organizations with at least 20 employees.In response to public criticism of the previous Government's February 2015 AODA enforcement cutback, the previous Government commendably announced on June 3, 2015 that it would double the number of AODA audits, with the gradual increase in their numbers to begin in 2016. Yet our subsequent Freedom of Information application revealed that this never materialized. More public education is not the effective solution for this ongoing problem of AODA violations. It is clear from Government records that when the Government actually deploys its enforcement powers, it can get a good rate of improved compliance by the obligated organizations at which those enforcement efforts are directed. In contrast, the Government has spent over a decade to educate obligated organizations. It told us about its conducting or funding a great number of workshops, sending obligated organizations tens of thousands of letters and reminders, and funding a great number of Enabling Change projects for this purpose. Yet massive AODA non-compliance has persisted for over half a decade. With less than six and a half years left for the Government to lead Ontario to full accessibility, there is no more time to delay ramped-up enforcement, while the Government first tries to once again effectively educate organizations on their AODA obligations and on the benefits of becoming accessible. The persisting weak AODA enforcement serves to undermine and counteract benefits of any Government efforts to inspire obligated organizations to voluntarily comply. In other areas of the law, such as public health and safety, Government does not hold off on promised effective enforcement for years, while it first tries to get obligated organizations to understand why it is good to obey the law. Put another way, the most effective way at this point to educate obligated organizations is through effective AODA enforcement."Among the priorities for the AODA that we urged in that briefing note was:"7. Substantially strengthen the weak enforcement of the AODA, e.g. by:Now at least doubling the number of obligated organizations to be audited for AODA compliance. Conducting on-site audits of actual accessibility practices, rather than the current practice of off-site paper audits of an obligated organization's records regarding AODA compliance. Ontarians need to know if obligated organizations are actually becoming accessible, not just if they produce required paper trails (which may or may not be accurate). Deputizing inspectors under other legislation to also be AODA inspectors, so that AODA compliance is included when they inspect obligated organizations under other legislation, such as inspectors under labour, health and safety or environmental legislation. The previous Government did a trial with this idea, based on our recommendation, but did not publicly disclose the results. Widely publicizing the Government's toll-free number for the public to report AODA violations, in connection with AODA enforcement. The previous Government did not, to our knowledge, make any significant effort to publicize this toll-free number. Implementing the 2014 Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review report's recommendations to make public on a quarterly basis key information on the Government's AODA enforcement.Engaging in much more visible AODA enforcement, so obligated organizations get the clear message that there are significant consequences for non-compliance."Minister for Accessibility and Seniors Cho responded to us in writing on August 15, 2018. He said nothing there specifically about AODA enforcement. We are not aware of what The Ford Government is doing now regarding AODA enforcement, or what future plans it has. The Ford Government has, to our knowledge, not announced any of the improvements to AODA enforcement that we urged.Chapter 3 Current AODA Accessibility Standards Don't Ensure Ontario Will Become Accessible to People with Disabilities by 2025 1. Introduction The accessibility standards which the Ontario Government has enacted under the AODA over the past 13.5 years have been helpful, but only to a limited extent. They do not ensure that Ontario will ever become fully accessible, much less by 2025. Moreover, work on developing accessibility standards over the past six years has been much slower than it was during the AODA's first five years. No new accessibility standard has been enacted since the end of 2012, some six years ago. Only one accessibility standard has been revised in the past six years, the 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard. Those revisions instituted improvements that were marginal at best, and counterproductive in part, as this chapter explains. The 2014 Mayo Moran Report identified serious problems with the current accessibility standards. The former Ontario Government did not fix those problems. They persist to this day.2. Recommended Findings We recommend that this AODA Independent Review make the following findings:* The current AODA accessibility standards will not ensure that Ontario becomes accessible to people with disabilities by 2025, even in the specific areas they regulate, e.g. customer service, employment, transportation, or information and communication. The 2014 final report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review correctly identified significant deficiencies with these accessibility standards. In the intervening years, the former Ontario Government did not rectify those deficiencies.* The Government's mandatory 5-year review of the 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard did not rectify most of the significant deficiencies with that accessibility standard. In one way, it made that weak accessibility standard even weaker.* The Government's mandatory 5 year- review of the 2011 Transportation Accessibility Standard resulted in weak recommendations to the Government from the Transportation Standards Development committee. Even if those recommendations were all implemented, these would not materially or substantially improve that accessibility standard.* Similarly, the 2018 draft recommendations from the Employment Standards Development Committee on how to improve the very limited Employment Accessibility Standard would not significantly improve that accessibility standard.3. Recommendations Regarding Deficiencies in Current AODA Accessibility StandardsWe urge this Independent Review to recommend as follows:The Ontario Government should substantially strengthen all the existing accessibility standards.Any accessibility standards enacted under the AODA should, at least, measure up to the accessibility standards and accommodation and undue hardship requirements of the Ontario Human Rights Code. Where any existing standard falls below that standard, or provides defences to obligated organizations that are broader than those under the Human Rights Code, the AODA accessibility standard should be amended as part of any review of that accessibility standard, to bring it in line with the Human Rights Code.The Ontario Government should direct each Standards Development Committee that is now developing recommendations for a new accessibility standard or that is reviewing an existing standard, or that is appointed in the future, to make recommendations on accessibility that live up to the Ontario Human Rights Code. To assist with this, the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario should give each Standards Development Committee up-to-date information on relevant rulings by the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario and courts, and should centrally involve the Ontario Human Rights Code in each Standards Development Committee on an ongoing basis, including appointing a representative of the Ontario Human Rights Commission as an ex officio non-voting member of each Standards Development Committee.When any Standards Development Committee is conducting a review of an existing AODA accessibility standard, that Committee should be advised that its mandate is not simply to decide if the existing accessibility standard is working "as intended". Rather, it should investigate whether the accessibility standard will ensure that accessibility in the area that the standard addresses will be achieved by 2025. If it does not, then the Committee should recommend measures needed to ensure that accessibility in that area will be achieved by 2025.The Ontario Government should appoint a Standards Development Committee to review the sufficiency of the general provisions in the Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation, since no Standards Development Committee appears to be reviewing them. The Ontario Government should now launch the next review of the Customer Service Accessibility Standard, since that standard remains so weak, and since the last review of that accessibility standard failed to significantly improve it. As part of that review, that accessibility standard should be revised to remove the barrier it impermissibly creates. That review should be mandated to consider, among other things, the low-cost revisions that the AODA Alliance and ARCH Disability Law Centre recommended to the Ontario Government in their joint March 15, 2016 brief.The Ontario Government should now convene a summit with leaders from the disability community and the transportation sector to identify substantially stronger reforms to the 2011 Transportation Accessibility Standard than those which the Transportation Standards Development committee had recommended. The Ontario Government should ask the Employment Standards Development Committee to expand its efforts, and to develop recommendations on measures to remove and prevent specific workplace disability barriers.Note: See also the recommendations in Chapter 4.4. What We Told the 2014 Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review Part 3 of our 2014 brief to Mayo Moran remains accurate as a description of the situation over four years later, nearing the end of 2018. The AODA Alliance there states this, to summarize our 2014 conclusions in this area:" Section 7 of the AODA requires the Government to create and implement "all accessibility standards necessary to achieving the purposes of this Act." It was wise in 2005-2006 for the Government to choose the first five accessibility standards to address barriers in customer service, transportation, employment, information and communication and the built environment. However, the accessibility standards enacted to date in these areas, while helpful, are grossly insufficient to effectively ensure that all recurring barriers in those fields are removed and prevented. At various points, their requirements are too weak. They mostly if not totally only deal with preventing new barriers, but not removing existing barriers. They leave out important recurring barriers. At various points, they create exceptions and defences that are broader than the undue hardship defence under human rights legislation. Their time lines are often too long. Taken together, they will not ensure that Ontario ever becomes fully accessible, even in the areas they regulate."Part 3 of our 2014 brief also offered these general reflections:"The fact that accessibility standards so often do not measure up to the requirements of the Human Rights Code is a huge concern. We repeatedly urged the Government before and after the AODA was enacted to ensure that accessibility standards enacted under it be at least as strong as the Human Rights Code's accessibility requirements. Particularly as the IASR was being developed, we often raised concerns that the draft IASR embodied real human rights concerns. We were not alone. The Ontario Human Rights Commission also publicly expressed to the Government its serious human rights concerns. It did so in writing fully four times in four years leading up to the June 3, 2011 enactment of the initial IASR to address barriers in transportation, employment and information and communication. First, on August 30, 2007, the Human Rights Commission released a damning critique of the initial proposed Transportation Accessibility Standard. That proposed accessibility standard had been put forward in the 2007 summer by the Transportation Standards Development Committee. The Human Rights Commission’s August 30, 2007 news release bore the headline: “Commission concerned that Proposed Transportation Accessibility Standards are a setback for Ontarians with Disabilities.” … Second, in the fall of 2010, the Human Rights Commission slammed a summary of the proposed integrated accessibility standard that the Government made public on September 2, 2010. … Third, in February 2011, the Human Rights Commission wrote to all municipal public transit authorities. It warned them that they could face human rights complaints if they rely on the Government's February 1, 2011 draft IASR to purchase inaccessible buses over the next few months. … Fourth, on March 18, 2011, the Ontario Human Rights Commission made a public submission to the Government that vigorously argued that the draft final IASR, which the Government posted for public comment on February 1, 2011, raised significant human rights concerns. The Government did not address many if not most of these when it finalized the IASR. We recommend to this Independent Review a careful read of the Human Rights Commission's entire March 18, 2011 submission on the February 1, 2011 draft IASR. The Human Rights Commission is Ontario's flagship human rights agency, which is supposed to provide leading advocacy and advice to the Government and the public on human rights issues. That the Government chose to largely ignore its advice set Ontario further behind schedule for full accessibility by 2025. … The Human Rights Commission summarized its human rights concerns:"Many concerns remain with standards that could result in contraventions of the Ontario Human Rights Code (Code):?The complete exemption of smaller organizations, as well as organizations with no employees, from many technical requirements, such as accessible websites?The exemption of volunteers from employment standards?The exemption of inaccessible transit vehicles that exist in a fleet on July 1, 2011?Minimal “upon request” requirements, while consistent with the Code, add nothing new in terms of advancing standards. When deferred by schedule, they actually take away from the Code’s duty to accommodate unless it would cause undue hardship?“Where not practicable” exemptions appear throughout. These could lead to contraventions of the Code’s duty to accommodate unless it would cause undue hardshipThe AODA Alliance is raising similar concerns. The OHRC generally supports the AODA Alliance’s submission dated March 11, 2011, including other matters not raised in the OHRC’s submission."A similarly important overarching concern has been the Government's willingness to carve important areas out of the AODA, through the back door. The effect of this is to potentially remove them from AODA oversight and enforcement.First, as is addressed further later in this brief, the Government has taken built environment accessibility issues within buildings that the Ontario Building Code covers, and incorporated them into amendments to the Ontario Building Code, without also incorporating them into an AODA accessibility standard. This flies in the face of the Government's repeated promises to enact a Built Environment Accessibility Standard. A Built Environment Accessibility Standard is by definition, an accessibility standard enacted under the AODA.Second, the Government opted to include several accessibility requirements regarding public transit vehicles in regulations under the mandate of the Ministry of Transportation, carving them out of the IASR's accessible transportation provisions. In each case, we lose the statutory guarantees of AODA reviews of these accessibility requirements every five years under the AODA. The Government thereby ducks its commitment that the body that makes or reviews accessibility standards will have 50% representation from the disability community. We also lose the AODA public consultation requirements associated with those reviews, and the avenue of resort to AODA enforcement. We were never consulted on nor agreed with this Government strategy. If we had been consulted we would have objected to any contracting or carving out of any part of the AODA's mandate."5. What the 2014 report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review Found Mayo Moran's excellent findings regarding the accessibility standards already enacted remain fully relevant today. There is no need for this Third AODA Independent Review to revisit them. Those findings appear to largely be based on and reflect the input from the AODA Alliance. The Ontario Government fixed none of the existing accessibility standards to address concerns that Mayo Moran found. The former Ontario Government enacted no new accessibility standards since the final report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review. As shown later in this chapter, the only changes that the former Ontario Government made to the 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard did not rectify its serious problems. In one respect, those changes made things worse. The April 29, 2015 AODA Alliance Update summarized Mayo Moran's findings as follows:"6.Current AODA Accessibility Standards are Insufficient to Ensure that Ontario Reaches Full Accessibility by 2025The Report documented in excellent detail a wide range of serious problems with AODA accessibility standards enacted to date. It echoes the critique of these standards that we submitted to the Moran Review, and that we have raised time and again with the Government. We have shown that these accessibility standards, even if fully obeyed, won't ensure full accessibility by 2025. For them, existing accessibility standards need to be strengthened to meet our accessibility needs. The Report summarized: "More generally, many participants believed that timelines in the standards are too long, several requirements are weak, little is being done to remove existing barriers, and exemptions and exceptions are too broad." The Report gave diverse examples from different corners of the disability community. For example, sweeping exemptions from a wide range of AODA duties are granted based on an obligated organization's number of employees. The Report stated: "It was suggested that one reason the AODA has not lived up to its potential is the number of organizations that are exempt from such obligations."The Report also documents that the accessibility standards enacted to date were widely criticized for failing to deal much, if at all, with retrofits to address existing barriers, in buildings not then under renovation. The Report also commendably identified that there is a pressing need to fill the gap caused because existing accessibility standards not requiring accessibility in extra-nets, the point beyond a log in on an organization's website.As yet another example, the Report said that obligated organizations voice strong concern that AODA accessibility standards were not harmonized with the Ontario Human Rights Code, to let obligated organizations be comfortable that complying with an AODA accessibility standard fulfilled their duties under the Human Rights Code. We have pressed the Government for years without success to ensure that accessibility standards meet the accessibility required by the Human Rights Code. The Government has to date not listened to us on that issue. The Report shows the harm that has resulted from the Government's failure to listen to us, when it noted:"Municipal stakeholders urged the Government to search for ways to harmonize AODA standards with the Code. Otherwise, obligated organizations in compliance with the AODA remain vulnerable to legal challenges under the Code. The Review heard of confusion and anger on the part of businesses that find that complying with one law does not protect them against complaints under another. In particular, there seems to be an expectation that complying with the AODA satisfies one's accessibility obligations under the Human Rights Code when in fact it does not. The resulting confusion was frequently commented upon as a matter that should be addressed in order to reduce complexity for obligated organizations." Neither we, nor as we read it, the Moran Report suggest that an obligated organization should get a free pass under the Human Rights Code just because it complies with an AODA accessibility standard. The Report voiced serious concerns that accessibility standards enacted to date are too vague, confusing and unclear. We here quote the key findings in the final report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review on this topic, which also include the following:* "One of the most common pieces of feedback received by the Review focused on the difficulty of interpreting the meaning of the standards under the AODA. Both the public and private sectors said they had problems understanding their obligations because the standards are often not clear enough or specific enough about what is required. Public sector organizations, while doing their best to comply, are often uncertain about what exactly compliance with the standards requires. The fact that the standards have been framed very generally means that it is hard to know when they have been met. For example, the standards do not offer reference points for several general obligations, such as what it means to provide accessible formats or incorporate accessibility features into procurement. This leaves organizations to depend on guesswork or expensive consultants and lawyers to determine what compliance entails.The harmonization of four standards into one regulation, the Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation (IASR), received mixed reviews. Some municipal stakeholders thought the effort was a success, but other municipalities and some business groups felt the requirements - with numerous compliance dates and different classes of organization - were extremely complex and difficult to follow. Despite this, there was a strong feeling in both the public and private sectors that integration should be completed by folding the Customer Service standard into the IASR. Both the public and private sectors said they had problems understanding their obligations because the standards are often not clear enough or specific enough about what is required.The Review was also told that the most confusing standards of all are those concerning accessible websites - even lawyers are said to have trouble with them. For example, the interpretation of where meeting a requirement is "not practicable" should be clarified - specifically concerning the need to convert all documents to accessible formats when a website is refreshed. Advice is also needed on what constitutes a "significant refresh" of a website. As well, it was suggested that the exclusion of intranets (with the exception of the government intranet) seems inconsistent with the Employment Standard that requires accessible formats and communication supports for employees.Similar difficulties were reported with a number of elements of the transportation standards. A case in point is the provision on "origin to destination services", which permits specialized transportation providers to offer an overall package of services to people with disabilities and which may include service on accessible conventional services. Some disability stakeholders consider this provision obscure, while others believe it creates an "escape hatch" that allows transit operators to deliver services as they wish. As well, it was suggested to the Review that requirements for accessible signage on transit vehicles should be more detailed so each provider does not have to figure them out on its own. And the status of not-for-profit groups providing transportation is considered unclear, a real concern in small communities. Municipalities also raised numerous issues about the Design of Public Spaces (DoPS) standards. The most frequently cited issues are as follows:?The compliance dates for projects - based on dates contracted, substantial completion dates and type and size of organization - are confusing; it was suggested that instead compliance should be tied to specific milestones in the development process.?A series of technical questions have been asked about the design and placement of accessible pedestrian signals at street crossings.?There appear to be conflicts between the DoPS standards and the recent Building Code amendments regarding the width of sidewalks, as well as between AODA standards and the Highway Traffic Act regulations on accessible parking.Municipalities also want the province to clarify who is responsible for tracking AODA-required training by third-party vendors. On the surface, the requirement to ensure that training is provided to all persons who provide goods, services or facilities on behalf of an organization seems to oblige municipalities to track the training activities of their contractors. If so, the municipalities suggested that this would be an unsustainable administrative burden given that one medium-size municipality, for instance, has over 10,000 contractors in a given year."* "However, the Review also heard considerable discussion about the content of the standards. In particular, members of the disability community emphasized that the five standards in place so far – even if complied with to the letter – will not get us to full accessibility by 2025, or in fact ever. They identified two problems. First, the current standards have serious gaps and deficiencies. And second, important aspects of everyday life fall entirely outside the scope of the current requirements. At the same time, obligated organizations also provided valuable feedback about the content of the current standards and some of the challenges that they pose. Below, I summarize the central themes of the feedback on these issues, including both suggestions about where there may be gaps in the existing standards as well as recommendations for additional standards. Proposed Revisions to Current StandardsThe Review heard many comments that suggested revisions to existing standards. Various disability groups advocated specific changes to the standards to better reflect the needs of their members and clients. More generally, many participants believed that timelines in the standards are too long, several requirements are weak, little is being done to remove existing barriers, and exemptions and exceptions are too broad. One disability stakeholder considered the deficiencies in the IASR so serious that the mandatory review of the Transportation, Employment and Information and Communications standards should begin in 2015 instead of 2016 as currently planned. Many obligated organizations in both the public and private sectors had other concerns, emphasizing that the overall AODA regime is too complex and should be simplified as much as possible.Members of the disability community emphasized that the five standards in place so far – even if complied with to the letter – will not get us to full accessibility by 2025, or in fact ever.IMPACT ON SPECIFIC DISABILITIESThe Review was told by some participants that they do not believe that the AODA has been effective in addressing non-visible disabilities, such as mental illness, autism, learning disabilities, traumatic brain injuries and others. They suggested that more extensive training requirements to recognize and respond to the needs of people with these disabilities were essential.The mental health community feels strongly that mental health and other non-visible disabilities should be better integrated into the content of standards. For example, it was suggested that the Employment standard should provide clear guidelines for accommodating employees with mental health disabilities.Groups supporting people who are deaf or have hearing loss pointed out that the vagueness about support persons leaves doubt about an organization’s responsibility to provide interpreters or other communication facilitators. Individuals with speech and language disabilities not caused by hearing loss believe standards should more fully outline requirements for communications assistance, especially in essential services.People with environmental sensitivities and multi-chemical sensitivities want to see these conditions explicitly included in the definition of disability. Participants with episodic or fluctuating disabilities likewise urged a direct reference to their type of disability in the definition. Representatives of people with bowel disorders called for a network of open, accessible public toilets to be established through the Customer Service, Transportation and Design of Public Spaces standards.The Review was told that the AODA has not been effective in addressing non-visible disabilities.EXEMPTIONS AND EXCEPTIONSThe existing regulations set different requirements based on the size of the organization. Where the line should be drawn between small and large businesses was a major source of contention in the feedback received by this Review. In fact, some felt it was a mistake to create any exemptions on the basis of the number of employees, as very small organizations can have huge revenue streams.At present, there are many exemptions under the IASR for organizations with under 50 employees. For example, they are exempt from requirements to prepare multi-year accessibility plans, make their websites accessible, develop a written process for employment accommodation, provide accessible exterior paths of travel, prepare written accessibility policies and file compliance reports, among other obligations. It was suggested that one reason the AODA has not lived up to its potential is the number of organizations that are exempt from such obligations.The Customer Service standard currently sets the threshold for certain requirements at 20 employees rather than 50. Currently, organizations with under 20 employees are exempt from requirements to prepare documents on their accessibility policies – including policies on service animals and support persons and the handling of service disruptions – and to produce copies on request, as well as from obligations to document training policies, keep training records and file accessibility reports. In its review of the Customer Service standard – which coincided with this Review – ASAC proposed to raise that threshold to 50 employees instead of 20 to align with the IASR, and several disability groups voiced their concerns about this proposal to this Review. In addition to the exemptions based on organizational size, the Review also received some feedback on several other provisions that were questioned including the following:?Exemption of owner-operated sole proprietorships from the entire IASR as they have no employees.?Exclusion of the entire private sector from the duty to incorporate accessibility criteria and features when acquiring goods, service and facilities.?Exclusion of products and product labels from the Information and Communications standard. ?Exclusion of unconvertible information from accessible format requirements, which some described as a loophole that should be closed. ?Exemptions for all organizations except the provincial Government from the website provisions on live captioning and pre-recorded audio descriptions.As well, disability stakeholders took issue with various exceptions that are less exacting than undue hardship under the Human Rights Code. This issue will be addressed later in the section on the AODA’s Relationship with Other Legislation.GAPS IN STANDARDSBeyond exemptions and the impact on certain disability groups, participants highlighted a host of gaps in existing standards and put forward numerous suggestions to close rmation and CommunicationsOne of the gaps identified that was among the most serious sources of concern was the exclusion of extranets from the website standards. An extranet is a controlled extension of an organization’s internal network that allows access to outside users over the internet. It was pointed out that the standards development committee expected everything behind the log-in to be covered. The fact that this was not done is seen as a step backward. Unless Ontario keeps standards in line with evolving information technology, we risk reaching 2025 and realizing we have made Ontario accessible, but for the citizens of 2005. The importance of keeping the Information and Communications standards in line with evolving international standards was also stressed. Unless a mechanism is created to do this, the Review was told, we risk reaching 2025 and realizing we have made Ontario accessible, but for the citizens of 2005.Some participants raised concerns about the provision of accessible formats for various purposes “on request”. They proposed that all educational resources should be accessible, with no need for a request. On the other hand, some post-secondary stakeholders pointed out that this might not be a wise use of resources as there may turn out to be no demand for many of the materials.TransportationMany transit stakeholders trace problems with the Transportation standards back to the standards development process itself. The Review was told that this became almost a negotiation between the sector and the disability community rather than an effort to identify barriers based on evidence. Moreover, transportation was considered in isolation, resulting in very detailed requirements rather than setting higher-level goals as the other standards do. The Review heard that this process led to problems with the content of the standard.As an example of a non-evidence-based standard and the problems thereby created, the Review was referred to the provision on free travel for support persons. The standard leaves it up to the transit system – in practice, often the driver – to determine if a support person is needed. As a result, different transit systems in the Greater Toronto Area have different eligibility criteria, undermining the goal of seamless integrated travel across the GTA and the province. This also places a burden on transit operators. They strongly urged the Government to define criteria for support persons and apply them province-wide.Many transit stakeholders trace problems with the Transportation standards back to the standards development process itself.Capacity issues in specialized transit were frequently raised by people with disabilities. The standard requires service providers to estimate demand and develop steps to reduce wait times, but it does not actually guarantee that any action will be taken. People with disabilities from rural areas pointed out that specialized transportation there often takes the form of taxicabs and urged that all taxis should be accessible by 2025. Customer ServiceSome disability stakeholders feel the Customer Service Standard is not specific enough to be effective. It explicitly addresses only a few named barriers, like those concerning service animals and support persons. Otherwise accessibility largely depends on the hard-to-enforce criterion of “reasonable efforts” to follow such principles such as dignity, integration and equal opportunity.Concerns were expressed that the ASAC proposal – during the standard review – to require that a service animal be trained to assist a person with a disability would exclude emotional support animals, which may have no training or certification. It was pointed out that this would be detrimental to those with mental health issues and also inconsistent with the Human Rights Code. The Review also heard that the existing standard creates a new barrier by allowing service providers to require a customer with a disability to bring a support person where the health and safety of the person with a disability or others is at risk. As well, there were calls to remove provisions that allow support persons to be charged a fee. Transit operators, for example, contended that support persons should have free access to any service that requires an admission charge, not just transit. With the decline of full-service gas stations, the Review also heard that drivers with disabilities are finding it hard to get gas. A presenter in Toronto proposed a system known as “fuel call” in which a gas station posts a wheelchair symbol on its signs when an attendant is available, and the attendant responds when a button near the pump is pushed.EmploymentSeveral participants argued that the Employment Standard in the IASR should be extended to cover volunteers and other unpaid workers. Mental health patients often perform unpaid work as a pathway to employment and the Ontario Human Rights Commission has made it clear that the Human Rights Code applies to work-like contexts.Business and disability stakeholders both observed that the standards address the stages in the employment lifecycle but leave out measures to actually promote employment. Disability groups proposed creation of an accessibility employment centre under the standard. This would develop a database on the skills and qualifications of people with disabilities – helping them to find jobs and employers to find candidates. A business group tabled a similar proposal for an employment “hub” that would link multiple employers with people with disabilities seeking work. More generally, a number of participants noted the importance of increasing the employment of persons with disabilities as a key element in ensuring full inclusion.Business and disability stakeholders both observed that the standards address the stages in the employment lifecycle but leave out measures to actually promote employment. Built EnvironmentAs mentioned above, the current Built Environment Standards do not cover retrofits to remove existing barriers. Many disability stakeholders argued that this must change. They pointed out that barriers in buildings mean people with disabilities cannot use them, whether to shop, study, work, play or obtain services from health care to driver’s licences. During the Review, considerable discussion of retrofits arose in different sectors. Many concerns were raised about the built environment in health care, such as lack of elevators to doctors’ offices and inaccessible hospital washrooms. A strong view was expressed that all health care facilities in particular should be physically accessible to people with disabilities. The importance of access to buildings was also underlined in the education sector. In the housing sector, a suggestion was made for retrofits of all apartment suites to install power door openers.Generally speaking, the Review heard that if accessibility standards were expanded to require building retrofits, it would be necessary to create exemptions in cases of undue hardship. For example, some people with disabilities who contended that the AODA should require retrofits of ramps and door openers felt this should apply only where it can be done without undue hardship. Other disability stakeholders observed that such exemptions would be inconsistent with the usual approach under the Building Code, which is to impose accessibility requirements without providing for exceptions if the cost would result in undue hardship. It was argued that this usual practice should be overlooked if it stands in the way of retrofits to improve accessibility.Some municipalities expressed concerns about enforcement of the Design of Public Spaces (DoPS) Standard. They pointed out that there is no mechanism for verifying that a project has met DoPS requirements, or that exemptions are justified, prior to construction. The building permit process will ensure compliance with the recent Building Code amendments, but does not cover the DoPS standards. Hence municipalities could be put in the position of approving site plans or building permits that contravene the AODA regulations. Problems will likely not come to light until complaints are made after construction, when it will be more costly or impossible to fix them.Proposed solutions include utilizing the building permit process or the site plan control process to review projects and consider exemption requests, or having a provincial body like the ADO do this. It was pointed out that if existing municipal processes are used, provincial funding would be required to cover the additional costs.Barriers in buildings mean people with disabilities cannot use them. The Review also heard a number of other comments with regard to accessibility in the Built Environment. With regard to on-street parking, disability stakeholders observed that the only obligation is for consultation on the number, location and design of parking spaces. They felt that specific requirements should be spelled out so people with disabilities do not have to lobby on this issue in every community. One Toronto participant also noted that many elevators cannot handle the weight of modern wheelchairs, and suggested adjusting the Building Code to include a minimum capacity for public lifts of 800 pounds.People with environmental and multi-chemical sensitivities pointed out that the Built Environment Standard as proposed by the standards development committee included air quality and ventilation provisions. They were extremely disappointed to find that these requirements did not appear in the final regulations."* "RESIDENTIAL HOUSINGOne of the biggest issues for people with disabilities is finding a place to live, the Review was told. Yet the AODA barely touches on this. Visitability standards were urged for all new home construction. This refers to basic accessibility, not full universal design, and includes such features as an open plan, wider hallways and low-resistance flooring, which many new homes already offer – along with a zero-step entrance. The Review was told that visitability standards have the potential to gradually increase the inventory of accessible homes and are seen as a crucial response to the trend towards aging at home. Other participants called for accessibility features to be included when private homes undergo extensive renovations. In addition, proposals were made to require a certain portion of new homes and of new social housing units to be accessible. ELECTIONSWhile some participants called for an elections standard under the AODA, the wider view was that accessible elections should be achieved through amendments to the existing provincial and municipal election laws. Disability stakeholders called on the Government to appoint an independent person to conduct a review of barriers impeding voters and candidates with disabilities. The idea was that this review could propose reforms to ensure that voters would be able to independently mark their own ballot in private and verify their choice – including telephone and internet voting. The review would also serve as a means to guarantee full physical accessibility to all polling stations and all-candidates debates." * "Several participants stressed that current AODA standards do little to remove existing barriers, though the AODA calls for this, leading people with disabilities to seek facility retrofits in particular through the Human Rights Tribunal. A business group suggested removing disputes over retrofits from the realm of human rights and coming up with an objective standard for the accessibility of buildings to be applied province-wide.The Review was told that a number of standards have weak or vague requirements that are out of step with the Human Rights Code. Among the examples cited were:?Complete exemption of smaller organizations from many technical requirements, such as accessible websites.?Exemption of volunteers from the Employment Standard.?“Where not practicable” exemptions such as those concerning websites, accessibility in procurement, or external paths of travel.?Exemption of transit vehicles in a fleet as of July 1, 2011.Disability stakeholders contend that standards that fall short of the undue hardship requirements of the Code should be amended through the Accessibility Standards Advisory Council review process. Another suggestion was to involve the Ontario Human Rights Commission more extensively in the process of standards development."6. The Mandatory 5-Year Reviews to Date of Existing Accessibility Standards Have Failed to Lead to These Standards Being Effectively Strengtheneda) The Government's Duty to Conduct 5-Year Reviews of Each AODA Accessibility StandardAfter the Ontario Government enacts an AODA accessibility standard, the AODA includes an important way for the Government to ensure that accessibility standards are strong enough to ensure that they bring Ontario to full accessibility by 2025. No more than five years after an accessibility standard is enacted, the AODA requires the Ontario Government to appoint a Standards Development Committee to review it. This mandatory review provides an opportunity to identify, with public input, where the standard has fallen short, and where it needs to be strengthened. Section 9(9) of the AODA provides:" (9) Within five years after an accessibility standard is adopted by regulation or at such earlier time as the Minister may specify, the standards development committee responsible for the industry, sector of the economy or class of persons or organizations to which the standard applies shall,re-examine the long-term accessibility objectives determined under subsection (2);if required, revise the measures, policies, practices and requirements to be implemented on or before January 1, 2025 and the time-frame for their implementation;develop another proposed accessibility standard containing such additions or modifications to the existing accessibility standard as the standards development committee deems advisable and submit it to the Minister for the purposes of making the proposed standard public and receiving comments in accordance with section 10; and make such changes it considers advisable to the proposed accessibility standard developed under clause (c) based on the comments received under section 10 and provide the Minister with the subsequent proposed accessibility standard."As the following discussion shows, this review process has failed to fix or even to recommend the fixing of the serious problems with the existing AODA accessibility standards. In Chapter 5 of this brief, we identify problems with the standards development process, and make recommendations on how it can be strengthened. We here identify the results to date of these five-year reviews. We here show that the substantive results of these reviews fall well short of what people with disabilities need.b) 2013-2016 Mandatory Review of the 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard The 2013-2016 mandatory review of the 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard has left that standard in place as a very weak standard. In some ways, this review led to it being weakened even further.Part 3 of the 2014 AODA Alliance brief to Mayo Moran shows the serious deficiencies with the 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard, the first accessibility standard that was enacted under the AODA. The five-year review of that accessibility standard, which the former Ontario Government assigned to the Accessibility Standards Advisory Council (ASAC) led only to very minor changes. These changes were insufficient to fix the major deficiencies with the 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard, or to strengthen it. As further explained below, it did result in that standard being weakened in a troubling way, contrary to former Premier Wynne's December 3, 2012 promise never to weaken any provisions in or under the AODA. The AODA's five-year review of accessibility standards was never meant to lead to the further weakening of an already-weak accessibility standard.Part 3 of the 2014 AODA Alliance brief to Mayo Moran spells out in detail why we concluded that the 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard is so weak. As well, on March 3, 2014, ASAC made public its draft recommendations for revisions to that standard. After that, the AODA Alliance's April 4, 2014 brief to ASAC showed why the 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard was so weak, what revisions were needed to correct this, and why the draft ASAC recommendations fell far short of what people with disabilities need. Our April 4, 2014 brief to ASAC offered this summary:"In summary, the Customer Service Accessibility Standard is far too weak. It needs to be substantially strengthened. At present, even if fully complied with, it will not ensure that customer service in Ontario becomes fully accessible by 2025, or indeed, ever. This is because:It only covers providers of goods and services, not facilities.It lacks needed clarity and specificity. It doesn’t include the key requirements of an AODA accessibility standard. This is because it doesn’t identify the barriers that need to be removed and/or prevented, and doesn’t set out time lines for completing these tasks. It largely delegates to service providers far too much unaccountable and unreviewable discretion to choose what barriers to remove and prevent, and to choose the time lines for removing and preventing them. What little the standard does require a service provider to do is subject to time lines that are too long.It weakly requires a service provider to “use reasonable efforts to ensure that its policies, practices and procedures fulfill a series of broad principles.” This doesn’t ensure that the policies and practices that a service provider establishes will be strong and effective. This limited obligation is potentially difficult to enforce. In one area, this standard inexcusably authorizes the creation of a new barrier. The AODA doesn’t allow an accessibility standard to do this.It doesn’t require service providers, and particularly larger organizations, to put in place an effective means for accountably delivering accessible customer service. In the important area of enforcing human rights, the standard applies to the Human Rights Tribunal and the weakened Ontario Human Rights Commission. However, it unjustifiably doesn’t apply to the Ontario Government’s new Human Rights Legal Support Centre, on whom persons with disabilities must depend to investigate and enforce their human rights cases.Its provision requiring training of a service provider’s staff and volunteers on disability needs is deficient; e.g. it doesn’t say it requires any training on the fundamental requirements of the Ontario Human Rights Code, including the duty to accommodate persons with disabilities in customer service. Although it is good that the standard requires service providers to have a system in place to get feedback from patrons with disabilities, it doesn’t require persons in position of authority such as senior management to be notified of any of the feedback received, nor does it provide for any accountability whatsoever for action taken on such feedback. Its provisions for notifying the public about the availability of accessible services are seriously inadequate. They don’t ensure that that notification will be fully accessible to persons with disabilities.The standard permits a barrier-ridden process regarding notification of patrons about service disruptions. The final version of this standard is even weaker than the weak one that the Ontario government’s Customer Service Standards Development Committee proposed as its final recommendation on February 27, 2007. ASAC's March 3, 2014 initial proposals for revision to the 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard are substantially inadequate. They for the most part do not address the major problems with the Standard that we have demonstrated, and that we made public over six years ago, on September 12, 2007. Some of ASAC's proposals would make things worse, further weakening this Standard. While some acceptable improvements are proposed, these fall very far short of what is needed. Unless substantially more is done to strengthen the Standard, it will not ensure that customer service in Ontario becomes accessible by 2025, or ever.We propose that the Customer Service Accessibility Standard should also be revised to:Strengthen purpose of the StandardRedefine classes of organizations under the StandardInclude in the standard comprehensive provisions targeted at specific recurring barriers and specific required corrective actionRevise the standard to effectively address accessibility barriers in the built environment that impede accessible customer serviceEnsure that signage is accessible and doesn't create barriers Ensure timely snow removal to ensure physical accessibility Expand the duty to provide accessible point-of-sale devices and self-service kiosksProhibit any surcharge for accessible customer serviceRequire organizations to review their goods, services and facilities for barriersWork towards providing goods, services and facilities that are disability-accessibleRequire organizations to post and file with the government their service accessibility policiesRequire regularly publicizing for customers the availability of accessibility supports and opportunities for giving feedback to the organizationProvide a one-stop staff person to be available when needed for customer service accommodation and accessibility supportImprove customer service training Require organization's senior management to periodically review feedback received on accessible customer serviceMake it easier for people with disabilities to provide documentation that they are accompanied by a qualified service animalRemove the exemption for accommodating people using service animals if otherwise excluded by lawRepeal the power to require a person with a disability to bring a support person and power to charge an additional admission fee"On November 7, 2014, the Government made public the final proposal for revisions to the Customer Service Accessibility Standard that ASAC had submitted to the Government earlier in 2014. The November 12, 2014 AODA Alliance Update declared that those final ASAC recommendations were "weak and toothless." That Update explained:" ASAC's proposals that were just made public are palpably weak, paltry and ineffective. They ignore most if not all of the detailed, constructive input that the AODA Alliance submitted to ASAC earlier this year. ASAC's proposals would do nothing significant to improve the accessibility of customer service in Ontario for people with disabilities.Making things worse, ASAC actually recommends that the Government cut back on the already-weak provisions of the existing Customer Service Accessibility Standard that was enacted in 2007. Its proposal would reduce obligations under that Standard for many of the very same private sector organizations which since January, in huge numbers, have been violating mandatory requirements in the 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard. The Government has known about those massive violations of the AODA since January 2013.If the Government adopted ASAC's flawed proposal, it would wrongly reward that massive law-breaking by reducing the obligations of those obligated organizations under the Customer Service Accessibility Standard. That would send the wrong signal to obligated organizations. Instead, the Government at last needs to keep its unkept promise to effectively enforce the AODA, rather than wrongly reducing the AODA obligations of organizations that have in massive numbers been violating this law with impunity.For the Government to follow ASAC's advice in this regard would also violate the Government's promise not to cut back on accessibility protections we have previously won. We call on the Wynne Government to confirm that it will keep its word to us, and that it will not cut back on any existing accessibility standards provisions.ASAC also proposes to preserve in the Customer Service Accessibility Standard a provision which should never have been there in the first place, because it wrongly creates a barrier against people with disabilities. An accessibility standard cannot create barriers against people with disabilities. An accessibility standard is supposed to tear down disability accessibility barriers.Now the 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard wrongly lets an organization dictate to a customer with a disability, in some situations, that the customer must bring his or her own support person at their own expense, or else entry can be barred. It wrongly lets the organization charge people with disabilities a second admission for that support person, even if the customer doesn't want a support person, or feel they need one. Rather than recommending that the Government repeal this unlawful provision in the 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard, ASAC merely recommends some minor tinkering with its wording."Because ASAC did not come up with more helpful recommendations, the November 12, 2014 AODA Alliance Update called on the former Ontario Government to take action. It stated:"We urge the Government to immediately instruct the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario to develop meaningful, strong revisions to the Customer Service Accessibility, that are not constrained by the weak and counterproductive proposals that ASAC has submitted."The Government did not do so. For months, we repeatedly urged the Government at all levels to bring us together at the table with representatives of key stakeholders in the customer service area, such as those who represent hotels, restaurants and retail stores. The Government never did so. It never gave us a reason for it's failing to do so.It was especially important for the Government to listen to concerns from the disability community about the deficiencies in the 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard. This is because the disability community did not have the full voice in that original standard's development process as it was later to have in the development of subsequent AODA accessibility standards. Our December 3, 2015 AODA Alliance Update explained:"The Customer Service Accessibility Standard was based on recommendations by the Customer Service Standards Development Committee which the Ontario Government appointed under the AODA. Working as the first AODA Standards Development Committee, that committee did not operate with all the protections for people with disabilities that we later secured in 2007 promises from the Ontario Government. It did not include equal representation by people with disabilities. It did not vote on its proposals clause-by-clause. Disability sector representatives did not have the benefit of dedicated staff from the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario to assist them in their work. The Ontario government promised all those measures in the 2007 Ontario election. That was too late for the Customer Service Standards Development Committee. It was therefore hardly surprising that the 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard was very weak. The lopsided process by which it was developed tilted against people with disabilities."A full year after the Government posted online ASAC's final recommendations for revisions to the 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard, on November 9, 2015, the Government posted online a summary of changes it proposed to make to that standard and to the 2011 Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation. The AODA Alliance consulted its supporters and then submitted a brief to the Ontario Government on those proposed amendments. The December 3, 2015 AODA Alliance Update summarizes our feedback to the Ontario Government on its proposed changes to the 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard as follows:"The Government's proposed changes to the 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard are far too inadequate to meaningfully improve that weak accessibility standard. As well, they include unwarranted cutbacks that are both harmful to people with disabilities, and violate the Government's promises to people with disabilities.The Government does not even say it aims to strengthen the weak and inadequate 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard.The Government's proposal would break Premier Wynne's promise never to weaken AODA provisions or protections.The Government wrongly proposes to perpetuate an unlawful provision in the Customer Service Accessibility Standard, a provision which instead should be removed. The Government improperly proposes changes to the 2011 Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation without following the AODA's mandatory legal accessibility standard amendment process for which we fought so hard, and won in 2005.The Government proposes a counter-productive backwards step regarding customer feedback on accessibility barriers in an organization's goods, services or facilities. The Government Proposes cosmetic packaging changes that will make no difference for achieving accessibility for people with disabilities, or whose impact is insufficiently clear to be assuredly harmless.The Government proposes some minor improvements that, though helpful, won't significantly strengthen the Customer Service Accessibility Standard.The Government should reconsider and make needed improvements to the Customer Service Accessibility Standard that it so far has disregarded or rejected.The Government should now launch a short, focused and inclusive consultation with stakeholders together to develop meaningful improvements to the 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard."Here are some of the key points that the December 3, 2014 AODA Alliance Update made:* "Yet when it announced its proposed changes to the 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard, the Government did not say it is trying to strengthen that accessibility standard. The November 9, 2015 email from Assistant Deputy Economic Development Minister Ann Hoy to disability sector stakeholders, which makes these Government proposals public, set out below as Appendix 2, says that the Government's proposed amendments merely "clarify and streamline" the Customer Service Accessibility Standard's requirements. She did not say that they aim to strengthen the Customer Service Accessibility Standard. Yet the Customer Service Accessibility Standard didn't lack clarity. It lacks strong, effective accessibility requirements."* "Among the most troubling of these proposals is the Government’s plan to deliberately weaken simple but important documentation requirements in the 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard, for private sector organizations with 20 to 49 employees. Three years ago today, on December 3, 2012, the International Day for People with Disabilities, Kathleen Wynne wrote the AODA Alliance a letter that set out her pledges to Ontarians with disabilities, in the event that she won the Ontario Liberal Party’s leadership race and became Ontario’s Premier. Among other things, she promised in writing that she would not reduce any provisions or protections under the AODA or any accessibility standards enacted under it. She wrote:“Under your leadership, will the Liberal Party fully maintain the implementation of the AODA 2005 and the Ontarians with Disabilities Act 2001, and not weaken or reduce any provisions or protections in that legislation or regulations enacted under them, or any policies, practices, strategies or initiatives of or within the Ontario Government that exist to implement them or achieve their objectives?Yes. I’m committed to building a more accessible Ontario as it is not only the smart thing to do, it’s the right thing to do. I will maintain the implementation of the AODA, 2005 and the Ontarians with Disabilities Act 2001, and not weaken or reduce the progress we’ve made.Will you stand by and fully honour the past commitments that your Party has made to Ontarians with disabilities regarding disability accessibility?Yes. I will honour the specific commitments made by my party and the government, and look forward to working with you to continue making progress.”……The 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard requires obligated private sector organizations with 20 or more employees to keep basic records on accessible Customer Service. These are an essential feature for any realistic hope of the AODA’s effective enforcement regarding Customer Service. Despite this, the Government's November 9, 2015 Summary proposes to totally eliminate these basic documentation requirements for private sector organizations with between 20 and 49 employees. The 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard requires all obligated private sector organizations with at least 20 employees to keep a document or documents of its policies, practices and procedures on the following and to make it available to a member of the public on request:On providing accessible goods and Services. (Section 3(5)) Regarding their admitting people with disabilities accompanied by service animals, and/or their requiring people with disabilities to be accompanied by a support person, and their charging a second admission fee for that support person (section 4(7).On the steps to be taken in connection with a temporary disruption of the organization’s services. (Section 5(4) On its feedback process on accessible goods and Services. (section 7(4)).That standard also requires obligated private sector organizations with at least 20 employees to keep documents on the following, without requiring that it be provided to a member of the public on request:Its policy on providing its staff with training on accessible goods and services, including a summary of the contents of the training and details of when the training is to be provided (section 6(5).The training provided under this section, including the dates on which the training is provided and the number of individuals to whom it is provided. (Section 6(6).The Government's November 9, 2015 Summary proposes to abolish all these documentation requirements for any private sector organization with 20 to 49 employees….…This would be a direct, palpable violation of Premier Wynne’s promise not to weaken or reduce any protections or provisions in the AODA or in AODA standards for people with disabilities. In the absence of effective Government enforcement of the AODA, one of the only ways people with disabilities can crowd-source this law’s enforcement is by asking those organizations for their legally-mandatory documentation. If they don’t provide that documentation on request, they are in breach of the AODA. Moreover, one of the few enforcement tools the Government has used in limited measure has been the power to audit obligated organizations. On June 3, 2015, the Government promised to eventually double the number of organizations it will audit. It made that commitment after public and media criticism of the Government’s weak enforcement and recent enforcement cutbacks.The Government’s AODA audits are mostly if not entirely paper audits. The Government inspects for required AODA documentation. By eliminating these important documentation requirements for private sector organizations with 20 to 49 employees, the Government guts AODA audits, through the backdoor, as a useful means for enforcement for those organizations. To date, the Government’s AODA enforcement has been paltry. This amendment would serve to make a bad situation worse. This proposal also weakens the effectiveness of another major AODA enforcement tool, namely the AODA Accessibility Report. Now, private sector organizations with at least 20 employees must periodically file an AODA Report with the Government. These were required by the end of 2012 and again by the end of 2014. In them, an organization indicates if it has met its AODA obligations, e.g. regarding accessible Customer Service. If a private sector organization with 20 to 49 employees need not keep any such documentation, it will know that it can tick any box it likes on its AODA Accessibility Report, without worrying that it lacks a legally mandatory paper trail to show that that box deserved to be ticked.This proposal would fly in the face of the recommendations of the 2014 Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review. That Report called for AODA enforcement to be beefed up, not further weakened."* "According to the November 9, 2015 Summary, the Government wrongly proposes to keep in the Customer Service Accessibility Standard a provision which is not lawfully there in the first place. The Government only proposes to tinker with that provision, rather than taking the needed step of removing it from the Customer Service Accessibility Standard altogether. We have strongly objected to this illegal provision since the 2007 summer, shortly after it was enacted. The 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard authorized a provider of Customer Service to require a customer with a disability to bring a support person with them, as a condition of their admission, and to charge a second admission fee for that person, under some circumstances i.e. if the obligated organization thought that the person with a disability presented a danger to the health or safety of themselves or of others on the premises. By this, the Government improperly created a barrier against people with disabilities. An AODA accessibility standard cannot create or authorize barriers against people with disabilities, especially unjustified ones.This provision should never have been included in the Customer Service Accessibility Standard. We told the Government this, shortly after it enacted the Customer Service Accessibility Standard. Yet the Government never removed it. We also told ASAC about this when it reviewed the Customer Service Accessibility Standard in 2014. Yet instead of recommending to the Government that this provision be removed from the Customer Service Accessibility Standard, ASAC simply recommended that it be narrowed. Here again, ASAC and the Government opted to disregard our recommendation. Neither ASAC nor the Government has ever shown how it is legal for an AODA standard to create or legitimize an accessibility barrier, especially an unjustified one. The Government’s November 9, 2015 Summary merely says this about its intended change to this unlawful provision: “This additional language is intended to clarify that organizations may only require a person with a disability to be accompanied by a support person in very limited circumstances, when there is no other available option.” This does not fix the existing provision’s illegality. The Government did not explain why it feels it is necessary to retain any part of that unlawful provision.The Government’s November 9, 2015 Summary proposes a change to this provision that would reduce but not remove one of the barriers it creates. It states: “Additional language would be added to clarify when an organization requires a person with a disability to be accompanied by a support person on the premises due to health and safety reasons, the organization would be required to waive any fare/fee for the support person that would normally be charged to a person.”The Government contradicts itself in the Summary’s next statement. The November 9, 2015 Summary states:“This requirement is intended to ensure that people with disabilities do not face a financial barrier or penalty in situations when an obligated organization determines that they must be accompanied by a support person. In these situations, a person with a disability may be charged a fare or fee, but the fare or fee must be waived for the mandatory support person.”People with disabilities don’t have guaranteed free support people, available at the drop of a hat, whenever an obligated organization decides they must bring one. Being forced to hire a support person obviously can create a financial barrier or added cost to the customer. Many people with disabilities live at or below the poverty line. If the Government truly means to ensure that customers with disabilities “do not face a financial barrier or penalty in situations when an obligated organization determines that they must be accompanied by a support person,” the Government should presumably impose a mandatory requirement that the obligated organization pay for the entire cost of the support person. The far better and only barrier-free solution is to eliminate this “support person” provision from the Customer Service Accessibility Standard altogether."* "The Government's November 9, 2015 Summary announces a change that at first appears to be purely cosmetic. Yet on closer inspection, it is a source of real concern. It can only slow progress towards a fully accessible Ontario.The Government's November 9, 2015 Summary states:“Title of feedback process sectionThe title of this section would be changed from “Feedback process for providers of goods or services” to “Feedback process on the accessible provision of goods, services or facilities”.The proposed new title of the section is intended to clarify that the requirements relate to receiving feedback on the accessibility of the provision of goods, services and facilities, rather than the accessibility of the goods, services and facilities themselves.”Ordinarily a mere change of the title of a section in a regulation would make little if any difference to anyone, other than lawyers and bureaucrats. However, what the Government here aims to do is a real concern. The Government wants to change this section title so members of the public won’t think that when they give an obligated organization customer feedback on accessibility, that can include feedback on the accessibility or inaccessibility of the goods, services or facilities that the organization offers to the public. Yet section 1 of the Ontario Human Rights Code guarantees to every person the right to equal treatment with respect to goods, services and facilities without discrimination because of disability. The Human Rights Code imposes on organizations the duty to accommodate people with disabilities, including vis à vis the accessibility of their goods, services or facilities, up to the point of undue hardship to that organization, where this is needed to ensure equality of opportunity. The AODA seeks to make these human rights a reality by 2025, without people with disabilities having to bring human rights complaints against each barrier they face, one at a time. Flying in the face of that goal, the Government wants obligated organizations to think it is good to hear from customers about barriers in getting customer service in their establishment, but not to hear from their customers about accessibility barriers in their goods, services or facilities. This proposal reflects an impoverished and counter-productive view of the AODA’s goals, and of accessible Customer Service. What possible harm can be done, if a customer tells an obligated organization about accessibility problems with their goods, services or facilities? The Government should want to encourage this. If organizations learn about these barriers from their customers, they can aim to get them fixed, or find more accessible goods, services or facilities to offer the public. The AODA’s goal of full accessibility in Ontario by 2025 is not achieved if every organization provides Customer Service that is accessible, but does nothing to provide goods, services and facilities that are accessible."* "The Government proposes to amend the Customer Service Accessibility Standard so that it applies to the provision of “facilities,” and not just goods and services. This is helpful. Yet it cannot be heralded as a game-changer that will make a discernable difference in the lives of people with disabilities. We know of no situation over the last 8 years where an organization avoided compliance with this accessibility standard because it only provided a facility, not a good or a service. The Government makes it clear in its November 9, 2015 Summary that this change should mean nothing for people with disabilities. The Summary states:“This is not intended to change which organizations are obligated to meet requirements under the Customer Service Standard, which currently applies to “providers of goods or services.” Making this worse, The Government's November 9, 2015 Summary also states regarding this proposed change:“This is not intended to require organizations to alter physical facilities.”It is deeply troubling that the Government still believes that making an organization’s physical premises more accessible has nothing to do with the provision of accessible Customer Service. This too reflects an impoverished approach to accessibility for people with disabilities and the AODA’s goals. It makes no sense for the Government on the one hand to say that it is extending this accessibility standard to those who provide facilities on the one hand, but then to say that those organizations don’t have to do anything under this accessibility standard to make those facilities accessible, on the other. The Government proposes to expand the definition of a service animal, to include those authorized by doctors, nurses, audiologists, speech and language pathologists, chiropractors, occupational therapists, optometrists, physiotherapists, psychologists, and certain other therapists. Again, this is helpful. However, it still does not get at the root of the problem facing people with disabilities who use service animals.The recurring problem repeatedly reported in the media, and about which we too often hear, involves restaurants, taxis and other organizations that still simply bar service animals, regardless of the animal’s documentation. When a taxi driver simply drives away at the sight of a service animal, the problem would not be solved by having a letter in hand from a doctor or other health professional saying the animal is legitimately needed. This problem of ongoing failure of accessible Customer Service persists in 2015 due to the well-known lack of the Government’s promised effective AODA enforcement. As well, the list of professionals that can give a person a document authenticating their need for a service animal should be expanded to include social workers." The Ontario Government did nothing to address the concerns that we had carefully explained above. The next step in this saga came on January 29, 2016, when the Wynne Government posted online for public comment a draft of the regulation it proposed to enact under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act. This regulation would amend the 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard and the 2011 Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation. The Government gave the public up to March 14, 2016 to email it feedback on these draft amendments. Even though the former Government never took up our proposal to bring stakeholders together for a short, focused accessible customer service summit, we, together with the ARCH Disability Law Centre, submitted a brief to the former Ontario Government on March 15, 2016. This proposal could have served as a helpful basis for such a summit. It offered a series of practical examples of low or no cost readily-achievable requirements that would improve the Customer Service Standard and make it more effective for persons with disabilities. These were not meant to be an exhaustive list of the ways that the 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard needed to be revised. However it was meant to offer proposals that could quickly and easily secure broad support from the disability community and the obligated sectors.The March 15, 2016 AODA Alliance/ARCH Disability Law Centre brief summarized its recommendations as follows:"The Customer Service Accessibility Standard should be revised to include these measures now, as well as by implementing additional measures that require long term action. Examples of revisions here include:Ensuring that obligated organizations make a clear commitment to provide barrier-free and accessible customer service.Designating an employee within an organization’s existing staff to ensure accessible that customer service is provided, and that complaints about accessibility are heard and readily municating by diverse and adaptable methods.Advising customers with disabilities of the nearest available accessible washroom and transit locations. Providing accessible public washroom signs. Posting signage about scent-free policies. Establishing accessible parking.Requiring accessible “point-of-sale” and movable debit/credit information transaction machines (ITMs). Ensuring accessibility of cash registers or tills with price displays.Providing accessible drug prescription labels and information.Providing accessible restaurant menus. Implementing visual fire alarms.Making accessible any financial services and provincially-regulated financial institutions that offer bank-like services.Standardizing all signage for ease and consistency. Reducing intrusive loud music in public spaces where customer service is offered.Making public announcements that reinforce priority accessibility policies at an obligated organization’s establishment. Enforcing all priority policies that have been established for persons with disabilities. This includes designated seating, priority entry to public transportation and other policies designed to remove barriers. Without enforcing priority policies for persons with disabilities, these measures become meaningless.This list is not exhaustive. We urge that revisions to the Customer Service Accessibility Standard ensure that needed accessibility and accommodations are provided to customers with all kinds of disabilities, including e.g. those labelled with intellectual, learning, mental health, communication, or mobility disabilities, or vision or hearing loss."In the 2016 spring, the former Government rejected all of these recommendations. It gave no public explanation for doing so.On June 6, 2016, the former Government announced that it had amended the 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard. Its amendments in essence did what its November 9, 2014 announcement, addressed above, foreshadowed. It also made most if not all of the series of amendments to the 2011 Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation that the former Government had proposed on November 9, 2014, despite our having made it clear that this violated the AODA's provisions on the process for amending an AODA accessibility standard. (See further the discussion of that issue in Chapter 5 of this brief)The AODA Alliance's June 7, 2016 news release, issued in response to the2016 amendments to the2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard and the 2011 Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation included:“Premier Kathleen Wynne has just violated her written pledge to never reduce any protections or provisions that 1.8 million Ontarians with disabilities had won in or under Ontario’s accessibility law, the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA). When running for Ontario Liberal Leadership, she chose December 3, 2012, the International Day for People with Disabilities, to pledge in writing that if she became Liberal Leader and Ontario Premier, she would fully maintain and not “weaken or reduce any provisions or protections in that legislation or regulations enacted under them, or any policies, practices, strategies or initiatives of or within the Ontario Government that exist to implement them or achieve their objectives…” In breach of that pledge, the Wynne Government yesterday significantly weakened a core provision of the 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard, the first accessibility regulation ever enacted under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act. Ontario’s disability community tenaciously fought for a decade to get the AODA passed. The 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard’ central requirement is that public and private sector organizations that provide customer service to the public must establish a policy on ensuring accessibility of their Customer Service to people with disabilities, and must train their staff on this policy. Until now, any private sector organization with at least 20 employees had to make sure it had that accessible Customer Service policy in writing, had to make it available to the public on request and had to keep a record of its employee training. But as of yesterday, the Wynne Government gutted that requirement for the huge number of private sector organizations with 20-49 employees. They no longer need to have the policy in writing, no longer need to provide it in writing to the public on request and no longer need to keep records of its employee training on it. “This will make the core part of this accessibility regulation very hard if not impossible for the Wynne Government to effectively enforce for the great number of private sector organizations with 20-49 employees. The Wynne Government’s main way of enforcing, in the paltry fraction of cases where it has done any enforcement at all, has been by the Government auditing an organization’s paper records. Yet if a private sector organization with 20-49 employees no longer needs to keep any paper records, there’s nothing for the Government to audit,” said David Lepofsky, chair of the non-partisan AODA Alliance which leads Ontario’s grassroots campaign for accessibility for people with disabilities. “If a Government auditor asks if a private sector organization with 20-49 employees has the required policy on accessible Customer Service, the owner can just point to their head and say: ‘It’s in here!’”The AODA requires the Ontario Government to lead Ontario to full accessibility for 1.8 million people with a physical, mental, sensory, intellectual, or learning disability by 2025. It aims to ensure that people with disabilities can fully take part in schools, universities, jobs, housing, goods, services, restaurants and stores. Under the AODA, the Government must enact and effectively enforce accessibility standards that tell public and private sector organizations what disability barriers they must tear down, and by when. Making this situation worse for Ontarians with disabilities, yesterday’s further weakening of the possibility for enforcing Ontario’s accessibility law comes after the Wynne Government has a sorry history of poor enforcement, despite having promised that this law would be effectively enforced. The Wynne Government has known for three years of rampant private sector violations of the Disabilities Act, and of the Government’s paltry efforts at enforcement, which it cut back even further last year. Now it rewards private sector organizations with 20-49 employees that have violated the law for the past three years, by making meaningful Government enforcement even more unlikely.Back on November 18, 2013, the AODA Alliance revealed through a Freedom of Information application that the Wynne Government knew that fully 70% of private sector organizations with at least 20 employees were violating the Disabilities Act. Two years later, on December 3, 2015, the AODA Alliance revealed that the Government knew that fully 65% of private sector organizations with at least 20 employees still had not e-filed mandatory accessibility reports that were due in 2012. Fifty-eight percent of those organizations had still not filed compliance reports that were due at the end of 2014. “Despite Wynne Government promises one year ago to increase Disabilities Act audits this year, we have seen no indication that this has happened. The Government won’t answer our Freedom of Information inquiries about its enforcement plans unless we pay $4,250. As of last December Ontario still had a paltry three Disabilities Act directors and one inspector appointed to deploy the AODA’s inspection and auditing powers for the entire province.In yesterday’s amendments, the Wynne Government made a few minor improvements to the Customer Service Accessibility Standard. For those modest measures, the Government deserves some credit. Yet those changes won’t offset this breach of the Premier’s word to people with disabilities or significantly improve the accessibility of customer service to people with disabilities. Making yesterday’s amendments worse still, the Wynne Government has to date refused to make any of the low-cost high-impact changes to the 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard that the AODA Alliance and the ARCH Disability Law Centre have requested, after consulting the disability community. For example, the Wynne Government refused to revise the Customer Service Accessibility Standard to require any organizations, even large, well-resourced and highly profitable ones, to merely put Braille and large print signs on their public bathroom doors, or to require that a retail store simply put its “point of sale” device on a cable long enough to reach down to a customer in a wheelchair. They have refused to require any organizations, even huge ones, to let customers with disabilities know on request where the nearest accessible parking spot or bathroom might be. In 2014, a major Government-appointed Independent Review of the AODA by former Law Dean Mayo Moran found that the Government, including Premier Wynne, must now breathe new life into the AODA, and show strong new leadership on accessibility. It found that after a decade, the AODA hasn’t lived up to its great potential. It has not yet made a significant difference in the lives of Ontarians with disabilities. Ontario was not then on schedule for full accessibility by 2025, the deadline the AODA requires. The Moran 2014 Independent Review of the AODA called on Premier Wynne to show new leadership on accessibility. “Ontarians with disabilities need Premier Wynne to keep and not break her promise to us. We call on her to suspend the changes she made yesterday that weaken protections in the Customer Service Accessibility Standard, and that broke her pledge to people with disabilities. We need her to instead enact changes to the Customer Service Accessibility Standard that will make a real difference, like ones we put on the table to discuss with her Government,” said Lepofsky “We need her to bring together representatives of the disability community, the private sector and other stakeholders, to seek a consensus on ways to meaningfully improve the 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard, as we have been asking and asking the Government to do, without success.”This Government failure flew in the face of the reality facing people with disabilities. Throughout the period from 2013 to 2016, when the 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard was under review, the media time and again reported on denials of accessible customer service. As such, it was clear that on the front lines, the 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard was not ensuring accessible customer service to people with disabilities. It needed to be substantially strengthened.For example, the April 23, 2013 AODA Alliance Update reported:"According to an article in the April 20, 2013 on-line edition of the Toronto Star, set out below, a Toronto restaurant, part of a chain, allegedly restricted a customer from bringing his Hearing Ear dog with him wherever he wished to sit into the restaurant. The Star's April 21, 2013 on-line edition included a second article, set out below. It reported that the restaurant had apologized and planned to provide its disability service staff with disability training.The AODA Alliance quickly swung into action. As a result, in a third article, published in the Toronto Star's April 22, 2013 on-line edition, set out below, we highlighted that such incidents show that the Government must at long last keep its pledge to effectively enforce the AODA.The AODA includes helpful enforcement provisions. However they are useless if they are not effectively deployed."In another incident, the May 6, 2013 AODA Alliance Update explained:"Another troubling incident concerning disability accessibility has been reported in the Ontario media. It signals the need for the Ontario Government to now keep its oft-repeated promise to effectively enforce the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act. According to an article in the May 3, 2013 on-line edition of the Windsor Star, a store in Windsor restricted access to the store to a patron using a motorized wheel chair. This was reportedly not an issue of stairs blocking physical access. According to the article, set out below, the store's staff did not want people in motorized wheelchairs in the store out of fear that they could damage products for sale."The April 1, 2015 AODA Alliance Update reported:"In the past three days, the Guelph Mercury, CTV, CBC, and the National Post have all reported on a deeply disturbing incident in Guelph Ontario. These reports are set out below.According to these news reports, a father recently took his young daughter to play at a play centre where she had played in the past with no problem. Yet this time, she was refused. According to these reports, the child needs to wear her shoes to support her leg braces. Yet the play centre insisted that children must only wear socks, and not shoes, according to media reports.In the wake of coverage in the mainstream media and social media, the play centre reportedly apologized, and has found an accommodation that it would accept. That accommodation, simply wearing shoe coverings, appears to have been an obvious one that should have been offered on the spot. The family has had to resort to filing a human rights complaint against the play centre. Before the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal, the family must find its own lawyer, investigate its own case, and then present its case against the play centre. In 2006, the Ontario Government took away from the Ontario Human Rights Commission its decades-old job of publicly investigating and, where appropriate, publicly prosecuting individual human rights cases like this.2. The Bigger Picture - What this Incident Means for Ontarians with Disabilities This Guelph incident came to our attention via the media coverage that the family secured, and because the family contacted us online. The Guelph Mercury's April 1, 2015 article quoted the AODA Alliance. It reported:"David Lepofsky, chair of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance, said this is not an isolated incident but one example of a systemic problem. His group was instrumental in getting accessibility legislation passed 10 years ago. "Now, we're leading the fight to implement it," he said. "This incident illustrates how so many unfair barriers that Ontarians with disabilities face are so easy to fix, at little or no cost. It also shows that Ontario is not the world leader on accessibility for people with disabilities that the Ontario government claims." Lepofsky said having a universal law was supposed to mean that people with complaints would not have to file separate actions with the human rights tribunal. But because there is no or little enforcement, people continue to fight these battles on their own. "From 1994 to 2005, we fought for this law," he said. "People with disabilities should not have to fight these barriers alone.""" In yet another incident, the April 22, 2018 AODA Alliance Update included:"This week, both Global TV and CITY-TV news separately shone the spotlight on Customer Service barriers that still face Ontarians with disabilities, nine years after the Wynne Government passed the Customer Service Accessibility Standard under the AODA. We applaud Global’s and CITY-TV’s “watchdog” coverage.Over one year ago, Global TV’s hard-hitting reporter Christina Stevens prepared a record-breaking seven installment series of TV news reports on the unfair obstacles facing too many people with disabilities in Ontario when they try to get accessible Customer Service in places like restaurants. Those earlier reports focused on the Wynne Government’s failure to effectively enforce the AODA. ……Global News’ Christina Stevens has just updated her 2015 coverage, one year later, in three reports that ran on the evening news in Toronto on April 18, 19 and 20, 2016. Below we set out the text of those reports. These reports show that:* One restaurant chain which had been covered in last year’s reports, gave the Global News reporter quite a run-around when trying to ask about the chain’s accessible Customer Service practices. Yet under the AODA’s Customer Service Accessibility Standard, such organizations are supposed to have a Customer Service feedback process. A feedback process is hardly effective if it is so difficult to reach a human being to converse.* One year after Toronto Police were caught out, unaware of their duty to investigate certain guide dog-related service refusals, Global News found that Toronto Police seemed still oblivious to this duty, despite claiming to have cleaned up its act. Again, the reporter described an official run-around when trying to get to the bottom of this with Toronto Police.* Global News then focused on the Wynne Government’s inadequate implementation and enforcement of the AODA. Its April 20, 2016 report described the AODA Alliance’s concern that the Wynne Government has posted online a proposal to cut back on the already-weak Customer Service Accessibility Standard. Right now, any private sector organization with at least 20 employees must have an accessible Customer Service policy, and must have it available in writing. The Wynne Government has proposed that only private sector organizations with at least 50 employees be required to keep a written copy of its accessible Customer Service policy. If the Wynne Government passed this, private sector organizations with 20 to 49 employees would have to have an accessible Customer Service policy, but would not have to have it in writing. Of course, if it doesn’t have to be in writing, there is no way for an AODA inspector to prove that the organization did not have a policy on Customer Service accessibility.In the Global News report, the Wynne Government’s lead AODA enforcer-in-chief, Economic Development Minister Brad Duguid, is quoted as being dismissive about this. The report quotes AODA Alliance chair David Lepofsky and then Minister Duguid:“"So if you go into one of those places and say ‘Do you have a policy?’ all the person has to do is point to their heads and say, ‘Yes, it’s in here’, well, how do you enforce that?" asked David Lepofsky, Chair of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance.“Making them do more paperwork is not the route to go,” added Brad Duguid, Minister of Economic Development, Employment and Infrastructure.“The key for us is to make sure the businesses are aware of the opportunities of becoming more accessible.”“The government’s solution when there’s large lawbreaking when there’s ineffective enforcement is promise more and pass regulations which means there’s actually going to be less effective enforcement,” said Lepofsky.Duguid explained if someone does encounter a problem, there is a provincial line they can call.“And we will send out enforcement where we can,” said Duguid.But when Global News called the toll free line and asked if it is linked to enforcement, the operator said they did not have one in place.She wasn’t even sure where to report the denial of access due to a service dog.”In an separate April 20, 2016 CITY TV news story on an entirely different Customer Service accessibility problem, the Economic Development Ministry conceded that Ontario still has a long way to go to reach full accessibility. In the story, set out below, is this important admission, with which we fully agree:“"Although we have made progress, there's still a long way to go to reach our goal of becoming an accessible province," a Ministry Spokesperson tells CityNews.”" As of the time of this brief's preparation, there has been no action taken by the Ontario Government since June 6, 2016, to rectify the deficiencies with the Customer Service Accessibility Standard. There has been no announcement by the Ontario Government that it plans to do anything about this before the next mandatory review of the Customer Service Accessibility Standard. It is open to the Ontario Government to launch that review at any time. however, under the AODA, the Ontario Government need not launch it until June 2021. If that review takes the typical two-three years that the Government has taken to date for such reviews, it will not be completed until at least 2023. By then, the AODA's 2025 deadline for full accessibility in customer service will be only two years away. Ontario cannot wait that long to fix the deficiencies identified here.c. Mandatory Five-Year Review of the 2011 Transportation Accessibility Standard The mandatory review of the 2011 Transportation Accessibility Standard has not yet led to any amendments of that accessibility standard. In early 2018, a new Transportation Standards Development committee submitted recommendations to the Ontario Government on how to revise that accessibility standard. Those recommendations are very weak, and would not substantially improve that accessibility standard. The Transportation Standards Development committee rejected many if not most of the reform recommendations that the AODA Alliance together with the ARCH Disability Law Centre presented in the 2017 summer for that Committee's consideration. As noted earlier, the final report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review identified real deficiencies with the 2011 Transportation Accessibility Standard, which was enacted as part of the 2011 Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation. In 2016, the former Ontario Government appointed a new Transportation Standards Development committee to review the 2011 Transportation Accessibility Standard. We only learned about this through the grapevine. Neither the Accessibility Directorate nor others in the Ontario Government let us and the public know at the time that this Standards Development Committee had been appointed. When it was working on its draft recommendations, that Committee never reached out to the AODA Alliance to get our input on where the 2011 Transportation Accessibility Standard needed to be improved. Having led the campaign in Ontario on accessibility for many years, we should have been an obvious place to turn.On May 19, 2017, after the Transportation Standards Development committee had been working for over a year, the Ontario Government posted online for public comment the draft recommendations that the Transportation Standards Development committee had prepared. These were very weak. They, at best, would only tinker with the 2011 Transportation Accessibility Standard. They would have left in place many if not most of the 2011 Transportation Accessibility Standard's many serious deficiencies.On July 31, 2017, the AODA Alliance and the ARCH Disability Law Centre submitted a 106 page joint brief to the Transportation Standards Development committee. It showed what was deficient in the 2011 Transportation Accessibility Standard, and what was lacking in the Standards Development Committee's draft recommendations for revisions to that standard. Our joint brief made detailed recommendations to address these problems, and to strengthen the 2011 Transportation Accessibility Standard. The AODA Alliance/ARCH brief offered this summary of the problems with the 2011 Transportation Accessibility Standard:"Before the 2011 Transportation Accessibility Standard went into effect, transportation services in Ontario were replete with many disability accessibility barriers. Over a decade ago, the Ontario Human Rights Commission released a comprehensive study of accessibility problems facing persons with disabilities who try to use public transit. It found that Ontario's public transit system is replete with barriers impeding persons with disabilities. It recommended, among other things, that new standards be enacted for transit accessibility. The Ontario Human Rights Commission's Report on Public Transit Accessibility Barriers is available at It is good that the Government decided to create a Transportation Accessibility Standard under the AODA, and enacted one in 2011. However, the 2011 Transportation Accessibility Standard has significant shortcomings. Revisions to that accessibility standard should aim to correct these problems. We summarize these problems as follows:Over six years after the 2011 Transportation Accessibility Standard went into effect, progress towards full accessibility in transportation in Ontario has been far too slow. There are less than 7.5 years to go before 2025. Yet transportation services are still not fully accessible to people with disabilities. In many respects they fall far short. The 2011 Transportation Accessibility Standard will not ensure that transportation in Ontario becomes fully accessible to people with disabilities by 2025. Even if all transportation organizations fully comply with all of its requirements and time lines, this will not ensure that transportation will become fully accessible by 2025, or ever.The 2011 Transportation Accessibility Standard does not cover all the known recurring disability accessibility barriers in transportation in Ontario.Where the 2011 Transportation Accessibility Standard does address a known accessibility barrier, its requirements are too often too weak or too vague. Its exemptions and exceptions are too broad. This all falls short of meeting the accessibility requirements of the Ontario Human Rights Code, and in the case of public sector public transit providers, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The 2011 Transportation Accessibility Standard takes an erroneous approach to equality and accessibility for people with disabilities, by permitting equivalent services at times, rather than requiring equal services. The Ontario Human Rights Code requires people with disabilities to receive equal services. An approach of unequal access appears to be tolerated if transit providers feel they are providing something they consider equitable access. The time lines for action required under the 2011 Transportation Accessibility Standard are often too long. They permit unjustified delays in providing accessibility in transportation to people with disabilities. This allows transportation providers to create or retain new disability accessibility barriers for too many years.A further indication that there are significant problems with the 2011 Transportation Accessibility Standard can be gleaned from two major reports, prepared at the request of the Ontario Government:The 2014 final report of the second Independent Review of the AODA, conducted by Mayo Moran. The Government was required to appoint this AODA Independent Review. In Appendix 2 to this brief, we summarize that report's key contents and findings as they relate to the accessibility of transportation in Ontario.The August 2015 report by the KPMG consulting firm, prepared at the request of the Ontario Government, on transportation accessibility barriers. We analyze the key contents and findings in that report in Appendix 3 to this brief. Our recommendations in this brief build on the key findings and contents in those reports, and on our own analysis and research."The July 31, 2017 AODA Alliance/ARCH brief then summarized the deficiencies in the Transportation Standards Development committee's draft recommendations on how to revise the 2011 Transportation Accessibility Standard, as follows:"We commend the Transportation Standards Development Committee for identifying some of the ways that the 2011 Transportation Accessibility Standard needs improvement and for seeking ways to improve it. However, the draft recommendations that the Transportation Standards Development Committee circulated for public feedback on May 19, 2017 are substantially insufficient to remedy the deficiencies in the 2011 Transportation Accessibility Standard. Even if the Ontario Government adopted all the Transportation Standards Development Committee's draft recommendations, this would not ensure that transportation in Ontario would be fully accessible to people with disabilities by 2025, or ever. Indeed, even if the Ontario Government adopted all those draft recommendations, this would not lead to a substantial improvement in the accessibility of transportation services in Ontario. This is because:The Transportation Standards Development Committee's draft recommendations do not identify or address many of the inadequacies in the 2011 Transportation Accessibility Standard. They don't address key problems with transportation services in Ontario or with the 2011 Transportation Accessibility Standard identified in the discussions or findings of the 2014 final report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review or the 2015 KPMG report to the Ontario Government on transportation accessibility barriers.In many cases, the Transportation Standards Development Committee's draft recommendations commendably identify an ongoing problem with the accessibility of transportation services in Ontario. However, the reforms that the Transportation Standards Development committee's draft recommendations propose are still too weak and will not solve the problems identified.In several places, the Transportation Standards Development Committee recommends efforts at better educating people with disabilities, as a solution to accessibility problems they face. Yet the core reason why disability accessibility barriers remain in transportation in Ontario is not because passengers with disabilities are insufficiently educated on what they need to do to obtain accessible transportation services. These accessibility barriers remain because transportation organizations have not acted quickly enough or effectively enough to remove and prevent the accessibility barriers that remain in transportation services.In some places, the Transportation Standards Development Committee's draft recommendations incorrectly propose to shift to others, such as the Ontario Government, responsibilities which properly lie with those who provide transportation services in Ontario."The AODA Alliance/ARCH brief summarized its detailed recommendations to the Transportation Standards Development committee, as follows:"We urge amendments to the 2011 Transportation Accessibility Standard:To state that the Transportation Accessibility Standard's purpose is to ensure that transportation services become accessible to people with disabilities by 2025.To require each transit organization to commit to reaching full accessibility by 2025, and to adopt, implement and annually report to the public on a plan to ensure it reaches full accessibility by 2025.To set detailed requirements for the accessibility of the built environment in transit stations and stops, to strengthen accessible signage requirements, to increase transit stations' accessible parking spots, and to ensure that bus drivers enable passengers with disabilities to get on and off a bus at a bus stop.To improve accessibility requirements for transit vehicles, (e.g. increasing the size and number of mobility devices each can accommodate), and to require retrofit of existing transit vehicles that will remain in service for at least five years.To set stronger requirements to ensure that public transit accessibility equipment is always in good working order.To require transportation organizations to effectively inform people with disabilities about their accessibility services, including, for example, the sizes of mobility devices that their vehicles accommodate.To make it easier for people with disabilities to bring a support person on public transit at no charge, and to prohibit public transit providers from requiring a passenger with a disability to bring a support person with them before allowing them on public transit.To improve pre-boarding and on-board announcements and to require public transit providers to self-audit and publicly report on these.To far more effectively ensure the accessibility of public transit electronic kiosks and fare-payment technology like the Presto Smart Card, and any related apps.To require public transit providers to provide a service to assist passengers with disabilities to navigate transit stations.To strengthen the requirement for public transit providers to hold an annual public forum on accessible transit.To better provide for safety of people with disabilities during emergencies on public transit.To better implement public compliance with priority seating for people with disabilities on public transit vehicles.To require larger transit authorities to make available accessible mobile apps regarding their services.To make it easier to qualify for paratransit services.To require the provision of paratransit same day service, or, if rejected, to substantially narrow any exemptions from this requirement.To require permanent streamlined procedures for getting a paratransit ride across municipal lines.To eliminate the "family of services" retrenchment on paratransit services, that lets a public transit provider force a paratransit passenger to take part of their ride on paratransit and the rest on conventional transit.To ban double-charging people with disabilities when part of a ride is on the conventional service and part of the ride is on a paratransit vehicle.To strengthen requirements to ensure that all taxi services will be fully accessible to people with disabilities by 2025.To set comprehensive accessibility requirements on ridesharing services like Uber.To set substantially stronger guarantees and penalties for violations such as refusals to accommodate service animals.To strengthen requirements for accessible school bussing services for students with disabilities."We were concerned about how the Transportation Standards Development committee had been carrying out its work. As a result, the July 31, 2017 joint AODA Alliance/ARCH brief recommended that the Transportation Accessibility Standard take corrective action, as follows: "We also recommend that the Transportation Standards Development Committee take these steps:Make as the Committee's mission, to ensure that the Transportation Accessibility Standard will make transportation accessible to people with disabilities by 2025.Create opportunities to hear face-to-face from transportation passengers with disabilities e.g. by organizing public forums.Ask the Government to keep its election promise to provide a fulltime staff resource person to disability representatives on each Standards Development Committee.Keep the Government's election promise that Standards Development Committee members will get to separately vote on each of its recommendations, clause-by-clause.Not to recommend the creation of any new barriers to face people with disabilities."We saw no indication that the Transportation Standards Development Committee took any of those corrective actions. On May 2, 2018, just days before the official 2018 Ontario election campaign began, the former Ontario Government made public the final recommendations of the Transportation Standards Development committee. The Transportation Standards Development committee had submitted its final recommendations to the Government some weeks earlier. The Government traditionally only posts these recommendations on its website for 45 days. In contrast, the AODA Alliance posts these permanently on our website. We believe they should be permanently available to the public. To read the final recommendations of the Transportation Standards Development committee, visit The May 8, 2018 AODA Alliance Update offered this preliminary analysis of the Transportation Standards Development committee's final recommendations:“The final recommendations of the Transportation Standards Development committee are very weak. They would not ensure that transportation becomes fully accessible to passengers with disabilities by 2025, or ever. They would not substantially improve the limited 2011 Transportation Accessibility Standard. That standard needs substantial improvement. The Transportation Standards Development committee did not accept many if not most of the advice in the detailed 106-page brief that the AODA Alliance and the ARCH Disability Law Centre submitted to the Transportation Standards Development committee on July 31, 2017. We made an in-person presentation on that brief to the Transportation Standards Development committee on November 15, 2017. No member of that Standards Development Committee asked us a single question about our 59 detailed recommendations.The Transportation Standards Development Committee's final recommendations are modestly better than the Committee's even-weaker earlier draft recommendations, on which the AODA Alliance /ARCH July 31, 2017 brief had commented. However, most of the deficiencies in the Transportation Standards Development committee's earlier draft recommendations have not been fixed.In its final recommendations to the Government, the Transportation Standards Development Committee commendably recommended that the Government should strengthen the stated goal of the Transportation Accessibility Standard. However, none of the other Transportation Standards Development committee recommendations would significantly strengthen the Transportation Accessibility Standard, in the ways needed to achieve that goal.”The Transportation Standards Development committee proposes a number of modest changes to the 2011 Transportation Accessibility Standard itself. These largely focus on more education, more consultation, and imposing requirements to report on progress. A strong, effective accessibility standard must go much further. It must spell out which disability barriers must be removed and by when in transportation services.One of the important disability accessibility issues that the AODA Alliance has raised in the 2018 Ontario election is the fact that the Ontario Government has been building new public transit stations with serious accessibility problems. Our new online Youtube video, which amply shows this, has gotten over 2,000 views in the first 12 days after we posted it on line. Check it out!16 minute version: 30 minute version: Transportation Standards Development committee made a very weak recommendation in this area. It merely recommended:"The Transportation Standards should be changed to require municipalities and transit providers to report on and show progress made to improve accessibility at transit facilities, stops and shelters, based on their service offerings and community need, as part of the annual status report on their multi-year accessibility plans." Ontario needs a Transportation Accessibility Standard that spells out specific accessibility requirements for public transit stations. The Ontario Government has hundreds of new public transit infrastructure projects coming, or already in progress. We cannot afford more accessibility blunders like those we expose in our new Youtube video.The Government that the public elects on June 7, 2018 will have to decide what revisions to enact, to strengthen the limited 2011 Transportation Accessibility Standard. Sadly, the Transportation Standards Development committee's final recommendations are not much of a help. If the Government implemented all of that Standards Development Committee's recommendations, we would have no assurance that the serious transportation barriers, shown in our recent video, would be removed or prevented in existing or future public transit stations or projects. In contrast to the final recommendations of the Transportation Standards Development committee, the AODA Alliance/ARCH July 31, 2017 brief is far more detailed. It includes much stronger recommendations."As such, it is essential for the Ontario Government to itself explore far more substantial improvements to the 2011 Transportation Accessibility Standard than those which the Transportation Standards Development committee has presented to the Government. Changes to the accessibility standard need to be along the lines of those which the AODA Alliance and ARCH Disability Law Centre proposed to the Transportation Accessibility Standard.d) Mandatory 5-Year Review of the 2011 Employment Accessibility Standard All political parties agree that it is important to tackle the high unemployment that chronically faces people with disabilities. In 2011, the Ontario Government passed the AODA Employment Accessibility Standard as part of the 2011 Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation. Five years after it was passed, the Government was required to appoint a new Employment Standards Development Committee (including people with disabilities and employers) to review the Employment Accessibility Standard. That Standards Development Committee is mandated to make recommendations for revisions to the Employment Accessibility Standard, if needed, to ensure that this accessibility standard tears down all the barriers that people with disabilities face in employment.It appears that a new Employment Standards Development Committee was appointed in late 2016 or early 2017, and then began its review of the 2011 Employment Accessibility Standard. On March 20, 2018, just two months before the 2018 Ontario election campaign began, the Ontario Government made public for public input a series of draft recommendations for revisions to the Employment Accessibility Standard that the Employment Standards Development Committee had formulated. On May 7, 2018, the AODA Alliance submitted a brief to the Employment Standards Development Committee on its draft recommendations. Our May 7, 2018 brief to the Employment Standards Development Committee includes this summary of its contents:"Our feedback set out in this brief is summarized as follows:The 2011 Employment Accessibility Standard is far too weak. It will not lead employment to become accessible to employees and job-seekers with disabilities by 2025, or by any time in the distant future, even if all obligated organizations fully complied with it to the letter. It needs substantial strengthening.The AODA Alliance agrees with a number of the draft recommendations that the Employment Standards Development Committee has proposed. However, those draft recommendations, if adopted, would not significantly improve the 2011 Employment Accessibility Standard, and would not make a significant improvement in the accessibility of employment for employees and job-seekers with disabilities. The Standards Development Committee's draft recommendations are built on a misunderstanding of the purpose or aim of its review of the 2011 Employment Accessibility Standard. This review's aim is not merely to see if the 2011 Employment Accessibility Standard is working "as intended", or if it will "improve" accessibility". The Standards Development Committee should aim to see if the 2011 Employment Accessibility Standard will ensure accessible employment for employees and job-seekers with disabilities by 2025.The AODA Alliance agrees with the Standards Development Committee that the long-term objective of the Employment Accessibility Standard should be strengthened. We propose reforms that are stronger than the wording that the Standards Development Committee proposes.Of the Standards Development Committee's eight recommendations, four of them (Recommendations 1, 4, 5 and 7) merely call for the Government to provide better, more user-friendly public education information for employers regarding their duties owing to employees and job-seekers with disabilities. We agree with any such improvements, but also call for stronger recommendations including amendments to strengthen the Employment Accessibility Standard in these areas.We agree with one of the Standards Development Committee's recommendations that calls for an actual amendment to strengthen the Employment Accessibility Standard, Recommendation 3 regarding notice to employees and job-seekers with disabilities about an employer's policies and practices regarding the duty to accommodate employees and job-seekers with disabilities.The AODA Alliance does not necessarily agree with the Standards Development Committee's recommendation that the Employment Accessibility Standard be amended to define the term "employee". If such an amendment were made, we recommend that this term be broadly defined to accord with its interpretation in the Ontario Human Rights Code, that it include contractors and volunteers, and that it not be harmonized with other employment legislation (since such harmonization is likely not feasible).The AODA Alliance does not agree with the Standards Development Committee's Recommendation 6, calling for amendments to the Employment Accessibility Standard regarding an employer's duty to provide employees and job-seekers with disabilities with information on individualized emergency procedures.The AODA Alliance does not agree with the Standards Development Committee's Recommendation 8, which would defer for five years any review of the Employment Accessibility Standard's provisions on accommodating workers with disabilities in their return to work. Those provisions should be reviewed by the Employment Standards Development Committee now.The Employment Standards Development Committee should go much further in its recommendations, so that the Employment Accessibility Standard can live up to the goals of the AODA. At present, the 2011 Employment Accessibility Standard’s core focus is on putting in place formal procedures in each organization for an employee with a disability to request and receive an individualized workplace accommodation. The Employment Accessibility Standard needs to be substantially expanded to include requirements for the systematic identification, removal and prevention of recurring employment barriers within an obligated organization, such as barriers in the built environment, in choice of location for off-site office events, in office furniture and equipment, and in job descriptions. With proper action on this front, the workplaces of 2025 can be barrier-free. Without this, employers will continue to leave employment barriers in place, and will continue to create new ones. The workplace of 2025 will only become barrier-free for employees and job-seekers with disabilities if the Employment Accessibility Standard is revised to include strong and effective provisions that identify disability barriers that must be removed and prevented, that direct the corrective action needed, and that set time lines for this action.The standard should include provisions on addressing employment barriers in the context of a unionized workplace where there is a collective agreement.The standard should be expanded to implement in larger organizations a process for addressing in a fair and timely way the cost of barrier-removal and prevention and of individual accommodation.The standard should be expanded to create specific added measures to address the Ontario Government, Ontario Public Service and the broader public sector, as Ontario's largest employer. This should include, among other things, strengthened provisions to ensure that the goods, services and facilities that the public sector procures for use in their workplaces are accessible to employees with disabilities.We endorse in principle the Ontario Human Rights Commission’s recommendations in its May 4, 2018 letter to the Employment Standards Development Committee, set out in Appendix 2 to this brief.We recognize that in addition to a strengthened Employment Accessibility Standard, people with disabilities need strong new non-regulatory measures to substantially improve employment opportunities to people with disabilities. While the Government's June 2017 "access Talent" strategy included some helpful measures, it is far too "high level", and does not include the comprehensive package of concrete measures that job-seekers with disabilities need."The work of the Employment Standards Development Committee, along with all other Standards Development Committees, was frozen pending briefing the new Government's Minister for Accessibility and Seniors. We learned that the work of the Employment Standards Development Committee was unfrozen in the late 2018 fall. We were invited to speak to that Standards Development Committee on November 21, 2018, when it resumed its work. That invitation came in response to our request to speak to that Committee, months ago.e) Mandatory 5-Year Review of the Information and Communication Accessibility Standard The 2011 Information and Communication Accessibility Standard, while helpful, remains insufficient. We cannot comment on the work of the Information and Communications Standards Development Committee. This is because that committee has not yet released draft recommendations for public comment. It also refused the AODA Alliance's request to be able to speak to that committee at this stage of its work, i.e. before it formulates and releases its draft recommendations for public comment.7. Developments Since the June 2018 Ontario ElectionDoug Ford's May 15, 2018 letter to the AODA Alliance, setting out his party's election pledges on accessibility, included:"This is why we're disappointed the current government has not kept its promise with respect to accessibility standards. An Ontario PC government is committed to working with the AODA Alliance to address implementation and enforcement issues when it comes to these standards."We are not aware of any efforts or action by The Ford Government on the issues addressed in this chapter.Chapter 4 The Need for New Accessibility Standards, Including a Strong and Comprehensive Built Environment Accessibility Standard1. Introduction Chapter 3 of this brief shows that the accessibility standards enacted to date under the AODA, while helpful to a degree, are not sufficient to ensure that Ontario reaches full accessibility for people with disabilities by 2025. It recommends needed actions in so far as those specific accessibility standards are concerned. This chapter addresses the need for the Ontario Government to develop and enact new accessibility standards, to address issues and barriers that are beyond the areas that the existing accessibility standards address.Part 4 of the June 30, 2014 AODA Alliance brief to Mayo Moran shows that since 2012, the Ontario Government's work on developing new accessibility standards under the AODA had slowed to a virtual crawl. That Part of our 2014 brief reached this conclusion:"This Part of this brief shows that the Government has in recent years taken an unjustified and inordinate amount of time just to decide which accessibility standards to next develop under the AODA. It seems as if the Government has been stuck in neutral. With the 2025 deadline growing ever nearer, this was time that Ontario could not afford to squander."That slow pace of progress has persisted to the present time. Since June 2014, no new accessibility standards have been enacted. The former Ontario Government only completed the mandatory review of one of the existing accessibility standards, the 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard. The mandatory 5-year reviews of the Transportation Accessibility Standard, the Employment Accessibility Standard and the Information and Communication Accessibility Standard are still underway. The mandatory 5-year review of the Public Spaces Accessibility Standard has not even begun. As shown later in this chapter, the Ontario Government has violated the AODA by not starting that mandatory review by the end of 2017.Chapter 3 of this brief shows that the mandatory 5-year review of the weak 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard did not lead to that standard being substantially strengthened. In one respect, it led it to be weakened even more.Throughout the past decade, the AODA Alliance has been in the lead in trying to get the Ontario Government to create new accessibility standards. During that period, the Ontario Government did not undertake a comprehensive effort to ascertain all the new accessibility standards that are needed. At most, the former Ontario Government only focused on two of the new subject areas which we had emphasized, namely education and health care. In those two areas, the former Ontario Government took an unconscionably long time to eventually decide whether to create accessibility standards in education and health care. The new Government, elected in June 2018, has frozen ongoing work on accessibility standards in those two new areas, as this chapter addresses.As an illustration of another much-needed new accessibility standard, we have been calling for the Ontario Government to create a Residential Housing Accessibility Standard for over half a decade. In July 2009, the former Ontario Government promised to address residential housing through the standards development process, once the promised Built Environment Accessibility Standard was enacted. It never kept that promise. The former Ontario Government never gave a reason for failing to address accessibility barriers in residential housing. It has never denied to us that there is a protracted and critical shortage of accessible housing in Ontario – a shortage which will get worse as our population continues to age.In this chapter, we first document the exceedingly long delays for the Ontario Government to decide to take action under the AODA on education and health care barriers. We then address the unmet need for a strong and effective Built Environment Accessibility Standard. Finally, we turn to the need for other accessibility standards to be created under the AODA.Chapter 5 of this brief addresses the need for Ontario to develop and enact an Education Accessibility Standard to tear down the disability accessibility barriers facing students with disabilities in Ontario's education system, and a Health Care Accessibility Standard to tear down the barriers facing patients with disabilities in Ontario's health care system. It addresses the pressing need for the Government to lift its freeze on the work of three Standards Development Committees which were already at work before the 2018 Ontario election, developing recommendations for an Education Accessibility Standard and a Health Care Accessibility Standard.2. Recommended Findings We recommend that this AODA Independent Review make the following findings:* After the AODA has been part of Ontario law for 13 and a half years, the built environment in Ontario remains replete with far too many disability accessibility barriers. The AODA has not had a significant effect on removing existing barriers or preventing new ones in the built environment. A new building can be built in full compliance with the AODA and the Ontario Building Code and yet have serious accessibility problems. The Ontario Building Code's accessibility requirements, like the few built environment requirements in AODA accessibility standards, are entirely inadequate to meet the known modern needs of people with disabilities.* Ontario also has a pressing need for a comprehensive Built Environment Accessibility Standard to be enacted under the AODA. The former Ontario Government's decision to carve the built environment largely out of AODA accessibility standards and to only address it in the Ontario Building Code was wrong. It set Ontario back. * The former Ontario Government's failure to keep its August 19, 2011 election promise to promptly enact the promised Built Environment Accessibility Standard set Ontario back. * The former Ontario Government's failure to act effectively on the 2014 Mayo Moran recommendations to address retrofits in existing buildings further set Ontario further back.* Ontario has a pressing need for a Residential Housing Accessibility Standard. There is a serious shortage of accessible housing in Ontario for people with disabilities. It is getting worse because the demand for accessible housing increases as Ontario's population ages. There is no effective strategy in place in Ontario to ensure a sufficient increase in the supply of accessible housing in Ontario.* Ontario needs a Goods and Products Accessibility Standard to be created under the AODA.* The former Ontario Government never undertook a comprehensive consultation or other effort to determine what additional accessibility standards need to be created in order for the AODA to ensure that Ontario reaches full accessibility by 2025. There is no indication that the current Government did this, or has a plan to do this.3. Recommendations Regarding Next Accessibility Standards to be DevelopedThe Government should consult with the public, including with people with disabilities, over the next three months, on all the sectors that other accessibility standards need to address, to ensure that Ontario becomes accessible by 2025, with a decision to be announced on the economic sectors to be addressed in those standards within three months after that consultation. The Government should not delay a decision on whether to have a new accessibility standard developed, while the Ontario Public Service decides what barriers it might include. Immediately after the Government decides what remaining accessibility standards need to be created, it should promptly create Standards Development Committees to develop recommendations for each of those new accessibility standards.The Government should now publicly recognize that there is a problem with the inaccessibility of the built environment in Ontario. It should launch a concerted and comprehensive strategy that will address new construction, major renovations, and the retrofit of existing buildings that are undergoing no major renovations, using feedback from the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal complaints and findings, and the Ontario Human Rights Commission's policies and advice.The Government should develop and enact a comprehensive Built Environment Accessibility Standard under the AODA, ensuring that it effectively addresses accessibility retrofits in existing buildings, as well as accessibility in new construction and major renovations (not limited to those covered in the DOPS accessibility standard). Among other things, the new and comprehensive Built Environment Accessibility Standard should include additional accessibility requirements for elevators that are not currently addressed by the requirements in the Ontario Building Code and other provincial laws. To this end, the Ontario Government should appoint a new Built Environment Standards Development Committee, both to review the 2011 Public Spaces Accessibility Standard and to develop recommendations for a far more comprehensive Built Environment Accessibility Standard.The Government should create a Residential Housing Accessibility Standard under the AODA, and should promptly appoint a Standards Development Committee to make recommendations on what it should include, or assign this to the Built Environment Standards Development Committee, referred to in the preceding recommendation.The Government should direct each AODA Standards Development Committee now in operation to make recommendations on standards for the built environment as it relates to the area that that Standards Development Committee is studying. For example, the Education Standards Development Committee should be directed to make recommendations for accessibility in schools, colleges or universities. The Health Care Standards Development Committee should be directed to recommend requirements for the accessibility of the built environment in the health care system.The Government should announce a comprehensive strategy on accessible housing to address the current and growing crisis in accessible housing in Ontario, in addition to creating an AODA accessibility standard on point.The Government should strengthen enforcement of accessibility in the built environment. For example, it should require that before a building permit or site plan approval can be obtained for a project, the approving authority, municipal or provincial, must be satisfied that the project, on completion, will meet all accessibility requirements under the Ontario Building Code and in all AODA accessibility standards. The Government should require professional bodies that regulate or licence key professionals such as architects, interior designers, landscape architects, and other design professionals, to require detailed training on accessible design, to qualify for a license, and continuing professional development for existing professionals. The Government should also require, as a condition of funding any college or university that trains these key professions, that their program curriculum must include sufficient training on accessibility and universal design. This should be designed to ensure that no new graduates in these fields will make the same mistakes as too often is the case for those now in practice. The Government should substantially reform the way public sector infrastructure projects are managed and overseen in Ontario, including a major reform of Infrastructure Ontario. This should include: A requirement that accessibility advice be obtained on all major projects starting at the very beginning, during master planning, feasibility studies, and functional programming, with any accessibility advice that is received being made public. This input should also be obtained through consultations with people with disabilities. A requirement to track any decisions to reject any accessibility advice, identifying who made that decision and the reasons why. That information should promptly be publicly reported. To require the Government to promptly make public the accessibility requirements under consideration as a requirement for a contract for any infrastructure, with enough time before the start of the bidding competition to allow for feedback and adjustments. It is too late to make this public only after the bidding competition. A requirement for post-project accessibility commissioning inspections which would include compliance with the project specific output specification accessibility requirements as well as the Ontario Building Code and AODA accessibility standards. A requirement in all contracts that any accessibility deficiencies found must be the financial responsibility of the Project Company who built the project to fix them.The Government should require that when public money is used to create new public housing, 100% of that housing should include universal design and visit-ability as mandatory design features.The Government should agree to create a Goods and Products Accessibility Standard.Accessibility standards should include, where appropriate, not only end-dates for achieving results, but also interim benchmarks for major milestones towards full accessibility.4. Excessive Multi-Year Government Delays in Deciding Whether to Develop a New Accessibility StandardThe AODA requires the Ontario Government to create all the accessibility standards needed to ensure that Ontario becomes accessible to people with disabilities by 2025. The former Ontario Government commendably started this journey shortly after the AODA was enacted in 2005, by developing five accessibility standards. These are in the areas of customer service, transportation, information and communication, employment and public spaces. However, after that, it took another half a decade if not more to get the former Government to decide what next accessibility standards to create. At first, the former Ontario Government made it sound like the first five accessibility standards were going to be the only ones it created. Public officials were reluctant to even advert to the possibility of creating additional accessibility standards. This was so even though the former Government asked the first AODA Independent Reviewer, Charles Beer, in 2009, to advise it on what accessibility standards it should make after these first five were enacted.It was not until early 2013, in the final days of Premier McGuinty's term as premier, that the former Government explicitly acknowledged that it would make more accessibility standards, and that it knew all it needed to know to decide which accessibility standards to next make. The January 21, 2013 AODA Alliance Update included this, referring to a Government news release, and to ASAC, the Government-appointed Accessibility Standards Advisory Council:"What is new today, and a positive step (though an overdue one), is this news release's commitment in unequivocal terms that new standards will be developed under the AODA. The news release states that the new ASAC's mandate will include, among other things, responsibility to "Develop new accessibility standards based on the advice and feedback we have received to date from stakeholders." By stating that the new standards will be created "based on the advice and feedback we have received to date," the Government is committing that there does not need to be any more consultations before it decides what the topic of the new accessibility standards will be. We have been urging the Government for several years to embark on the creation of new accessibility standards. The standards that have been developed to date, while helpful, do not address anywhere near the full range of barriers that need to be removed or prevented to ensure that Ontario becomes fully accessible by 2025, as the AODA requires. We have been waging an ongoing campaign for quite some time to get the Government to commit that the next three accessibility standards to be developed will address barriers in our education system, barriers in our health care system, and barriers to access to residential housing." Even after that Government news release, it took the former Government over another year, up to the middle of the 2014 election campaign, just to agree that the next accessibility standards it would create would address barriers in education, health care, or both. It made no commitment at that time which of these it would be sure to address. In her May 14, 2014 letter to the AODA Alliance, setting out her party's 2014 election pledges on accessibility, Premier Wynne wrote:"The next accessibility standard we will develop will focus on education and/or health."From Premier Wynne's letter, it was evident that the former Government had injected a new and unnecessary additional step into the AODA's standards development process. It had decided that before choosing to embark on creating another accessibility standard, it should first have public servants do the work of studying where there are barriers that need to be addressed. In her May 14, 2014 letter to the AODA Alliance, Premier Wynne wrote:"In order to develop a new accessibility standard, the Ministry of Economic Development, Trade and Employment has been actively working with the Ministries of Education, Training, Colleges and Universities as well as Health and Long-Term Care to examine where changes and new standards are required to make our education and healthcare systems more accessible. This important work needs to be done prior to broad consultation with the accessibility community."None of the ministries to which the Premier referred had reached out to the AODA Alliance or, to our knowledge, to the broader disability community, to get information on the barriers we face in those areas, as part of that exercise. The Premier's letter suggested that those ministries had already been working on this issue. Those ministries should have reached out to us for input, both because of the AODA Alliance 's known leadership role in this area, and because we had led the campaign to press the Ontario Government to create accessibility standards in the areas of education and health care. Moreover, the Ontario Government had never injected this new layer of bureaucracy in 2005 before commendably reaching the prompt decision to create accessibility barriers in the areas of customer service, transportation, employment, the built environment, and information and communication. Had it added this additional and unnecessary layer to the standards development process in 2005, the Government would have taken even longer than it did to get the original round of accessibility standards created.We do not know what the Government did during its internal education and health care barrier survey, or whom, if anyone, the Ontario Government contacted to survey barriers in either health care or education. Chapter 5 of this brief addresses the fact that the Government had hired the KPMG consulting firm to do an online survey of disability accessibility barriers in Ontario's education system and Ontario's health care system. We were not told about those studies at the time, nor consulted by KPMG. We know that the results of the Government's efforts at looking into barriers in the context of the health care sector were very limited in scope, and missed key barriers. The August 4, 2016 AODA Alliance Update included:"After all the time the Government spent over the past two years, exploring accessibility barriers in Ontario's health care system, the Government's PowerPoint showed that the Government had only found a very small fraction of the areas where people with disabilities actually face barriers. The PowerPoint listed the following barriers:"What's in? oTargeted accessibility training requirements for health care providersoImproving the interaction between health care providers and persons with disabilities oIdentifying best accessibility practices and patient accommodationsoAccessible prescription drug labels and instructions oOther focus areas as identified"The PowerPoint described as barriers to be address: health care providers' insensitivities towards people with disabilities, and communication barriers when dealing with health care providers. These are all the disability barriers the Government unearthed in Ontario's health care system, facing people with disabilities, after working on this issue over the past two years. We pointed out at the July 26, 2016 "pre-consultation" meeting, this leaves out a wide range of well-known and critical barriers, including barriers in the built environment in health care facilities, barriers in information technology in the health care system, and barriers in diagnostic equipment in the health care system, just to name a few." Creating more delay, it took the former Government up until February 13, 2015 to decide to create a Health Care Accessibility Standard. It announced that decision on the day the Government released the final report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review. After that, it took the Government up to December 5, 2016, or almost two more years, to announce that it would also create an Education Accessibility Standard. Put another way, it took the Government as long or longer just to decide to create these two obviously-needed new accessibility standards than it takes to actually do the hard work of developing a proposed accessibility standard. During its multi-year period of deliberating on these issues, the former Ontario Government never disputed that people with disabilities continue to face serious disability accessibility barriers in Ontario's health care system and education system. It was never credibly suggested that the existing AODA accessibility standards were sufficient to remove or prevent all those disability barriers.For years, the former Ontario Government withheld agreeing to create an Education Accessibility Standard even though in 2013 and afterwards, the Government received letters of support for our call for this accessibility standard from key unions that represent those who work in the front lines of Ontario's education system. This includes the Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation, the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations, the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario, the Association of English Catholic Teachers of Ontario and the Canadian Union of Public Employees (Ontario). Those front line workers were not opposed to a new AODA accessibility standard in the area of education. To the contrary they were supporting our call for this new measure. It was after a tenacious multiyear campaign that we had spearheaded, and only in an answer to a question from an opposition member, PC MPP Bill Walker, that Premier Wynne announced on December 5, 2016 in the Legislature that the Government had decided to create an Education Accessibility Standard. On that day, the Toronto Star reported on the fact that an open letter to Premier Wynne from 22 disability organizations had called for the Government to agree to create an Education Accessibility Standard. Presumably, Premier Wynne did not spontaneously decide on the spot during Question Period to agree to create an Education Accessibility Standard. We did not know of this decision in advance of that exchange in Question Period. We do not know why the former Government held off announcing this until we were fortunate enough to get an opposition member to raise this issue once again in Question Period. The Government never gave any reasons in public for its multi-year delays in deciding to create these accessibility standards. It was undisputed that Ontario was behind schedule for reaching accessibility by 2025. Ontario could not afford to lose all that time. Had the Government agreed sooner to create the Education Accessibility Standard and Health Care Accessibility Standard, we would now be much further along in the process of creating a barrier-free education and health care system. We have gathered that there was internal resistance within some parts of the Ontario Government or the Ontario Public Service. If so, the Public Service tail should not wag the democratic dog. In Chapter 5, we address the former Ontario Government's further protracted delays in setting up Standards Development Committees in the areas of education and health care, after it had decided to create accessibility standards in these areas, and the current Government's protracted freeze on the work of those committees.5. The Pressing Need for A Residential Housing Accessibility StandardWe also pressed the former Ontario Government for several years to create a Residential Housing Accessibility Standard. As is detailed later in this Chapter, in July 2009, the former Ontario Government had publicly stated on its website that it would address the need for accessibility in residential housing, as well as in retrofits to existing buildings that are not undergoing a major renovation, through the Standards Development Committee process. However, it said it would not do this until after the first phase of the promised Built Environment Accessibility Standard was enacted under the AODA, to address built environment barriers in new buildings and major renovations.The former Ontario Government later removed that text from its website. However, the AODA Alliance preserved it on the AODA Alliance's website. We often reminded the former Ontario Government about this pledge. The former Over the years since then, the former Ontario Government never denied making that announcement. It also never acknowledged it, or acted to fulfil it.There has for years been a crisis in accessible housing. As the population ages, it will get worse. 6. The Pressing Need for a Strong and Effective AODA Built Environment Accessibility Standard a) What We Told the Mayo Moran AODA Independent ReviewPart 4 of the June 30, 2014 AODA Alliance brief to Mayo Moran addressed the pressing need for the Ontario Government to enact a strong and effective Built Environment Accessibility Standard under the AODA. Part 4 of the June 30, 2014 AODA Alliance brief to Mayo Moran described the former Ontario Government's multi-year foot-dragging on the promised Built Environment Accessibility Standard up to 2014 as follows:"4. The Long, Sad and Unfinished Saga of the Promised Built Environment Accessibility Standard a) OverviewThe AODA requires Ontario's buildings to become accessible to persons with disabilities by or before 2025. Ontario is clearly not on schedule for achieving a fully accessible built environment by then or ever. During the Legislature's 2004-2005 debates on Bill 118, the proposed AODA, the need to make Ontario's built environment was a central focus. MPPs addressed not only the need to prevent new barriers in new buildings, but as well, the need to retrofit the existing built environment to ensure it becomes fully accessible by 2025. The 20 years that the AODA allows for achieving full accessibility was driven in substantial part by the time needed to retrofit Ontario's largely-inaccessible built environment.Even though the Government commendably focused efforts on the built environment within the first years after the AODA was passed, its efforts eventually slowed to a glacial pace after 2010. It will not be until 2015, if not later, that all its insufficient regulations enacted to date to prevent new built environment barriers will go into operation. No new built environment accessibility standards are now under development. The Government has, to date, done nothing to keep its promise to also address retrofitting of existing built environment barriers, through AODA standards.b) Hurry Up and Wait It was not long after the AODA was enacted that the Government commendably decided to make the built environment a priority. In October, 2007 it established the Built Environment Standards Development Committee to develop proposals for a Built Environment Accessibility Standard to be enacted under the AODA.The Built Environment Standards Development Committee began its work in 2008. In the following year, on July 14, 2009 the Government posted for public input the initial proposed Built Environment Accessibility Standard that the Built Environment Standards Development Committee prepared. When the Government released the initial proposed Built Environment Accessibility Standard, its web announcement included the following:"It is important to note that the government does not plan to impose requirements for retrofitting existing buildings at this time. Also, the government does not intend to require Ontarians to make their existing or new single family houses accessible at this time."The Government's web posting also said: "The initial proposed standard sets out specific requirements for making the built environment in Ontario accessible, including all new construction and extensive renovations.The Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act is built on a vision of improving accessibility in Ontario - looking forward, not looking back."We asked the standards development committee to take a broad look at how to make Ontario's buildings, structures and other spaces accessible. The requirements the committee is proposing are not law.Requirements for single family residential housing and for retrofitting existing buildings have been included for public discussion. But the government will not impose these requirements in the final built environment standard at this time.The Government does not plan to require that all existing buildings be retrofitted to meet accessibility requirements in the final accessible built environment standard at this time. Terms of reference outline that this standard will be focused on preventing barriers on a go-forward basis. Also, the government does not intend to require Ontarians to make their existing or new houses accessible in the final accessible built environment standard at this time."The terms of reference which the Community and Social Service Ministry (then responsible for the AODA's implementation and enforcement) set for the Built Environment Standards Development Committee required, among other things that the Committee:"Focus on first 5-year efforts on preventing barriers, on a go forward basis;"After these announcements were made public in the 2009 summer, we and others raised serious concerns with the Ministry about the need to address, at some point and where appropriate, the retrofitting of existing buildings and accessibility to residential housing. It was a substantial repudiation of much of the AODA's mission and mandate for the Government to state that the AODA is meant to address accessibility "looking forward, not looking back." The AODA explicitly addresses not only the prevention of new barriers, but the removal of existing barriers. Otherwise, it would not be possible to reach the AODA's goal of full accessibility in Ontario by 2025.It was similarly troubling that the Government's web posting referred to the AODA in terms of "improving accessibility." This massively diluted the AODA's goals. There was similar language in a number of the Government's pronouncements about the AODA after it was enacted. "Improving accessibility" is an impoverished, minimalist goal. It is achieved merely if a single ramp is installed somewhere in Ontario. The AODA seeks to achieve much, much more. Its goal is full accessibility. After we and others objected to the Government's attempt to walk back much of what the AODA promised, the Ministry promptly replaced the preceding portions of its website so it instead read:"On July 14, 2009, the Ontario government released the initial proposed Accessible Built Environment Standard for a public review period. A standards development committee developed the proposed standard. The committee was made up of representatives from the disability and business communities.Creating an accessible Ontario by 2025 is a big undertaking, but a goal the government is committed to achieving.The committee's terms of reference outline that this standard will focus on preventing barriers on a go-forward basis. Under this proposed standard, all new buildings and buildings undergoing major renovations would need to meet the proposed requirements if passed as law.The Government does not plan to require that all existing buildings be retrofitted to meet accessibility requirements in the final accessible built environment standard at this time. Also, the government does not intend to require Ontarians to make their existing or new houses accessible in the final accessible built environment standard at this time.A subsequent step the Government plans to take to achieve an accessible built environment in the province is to take a more focused look at how to deal with retrofitting existing buildings and making houses accessible. These two issues are expected to be addressed through a standard development committee process.The standard development process going forward will consider any recommendations made by Charles Beer in his independent review of the AODA, which is currently underway."We understood this to mean that the Government planned first to enact the first part of a Built Environment Accessibility Standard which addresses barrier-free construction in new buildings and renovated properties. After that was done, the Government would designate a Standards Development Committee or Committees to address measures regarding the retrofitting of existing buildings that are not undergoing renovations, and accessible housing needs facing Ontarians with disabilities. We made it clear to the Government and the public that we hoped that the latter initiative would include the full spectrum of issues relating to access to housing, such as removing barriers to community living options for persons with disabilities.A 2009 CBC report confirmed the Government's commitment to later deal with retrofits. CBC's Website on Friday July 17, 2009 included: "The province plans to deal with the issue of retrofits at a later date, according to Social Services Minister Madeleine Meilleur, MP for Ottawa-Vanier." One year later, on June 1, 2010, Community and Social Services Minister Meilleur committed in Question Period in the Legislature that the four accessibility standards that were then still under development, including the Built Environment Accessibility Standard, would be enacted by the end of 2010. She stated: "Before the end of this year, the five standards will be in place." It turns out that insofar as the promised Built Environment Accessibility Standard was concerned, she was off by as much as three years. In July 2010, the Built Environment Standards Development Committee finished its work. It submitted its final proposal for the Built Environment Accessibility Standard to the Government. Two months later, on September 10, 2010 the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario, part of the Community and Social Services Ministry posted the final proposed Built Environment Accessibility Standard on the Government's website for 45 days. The Government did not request public input on that proposal. On September 28, 2010, Minister Meilleur committed that the Built Environment Accessibility Standard would cover barriers both inside and outside buildings. Speaking to the "Business Takes Action" Symposium, she said (according to her speaking notes): "And last but not least, we have the Built Environment Standard. This will address access into and within buildings and outdoor spaces." On October 14, 2010, Minister Meilleur committed that the final public review period for the Built Environment Accessibility Standard would likely be in 2011. That is the period when the Government posts a draft of the accessibility regulation that it proposes to enact for a final round of public comment and input. This is the last step before an accessibility standard can be enacted. By that announcement, she in effect pushed back the deadline she had earlier announced for enactment of the Built Environment Accessibility Standard. Speaking to honour "World Standards Day" at the Standards Council of Canada, the minister stated (according to her speaking notes): "The Built Environment Standard - which will address access into and within buildings and outdoor spaces - is at an earlier stage of development. It has been submitted by the standards development committee for consideration and is now available on my ministry's website for the public to see. The public review period for the Built Environment Standard will likely take place next year."In that same month, October 2010, the Government announced that the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing would be undertaking a consultation on proposed changes to the Ontario Building Code. The first round of consultations, to begin in the fall of 2010, would not include Building Code amendments arising from the final proposed Built Environment Accessibility Standard. Rather, that Ministry was deferring accessibility amendments to the Building Code to a later consultation by that Ministry. This would be followed by much more foot-dragging by the Municipal Affairs and Housing Ministry. Four months after that, on February 23, 2011, the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario sent out a broadcast email, announcing that the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing was commencing a second round of Building Code consultations. However, that too would not include accessibility issues arising from the final proposed Built Environment Accessibility Standard. Accessibility issues were again being deferred to an unspecified future time. It stated: "I want to reassure you that the government continues to consider the Final Proposed Accessible Built Environment Standard submitted to the Minister in July 2010, and is working hard to respond to requests for further research in key areas of the proposed standard to make sure that when we move forward, all requirements will be clear, consistent, enforceable and will build on current accessibility requirements."The months dragged on with no progress in sight. On June 9, 2011, the AODA Alliance wrote to the two public officials with lead responsibility for this issue at the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing and the Community and Social Services Ministry respectively. We asked for a comprehensive update on the state of the government's work toward enacting the promised Built Environment Accessibility Standard:"It is our understanding that the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing is working on proposals for incorporating changes regarding accessibility of the built environment within buildings, into the Ontario Building Code, where they fall within the scope of the Building Code. We also understand that proposals from the Standards Development Committee that do not fall within the scope of the Ontario Building Code, are now the focus of work by the Accessibility Directorate at the Ministry of Community & Social Services. To the extent that those are enacted into law, the latter would not be done by amendments to the Building Code. We want to know in detail what has been done in both of these areas, since the Standards Development Committee submitted its final proposal last year. We also want to know what plans the Government has in both of your ministries, and elsewhere, for completing this project. Among other things, we would appreciate learning about the current time lines that are now expected for completing the work that each of your respective ministries is now undertaking. Finally, we are eager to ensure that whatever is enacted, including any changes to the Building Code, is also fully enforceable as a standard enacted under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act. What decisions have been made, or action taken in this regard to date."On June 24, 2011, the two senior Ontario Government officials to whom we had written wrote us a joint response. They described their activities in very general terms. They gave no time lines for finalization of the Built Environment Accessibility Standard. They wrote:"The Accessible Built Environment Standard is still under development. The Accessibility Directorate of Ontario and the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing (MMAH) are working together to complete a careful analysis of the proposed standard. In addition, you may be aware that the Standards Development Committee identified a number of areas where additional research was required in order to develop regulations, which were not part of the Final Proposed Standard. These additional recommendations are also part of our analysis of the Standard Development Committee's recommendations.We are working hard to make sure that the requirements put forward are clear, consistent and enforceable, and build on current accessibility requirements. Once this analysis is complete, the government will make decisions on what requirements will be proposed as regulations and when they will come into force." In the 2011 Ontario general election, still seeing no end in sight, we sought commitments from the major parties to expeditiously complete the Built Environment Accessibility Standard. In our July 15, 2011 letter to the party leaders, we wrote:"In July 2010 the current Government received a final proposal for a Built Environment Accessibility Standard under the AODA. The current Government has studied it for one year and has set no date for enacting it. … We agree with the current Government's plan to incorporate it into the Ontario Building Code, to the extent feasible. We ask you to commit to:2. Enact a Built Environment Accessibility Standard as a regulation under the AODA, and to the extent feasible, include the same content as an amendment to the Ontario Building Code, no later than the end of 2012, to address built environment barriers inside and outside buildings."On August 19, 2011, during the 2011 Ontario election campaign, Premier Dalton McGuinty wrote to us to promise that the Built Environment Accessibility Standard that his Government had under development would be enacted "promptly." He wrote: "It is a priority for us to enact the Accessible Built Environment standard promptly and responsibly." Four months after that, on December 2, 2011, after the dust had settled from the October 2011 Ontario election, and with still no signs of progress on the Built Environment Accessibility Standard, we wrote to the new Minister of Municipal Affairs, Kathleen Wynne. Among other things, we urged prompt action on the promised Built Environment Accessibility Standard. Our letter stated in material part:"1. Expediting Enactment of the Built Environment Accessibility StandardFirst, your ministry has taken on a major role in the development of the forthcoming built environment accessibility standard under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act. In his August 19, 2011 letter to us, setting out your party's 2011 election commitments, Premier McGuinty pledged that: "It is a priority for us to enact the Accessible Built Environment standard promptly and responsibly." Over four years ago, in October, 2007, your government appointed the built environment standards development committee, under the provisions of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act. It was established to develop a proposal for this standard in consultation with experts in the field. After many hours of painstaking work, that Standards Development Committee submitted a very detailed initial proposal for the Built Environment Accessibility Standard to the government. On July 14, 2009, your Government made public the initial proposed Built Environment Accessibility Standard for public comment. After public comment was received, the Built Environment Standards Development Committee undertook many more hours of study to refine their initial proposal in light of public feedback on the initial proposal. Well over a year ago, in July 2010, the Built Environment Standards Development Committee submitted its final proposal for the Built Environment Accessibility Standard to your Government. Since then, that proposal has been under study in your ministry and in the Ministry of Community and Social Services. We understand that your Ministry was extensively involved with the work of the Built Environment Standards Development Committee throughout its many months of activity. As such, your Government should be well-positioned to fulfil the Premier's commitment to promptly finalize and enact this much-needed accessibility standard. Despite this, this initiative has unfortunately been behind schedule for some time. On June 1, 2010, the Minister of Community and Social Services Minister committed that the Built Environment Accessibility Standard would be enacted by the end of 2010. That deadline was missed.Back on June 9, 2011, we wrote the relevant assistant deputy minister in your ministry and the assistant deputy minister in the Ministry of Community and Social Services, who together have lead responsibility for the development of the built environment accessibility standard. We asked for details on their plans for bringing this project to completion. Their answer to us, dated June 24, 2011, provided little information. … We understand that your ministry has taken on responsibility for the parts of the built environment accessibility standard that are to be incorporated in the Ontario Building Code. We ask you to expedite the work of your ministry's officials on this project, so that your government can keep the Premier's commitment to us. We also ask that any requirements that are incorporated into the Building Code also be enacted as accessibility standards under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, so that we have the full benefit of the protections we won in that legislation."Municipal Affairs and Housing Minister Wynne responded in a letter to us dated January 17, 2012. Her formulaic letter said nothing new. Regarding the built environment, she wrote:"Expediting Enactment of the Built Environment Accessibility StandardI want to acknowledge the work done by the Accessible Built Environment Standards Development Committee, and the contribution of the AODA Alliance as members of the committee, for the development of its final proposed Accessible Built Environment Standard. As you know, the committee's membership included people from the disability, municipal and business communities. All of them worked very hard to develop and submit their final proposed standard to the former Minster of Community and Social Services in July 2010.It takes time to develop a standard of this complexity and magnitude. In other jurisdictions, it has taken up to 10 years to develop accessibility standards. The Accessible Built Environment Standards Development Committee also identified a number of areas where further research is required. Work is ongoing through analysis of the entire proposed standard by staff from this ministry as well as the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario at the Ministry of Community and Social Services.New requirements will address both the internal built environment (buildings) and the external built environment (which includes parking spaces, signs and displays, and recreation areas such as parks and trails). Once this analysis is complete, our government will decide what requirements will be proposed as regulations and when they will come into force. Any requirements that the government moves forward on must be clear, consistent, enforceable, and must build on current accessibility standards."Yet another five months slipped past with no discernible progress. Therefore, on Friday, June 1, 2012 we wrote to the two Ministers responsible for the Built Environment Accessibility Standard, to press for its enactment. Our letter to Community and Social Services Minister John Milloy and Municipal Affairs and Housing Minister Kathleen Wynne, raised five key issues:We asked when the Government will be publicly posting a draft of the proposed Built Environment Accessibility Standard for public comment.We asked the Government to release a summary of the intended contents of the proposed Built Environment Accessibility Standard, in advance of finalizing its precise legal language. 3. We reiterated that the Government planned to enact part of the new Built Environment Accessibility Standard in the form of amendments to the Ontario Building code. We yet again asked the Government to commit that any new accessibility requirements to be added to the Ontario Building Code also be enacted as part of the enforceable Built Environment Accessibility Standard enacted under the AODA. Our earlier requests in this regard had never been answered. To this day, this request has gone unanswered and unfulfilled.We asked the Government to include in the Built Environment Accessibility Standard, a requirement that when public sector organizations engage in the downsizing of their buildings holdings, they give priority to closing inaccessible properties in favour of retaining more accessible properties. The Government has to this day never agreed to this, or responded substantively to this proposal. We noted that the anticipated Built Environment Accessibility Standard would not require retrofitting of any existing buildings that are not undergoing major renovations. We asked for a clear commitment now that as soon as the part of the Built Environment Accessibility Standard that addresses the sphere of the Ontario Building Code was enacted, the Government would immediately launch a prompt standards development process to develop a part of the Built Environment Accessibility Standard to deal with retrofitting of existing buildings that are not slated for major renovations. To this day, that request has gone unanswered and hence, unfulfilled. On July 16, 2012, Minister Wynne responded. Her letter provided few, if any specifics. It stated in material part:"As you know, the Built Environment Accessibility Standard is the final standard to be regulated under the AODA. It is the largest and most complicated standard requiring the cooperation of both the Ministry of Community and Social Services and the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing. Our work has been greatly advanced by the noteworthy contribution of the Accessible Built Environment Standard Development Committee.The Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing has a long history of contributing to an accessible built environment through Ontario's Building Code. We have set increasingly rigorous requirements for barrier-free design since 1975. Moreover, Ontario's Building Code has been, and continues to be, a leader among Canadian building codes, including the model National Building Code.Currently, ministry staff are developing recommendations for potential Building Code changes based on the Final Proposed Standard, and we expect this information to be made available in the coming months. Any proposed changes to the Building Code will be made available to all Ontarians as part of a public consultation. The consultation will include an explanatory document that outlines the proposed changes in plain language. Once this is complete, the Ontario government will decide which requirements will be proposed as regulations and when they will come into force. Once again, thank you for your input and continued engagement. I look forward to further dialogue with you on this matter." Our August 16, 2012 AODA Alliance Update commented publicly on this letter:"Minister Wynne's letter to us…makes undeserved self-congratulatory claims about her Ministry's past work in this area. In fact, deficiencies over the years in the Ontario Building Code have contributed to the ongoing presence of barriers that persons with disabilities too often still encounter in the built environment. Had her ministry's work on barrier-free building standards been as effective as Minister Wynne's letter claims, her Government would not now still be unable to even tell us when it will bring forward the "inside buildings" Built Environment Accessibility Standard provisions for which her ministry has lead responsibility…"On August 15, 2012, a full two years after the Government received the final proposed Built Environment Accessibility Standard from the Built Environment Standards Development Committee, the Government posted for public comment, a draft accessibility standard, to address built environment in public spaces. This in substances was a very limited, partial Built Environment Accessibility Standard. Addressed in detail in Part III of this brief, this accessibility standard, which was ultimately incorporated into the IASR, did not comprehensively address built environment barriers in buildings. It only addresses barriers in outdoor public spaces of new developments or major renovations. It did not address retrofitting of pre-existing barriers in outdoor public spaces where the public space is not being redeveloped. The only thing it addressed inside buildings were new or redeveloped service areas e.g. a public counter and waiting area. Our August 16, 2012 AODA Alliance Update commended the Government for taking this step, but noted: "We still have no specific word from the Government on when it will bring forward its promised draft accessibility standard to address barriers inside buildings. That is a very central part of any effective Built Environment Accessibility Standard."It also stated:"We remain frustrated that the Government is now only dealing with new construction and renovations to the existing built environment. It has not announced any specifics on how or when it plans to deal with retrofits of barriers in the existing built environment that are not undergoing any renovations. It has previously committed that it would eventually address those retrofits through the standards development process."Four months later, in December 2012, the Government enacted the Public Spaces provisions of the IASR. It was clear to us that the Community and Social Services Ministry was far ahead of the Municipal Affairs and Housing Ministry in its work and its commitment to this issue. From the outside, it appeared that the Community and Social Services Ministry had hived off the Public Spaces part of the Built Environment Accessibility Standard, in hopes of moving forward more quickly and making some progress despite the manifest foot-dragging at the Municipal Affairs and Housing Ministry. It was our perception that the delay at the Municipal Affairs and Housing Ministry came at least as much from the public servants within that ministry, as from the lack of political leadership on this issue. It was well over two years after the Built Environment Standards Development Committee submitted its final recommendations to the Government in 2010, before we saw the glacial activity at the Municipal Affairs and Housing Ministry start to pick up. That ministry's Building Code officials then went through a long process of consultations that led to Ontario Building Code accessibility amendments that were enacted by the Ontario Cabinet as regulations in December 2013. That was well over two years after Premier McGuinty promised on August 19, 2011 that the Built Environment Accessibility Standard would be enacted "promptly" as a priority.c) Reflections on the Promised Built Environment Accessibility Standard We acknowledge the advantages of including accessibility requirements in the Ontario Building Code. Builders look to the Ontario Building Code for directions on what a building must include. Builders likely know little if anything about the Human Rights Code, and even less about the AODA. However, there are major disadvantages to the Government having gone the Ontario Building Code route. As these Building Code accessibility amendments were being developed, we were told time and again that there are some accepted conventions in the Building Code. These led the Government to feel constrained about how effectively it could deal with built environment barriers in that legislation. For example, when we proposed a specific requirement to the Government, we were baldly told that this would be problematic "due to cost." We have taken the position that the simple fact that an accessibility requirement can occasion some costs cannot of itself stop the Government from imposing it. Under the Human Rights Code, cost can justify a denial of accessibility only where it would cause an organization undue hardship.As we understand it, the Ontario Building Code amendments do not take the approach of requiring an accessibility measure, but exempting an organization from that requirement if its cost would cause that organization undue hardship. We understand that crafting a requirement in that way is not a convention that is typically used in the Ontario Building Code. Instead, the Ontario Building Code simply imposes accessibility requirements, but they are watered down to avoid any chance of an organization having a claim that they would impose costs amounting to an undue hardship.Such "conventions" should not be treated as if they were engraved in stone. The AODA and Human Rights Code prevail over laws that provide lesser accessibility protections. It is troubling that the Government in effect hacked this major part of the built environment away from the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario, the public agency that has led the process of developing accessibility standards. It gave it instead to the Municipal Affairs and Housing Ministry. That Ministry has a sorry track record on built environment accessibility. Indeed, when our predecessor coalition, the Ontarians with Disabilities Act Committee, was advocating for the AODA from 1994 to 2005, it saw a need to wrench the built environment's accessibility away from the public officials who had had responsibility for it for years at the Municipal Affairs and Housing Ministry. This was because their track record on this issue was so poor. Their delays in dealing with this issue, once the Government re-assigned it to them after the Built Environment Standards Development Committee finished its work in 2010, demonstrated that this long, troubling track record was to continue.It remains seriously problematic that the Government has to date not agreed to enact accessibility requirements in an AODA accessibility standard, that replicate the built environment accessibility provisions of the Ontario Building Code, as amended in 2013. As demonstrated in this Part of this brief, we have made this request of the Government, but it simply has not responded.The Government is in clear breach of its promises to us. What we were promised was a Built Environment Accessibility Standard, to address the physical barriers in the built environment. Only the small slice of the built environment is addressed in the Public Spaces provisions of the IASR. The rest is all addressed, if at all, only under the Ontario Building Code. That is not an AODA accessibility standard.We were not consulted before the Government decided to take this approach. We have not and do not agree with it as the sole way to regulate accessibility barriers in the built environment inside buildings.We need these Ontario Building Code built environment accessibility requirements to be replicated in an accessibility standard enacted under the AODA, so that we can have the benefit of their enforcement under the AODA. Ontario's Building Code enforcement is conducted by municipal building inspectors, whom the Ontario Government does not hire. We have no way to track how well they are trained, nor how seriously they take these accessibility requirements, nor how effectively they enforce them, without having to shoulder the enormous task of tracking each municipality across Ontario.In addition to those municipal inspectors, any provincial official with AODA inspection or auditing authority should be able to include these accessibility requirements in their enforcement activities. It would be absurd for an AODA compliance order, audit, inspection, enforcement proceeding, appeal, or monetary penalty to disregard unlawful accessibility deficiencies in an organization's built environment.We also need these Ontario Building Code built environment accessibility requirements to be replicated in an accessibility standard under the AODA, so that we have full recourse to a five-year review of them through the process which the AODA makes mandatory. Ontarians with disabilities fought long and hard for that process to be enshrined in law. The Government's process for review of the Ontario Building Code does not include all those safeguards. Long experience with the Ontario Building Code also shows that the Ontario Building Code review process has been systemically deficient at effectively addressing the needs of persons with disabilities.It is fundamentally unacceptable that it took from 2005, when the AODA was passed, to 2015, for these Ontario Building Code accessibility requirements to go into effect. That is halfway through the twenty years that the AODA allocates for Ontario to become fully accessible. That in turn means that for the first ten of those twenty years, the AODA did nothing to prevent the creation of new built environment barriers, much less to deal with eliminating old built environment barriers in buildings that will otherwise undergo no major renovations. It makes this sad picture even worse that, as noted earlier, the Government has not kept its promise to address retrofitting of the built environment, in the context of residential housing, and of buildings that are not undergoing a major renovation, through a standards development process. As documented earlier, in response to direct advocacy efforts by us and others in the disability community, the Government promised this in July 2009, to begin after the Government had enacted requirements to deal with barrier-prevention in new construction and major renovations. That work was completed in December 2013, half a year ago. We have repeatedly referred to this commitment in correspondence with the Government and in discussions with public officials at all levels. No Government official has denied that this commitment was made. However, whenever we raise this with the Government, we are typically met with blank stares. It is clear to us that the public service has been given no directions to take any action on this. The Government's 2009 commitment to this effect was on a web page that the Government has since taken down from the internet. This is because it was part of a posting, discussed earlier, where the Government made public, for public comment, the Built Environment Standards Development Committee's initial proposed Built Environment Accessibility Standard. The Government has an unfortunate practice of taking down any such postings for public comment after the consultation period expires. However, that announcement, including this specific commitment, is preserved on our website, and is available to be viewed at Part of that 2009 Government commitment, as noted earlier is to address barriers in residential housing through the standards development process. Yet, as documented earlier in this Part of this brief, the Government has never positively responded to our call that the next three standards that the Government should create should include one to address residential housing. To the contrary, when the Government was finally driven to say something in public about the next standards to be developed, under the pressure of the 2014 Ontario election campaign the Government only spoke of accessibility standards to address education and/or health care. That purported to take an accessibility standard to address residential housing right off this table, contrary to its 2009 commitment." b) What the final report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review FoundThe findings in the 2014 final report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review confirmed the need for a comprehensive Built Environment Accessibility Standard. It identified the barriers in the built environment, including as a priority – one which the AODA's implementation to date had not adequately addressed. It also emphasized the need to address the unaddressed issue of retrofitting the existing built environment, where accessibility barriers persist. Key passages in the final report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review include:* "The issue of retrofits to remove existing barriers was a particular subject of discussion during the consultations. Current accessibility requirements apply to new buildings and extensive renovations as well as to newly constructed or redeveloped public spaces. They do not call for the retrofitting of the built environment, but many in the disability community and in the business sector do not realize this. As a result, people with disabilities may feel betrayed when they encounter physical barriers, while some businesses are turned against accessibility by what they fear will be high retrofit costs."* "Built EnvironmentPerhaps the most overwhelming number of concerns with barriers were those raised about the built environment, specifically access to buildings and public spaces. Again, many examples were cited to the Review – including provincial government offices located in inaccessible premises, or even relocating to inaccessible buildings. Participants told of brand new private sector buildings with no power doors, a new city park that was inaccessible to people with mobility devices, and hospital renovations completed without way-finding for people who are blind. A new playground banned children in wheelchairs from using a splash pad because it was felt the wheels could damage the surface.Perhaps the most overwhelming number of concerns with barriers were raised about the built environment.Many people also reported that facilities that are marked accessible may not be in fact. A Thunder Bay woman who uses a wheelchair found that supposedly accessible washrooms in a recently renovated city hall and hospital could not accommodate her and she was told it would cost too much to fix them now. Restaurants that advertise as accessible often have stairs and don’t have power doors and accessible washrooms. A small business owner reported that most business networking events are inaccessible – and invited anyone who wants to see how accessible Ontario is to borrow her wheelchair for a day."* "Built EnvironmentAs mentioned above, the current Built Environment Standards do not cover retrofits to remove existing barriers. Many disability stakeholders argued that this must change. They pointed out that barriers in buildings mean people with disabilities cannot use them, whether to shop, study, work, play or obtain services from health care to driver’s licences. During the Review, considerable discussion of retrofits arose in different sectors. Many concerns were raised about the built environment in health care, such as lack of elevators to doctors’ offices and inaccessible hospital washrooms. A strong view was expressed that all health care facilities in particular should be physically accessible to people with disabilities. The importance of access to buildings was also underlined in the education sector. In the housing sector, a suggestion was made for retrofits of all apartment suites to install power door openers. Generally speaking, the Review heard that if accessibility standards were expanded to require building retrofits, it would be necessary to create exemptions in cases of undue hardship. For example, some people with disabilities who contended that the AODA should require retrofits of ramps and door openers felt this should apply only where it can be done without undue hardship. Other disability stakeholders observed that such exemptions would be inconsistent with the usual approach under the Building Code, which is to impose accessibility requirements without providing for exceptions if the cost would result in undue hardship. It was argued that this usual practice should be overlooked if it stands in the way of retrofits to improve accessibility.Some municipalities expressed concerns about enforcement of the Design of Public Spaces (DoPS) Standard. They pointed out that there is no mechanism for verifying that a project has met DoPS requirements, or that exemptions are justified, prior to construction. The building permit process will ensure compliance with the recent Building Code amendments, but does not cover the DoPS standards. Hence municipalities could be put in the position of approving site plans or building permits that contravene the AODA regulations. Problems will likely not come to light until complaints are made after construction, when it will be more costly or impossible to fix them. Proposed solutions include utilizing the building permit process or the site plan control process to review projects and consider exemption requests, or having a provincial body like the ADO do this. It was pointed out that if existing municipal processes are used, provincial funding would be required to cover the additional costs.Barriers in buildings mean people with disabilities cannot use them. The Review also heard a number of other comments with regard to accessibility in the Built Environment. With regard to on-street parking, disability stakeholders observed that the only obligation is for consultation on the number, location and design of parking spaces. They felt that specific requirements should be spelled out so people with disabilities do not have to lobby on this issue in every community. One Toronto participant also noted that many elevators cannot handle the weight of modern wheelchairs, and suggested adjusting the Building Code to include a minimum capacity for public lifts of 800 pounds. People with environmental and multi-chemical sensitivities pointed out that the Built Environment Standard as proposed by the standards development committee included air quality and ventilation provisions. They were extremely disappointed to find that these requirements did not appear in the final regulations."* "As noted earlier, the Built Environment standards have been split between two different regulations. Standards affecting the accessibility of buildings have been incorporated into the Building Code, while standards for public spaces have been included in the IASR. Some disability stakeholders called for re-enactment of the Building Code accessibility provisions, including the 2013 amendments, as a regulation under the AODA. In this way, all Built Environment requirements would be subject to the AODA enforcement mechanism as well as to the five-year standards review process."* "The gap that stood out most clearly from the perspective of this Review concerned the built environment and the issue of retrofits. As mentioned earlier, of all the barriers facing people with disabilities, those involving the built environment attracted the most comment during the Review. Yet, as noted above, barriers in existing facilities – as opposed to those in new construction or renovations – are not covered by the current accessibility standards, leading to much frustration in the disability community. The Review repeatedly heard that in the absence of an obligation to ensure that the built environment eventually incorporates at least some accessibility features, it will be very difficult to celebrate the Ontario of 2025 as a leader in accessibility. At the same time, it is also very clear that retrofit obligations (which many assume are already part of the AODA standards) can be costly undertakings and imposing any new obligations in this regard requires sensitivity.Ontario could begin to address this issue by considering standards resembling the U.S. Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) regulations which require private facilities that provide goods or services to remove existing architectural barriers where this is “readily achievable, i.e., easily accomplishable and able to be carried out without much difficulty or expense.” (ADA Title III Regulations, section 36.304). This approach would lend itself to setting some priorities for accessibility enhancements, such as entry ways and washrooms (the two areas most frequently referred to in the consultations). Although by no means a full solution, beginning to address the built environment through a relatively modest option would significantly improve access for people with disabilities without generating major worries about cost. As is the case with all AODA standards, compliance with such a requirement would not relieve organizations of their obligation under the Human Rights Code to accommodate people with disabilities to the point of undue hardship. Individuals who believed their needs were not adequately met by “readily achievable” measures would still have the option of seeking recourse through the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario."* "The Review heard frequent comments that Ontario lags behind the United States in many aspects of accessibility, particularly when it comes to the built environment. Surely one factor in progress south of the border has been the tax incentives in place there since the early 1990s. Currently, a small business tax credit of up to $5,000 annually is available, equal to about 50 per cent of access costs – including barrier removal in facilities (such as widening a doorway, installing a ramp), provision of accessibility services (such as sign language interpreters), provision of printed material in alternate formats (such as large-print, audio, Braille), and provision or modification of equipment. As well, businesses of any size can take advantage of a tax deduction of up $15,000 per year for removal of barriers in facilities or vehicles. Ontario business groups have suggested the introduction of tax incentives and this possibility was also raised in the Beer Report. Tax measures could help to capture the attention of small businesses – and their accountants – and prompt them to go beyond the AODA requirements and see the business case for accessibility. However, any tax incentives should be designed to motivate firms, not simply to comply with AODA standards, but to exceed them in targeted ways."* "A.Align the accessibility provisions of the Building Code with the AODA. The Built Environment accessibility standards that affect buildings have been incorporated into the Building Code. It obviously makes sense from the industry’s point of view to have requirements for the construction and renovation of buildings consolidated in one place. Nonetheless, as the Review heard, this creates certain challenges. The main problem is that the Building Code accessibility amendments that will take effect in 2015 are not regulations under the AODA and are therefore not subject to the AODA process for standards review every five years or less. One proposed solution is to re-enact the Building Code amendments as a regulation under the AODA. In my mind, enacting the same regulation under two different laws would be confusing for stakeholders and legally dubious. I would prefer a simpler approach, such as inserting a provision in the IASR or the Building Code, or both, calling for review of the Code’s barrier-free design requirements through the AODA process. Municipalities also raised a further matter that may demand a quick response, concerning the enforcement of the Design of Public Spaces standards. The issue is that, unlike the Building Code, the DoPS standards have no provision for pre-construction approval of projects. Hence non-compliance will probably come to light only when people start using the public space. By then, it will be very difficult if not impossible to correct the error. I would advise the Government to reconsider this dimension of the DoPS standards as soon as possible."c) No Major Progress on the Built Environment under the AODA Since the 2014 Mayo Moran ReportOver the past four years, the former Ontario Government did not act on Mayo Moran's recommendations regarding the built environment. We tenaciously tried for the past four years since the Moran report, without success, to get effective action on the built environment from the Ontario Government. We raised it time and again with the Premier's office, and with minister after minister.Right near the end of its last term in office, on March 19, 2018, the former Government finally and commendably held a one-day summit on accessibility problems in the built environment. This included representatives from the disability sector, the public sector and design professionals. The former Ontario Government credited the AODA Alliance with the idea for holding this summit. We had been pressing that idea with the Government for months.On April 3, 2018, the AODA Alliance wrote the former Accessibility Minister, Tracy MacCharles, to summarize the key points raised at that summit. The former Ontario Government also released a less thorough, more sanitized summary of that summit. Our letter's summary includes:"* Ontario specific laws regulating the accessibility of the built environment, including the Ontario Building Code and the Design of Public Spaces (DOPS) Accessibility Standard enacted under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, do not ensure that a new building or major renovation will be accessible for people with disabilities. Recent construction that complies with these laws continues to include disability barriers. * Many among design professionals (like architects) and even those in the Building code field do not know that beyond the Ontario Building Code and AODA, organizations must also meet the higher accessibility requirements for people with disabilities in the Ontario Human Rights Code, and that it is no defence under the Ontario Human Rights Code to an accessibility barrier in the built environment that a building or other developed built environment complies with the Ontario Building Code and the AODA's DOPS Accessibility Standard. Indeed, introducing this forum, your Assistant Deputy Minister for the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario referred to there being two laws on point, the Ontario Building Code and the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act. No mention was then made of the Ontario Human Rights Code.* Your Ministry heard that many design professionals, including many architects, do not have a good working knowledge of the full spectrum of disability accessibility needs when designing the built environment. These needs go far beyond the important needs of people with mobility disabilities. They include the Needs that often go unaddressed or insufficiently addressed, of people with low vision or who are blind, people who are deaf, deafened or hard of hearing, people with learning, intellectual or cognitive impairments, people with fatiguing conditions or balance problems, and people with autism spectrum disorder, just to name a few.* There is nothing now in place under the AODA or the Ontario Building Code to address retrofits of any disability accessibility barriers in existing buildings where there is no major renovation underway. The 2014 final report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review pointed this out as a serious problem that the Government needs to treat as a priority. No action has been taken on this since then.* Even the Ontario Government has problems when it comes to ensuring that its own built environment is properly accessible. The example was given of a consultation session, held the week before this built environment forum, on the Ontario Government's plans for the new Toronto courthouse, planned for the heart of downtown Toronto. No people with disabilities were consulted on its design before its design was approved by the Ontario Government in a competitive bid process. The resulting design, chosen through a competitive bid process, turns out to have serious accessibility problems. These were pointed out at the disability consultation that the Ministry of the Attorney General held just the week before your built environment public forum.* Design professionals such as architects regularly present proposed designs to accessibility consultants which have real accessibility problems in the design. It then becomes the task of the accessibility consultant to recommend design changes. There is no assurance that these will be adopted.* In recent years, since 2012 for example, accessibility in newer buildings has too often been getting worse, not better.* Commendably, a number of municipalities in Ontario have been taking positive steps to fill the gaps that are left by Ontario's inadequate Building Code and AODA accessibility standards. Many Ontario municipalities have commendably enacted their own stronger local standards for the accessibility of new built environment in their municipality, that exceed the Ontario Building Code and AODA DOPS standard. These are of course helpful. However, they leave Ontario as an inconsistent patchwork, with different accessibility requirements for the built environment in different parts of the province. Obligated organizations, people with disabilities and design professionals would benefit from Ontario enacting a single, strong, consistent built environment accessibility standard for the entire province. * Where the DOPS accessibility standard addresses some barriers, it is often too vague. For example, it requires a public service counter to be at an accessible height with sufficient knee space. However it does not specify what those dimensions should be. That unfairly burdens each obligated organization and design team to try to figure those out for themselves, and hope they get it right. * Even the limited accessibility requirements in the Ontario Building Code and the AODA DOPS Standard are not effectively enforced. For example, an organization can get a building permit or site plan approval for a project without having to show that it fulfils the accessibility requirements in either law. It is not clear that a building, once built, is inspected for compliance with all existing accessibility requirements. If an organization gets a building permit, it is permitted to build to the approved design, even if new stronger accessibility requirements go into effect before a single shovel goes into the ground to start the actual construction. * There has been a good deal of discussion among design professionals about the examples of disability barriers that are depicted in the AODA Alliance's online videos about the accessibility problems at the new Ryerson University Student Learning Centre, and the new Centennial College Culinary Arts Centre. * After the AODA was enacted in 2005, the Ontario Government promised to enact a Built Environment Accessibility Standard. The Build Environment Standards Development Committee recommended major reforms in 2009-2010. However under the AODA, the Government only passed the DOPS Accessibility Standard, which left out most of the barriers that the Standards Development Committee had identified. 2013 amendments to the Ontario Building Code did not adequately address what the Built Environment Standards Development Committee had recommended.* In 2009, the Government promised to address retrofits and barriers in residential housing through the AODA standards development process, once the Government passed an accessibility standard to address new construction and major renovations. Yet nothing has been done about this.* The exemption of residential homes from the Ontario Building Code's accessibility provisions has contributed to the shortage of accessible housing for people with disabilities in Ontario.* Professional training to qualify as a design professional such as an architect does not require sufficient training on disability accessibility in the built environment.* A key area not now covered by the Ontario Building Code or AODA accessibility standards concerns the location and operation of elevators. Ontario needs clear and strong accessibility standards regarding elevators. * Infrastructure Ontario, which is responsible for much of the Ontario Government's new construction, does not sufficiently address disability accessibility in its standards and practices.* The Ontario Government's Alternative Finance and Procurement (AFP) approach to building new Government buildings and conducting major renovations, involving private sector organizations that bid for the project, is quite problematic from an accessibility perspective. The job goes to the lowest private sector bidder. There is an incentive created to cut important corners on accessibility to save money on the project.Arising from the forum's discussion were several good recommendations. We offer this list which we supplement beyond those recommendations specifically mentioned during that forum:The Government should begin by now publicly recognizing that there is a problem with the inaccessibility of the built environment in Ontario. It should undertake to launch a concerted and comprehensive strategy that will address new construction, major renovations, and the retrofit of existing buildings that are undergoing no major renovations, using feedback from the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal complaints and findings, and the Ontario Human Rights Commission's policies and advice.The Government should develop and enact a comprehensive Built Environment Accessibility Standard under the AODA, ensuring that it effectively addresses accessibility retrofits in existing buildings, as well as accessibility in new construction and major renovations (not limited to those covered in the DOPS accessibility standard). Among other things, the new and comprehensive Built Environment Accessibility Standard should include additional accessibility requirements for elevators that are not currently addressed by the requirements in the Ontario Building Code and other provincial laws.The Government should direct each AODA Standards Development Committee now in operation to make recommendations on standards for the built environment as it relates to the area that that Standards Development Committee is studying. For example, the Transportation Standards Development Committee should be directed to make recommendations for accessibility in public transit stations and stops.The Government should create a Residential Housing Accessibility Standard under the AODA, and should promptly appoint a Standards Development Committee to make recommendations on what it should include.The Government should announce a comprehensive strategy on accessible housing to address the current and growing crisis in accessible housing in Ontario, in addition to creating an AODA accessibility standard on point).The Government should strengthen enforcement of accessibility in the built environment. For example, it should require that before a building permit or site plan approval can be obtained for a project, the approving authority, municipal or provincial, must be satisfied that the project, on completion, will meet all accessibility requirements under the Ontario Building Code and in all AODA accessibility standards. The Government should require professional bodies that regulate or licence key professionals such as architects, interior designers, landscape architects, and other design professionals, to require detailed training on accessible design, to qualify for a license, and continuing professional development for existing professionals. The Government should also require, as a condition of funding any college or university that trains these key professions, that their program curriculum must include sufficient training on accessibility and universal design. This should be designed to ensure that no new graduates in these fields will make the same mistakes as too often is the case for those now in practice. The Government should substantially reform the way public sector infrastructure projects are managed and overseen in Ontario, including a major reform of Infrastructure Ontario. Accessibility needs to be addressed far earlier, and more effectively in every project. This should include a requirement that accessibility advice be obtained on all major projects starting at the very beginning, during master planning, feasibility studies, and functional programming, with any accessibility advice that is received being made public. This input should also be obtained through consultations with people with disabilities. Any decisions to reject any accessibility advice should be tracked, identifying who made that decision and the reasons why. That information should promptly be publicly reported. The accessibility requirements under consideration as a requirement for a contract for any infrastructure should be made public as soon as possible, with enough time before the start of the bidding competition to allow for feedback and adjustments. It is too late to make this public only after the bidding competition. The Government should require post-project accessibility commissioning inspections which would include compliance with the project specific output specification accessibility requirements as well as the Ontario Building Code and AODA accessibility standards. Any accessibility deficiencies found should be required by contract to be the financial responsibility of the Project Company who built the project to fix them.The Government should require that when public money is used to create new public housing, 100% of that housing should include universal design and visit-ability as mandatory design features.The Government should create a fund for accessibility retrofits to increase the number of public buildings that agree to make their property available to the public as an emergency shelter, during a crisis or natural disaster."We emphasize that what was raised at that summit was or should have been well-known to the Government for years, both at the political level and amongst its public servants. In our April 23, 2018 letter to the former Accessibility Minister Tracy MacCharles, we made the following action recommendations, which the former Ontario Government did not act upon:"5. Immediately Launch the Process to Recruit a Built Environment/Public Spaces Standards Development CommitteeAs noted earlier, the Government was required to commence a Standards Development Committee review of the 2012 Public Spaces Accessibility Standard by the end of 2017. As far as we have seen, the Government has not done so, nor has it announced a date on which it will begin this process. This is a contravention of the AODA.We ask the Government to immediately post an announcement, inviting members of the public to serve on a built Environment/Public Spaces Standards Development Committee. Setting up such a committee takes months, according to the Government's recent practices. We realize the Committee might not be appointed by the June 7, 2018 Ontario election. However the Government should now get this process underway, so that the next Government, elected on June 7, can get right to work on this, rather than having to start from scratch. Immediate action is especially important since the Government has not met the mandatory time lines for commencing this process that the AODA imposes.We also ask you to direct that the mandate for this new Standards Development Committee will include reviewing needed action for the entire built environment, and not just the very limited parts of the built environment that the 2012 Public Spaces Accessibility Standard covers. The AODA itself requires the Government to address the entire built environment."The pervasive myth in our society is that older buildings lack accessibility because we did not know better, but now, new buildings of course ensure proper accessibility. In fact, new buildings often lack proper accessibility, and can be even worse than some older buildings. As mentioned elsewhere in this brief, the AODA Alliance has over the past two years released three online videos. These show how new and recently renovated construction can and does comply with the Ontario Building Code and AODA accessibility standards, while still including serious accessibility problems. See the November 2016 AODA Alliance video on accessibility problems at the new Centennial College Culinary Arts Centre, the October 2017 AODA Alliance video on accessibility problems at the Ryerson University Student Learning Centre and the May 2018 AODA Alliance video on accessibility problems at new and recently-renovated Toronto area public transit stations. The fact that these videos secured so much media attention and went viral on the internet shows how serious a problem this is.This all leads to these conclusions: The former Ontario Government's decision to carve the built environment largely out of AODA accessibility standards and to only address it in the Ontario Building Code was wrong. It set Ontario back. Its failure to keep its August 19, 2011 election promise to enact the promised Built Environment Accessibility Standard promptly also set Ontario back. its failure to act effectively on the 2014 Mayo Moran recommendations to address retrofits in existing built environment further set Ontario back.Here is a sample of the kinds of barriers that can be included in new construction and in major renovations in Ontario, without running afoul of the weak accessibility provisions in the Ontario Building Code and the very few built environment accessibility provisions in AODA accessibility standards:Areas of Refuge - In the event of fire when elevators cannot be used, areas of refuge (aka rescue assistance) are not required in buildings that are sprinklered or that have fire separation. These spaces are not consistent with International Building Code (IBC) and NPFA. should be in each exit stair to provide the same travel distance, that are smoke protected spaces in all exit stair landing entry points with a 2-way voice communication system for use between each area of rescue assistance and the central alarm and control facility as per the International Building Code (IBC) and NPFA (National Fire Prevention Association).All Emergency Exits need not be accessible – and where they aren’t accessible there’s no way to tell which are accessible and which aren’t.In public buildings, no accessible tactile wayfinding is required for larger open areas from each entry point to the site to the closest entrance or from the entrance to the reception desk or the elevator directory or from each elevator lobby on non-entry floors to the directional signage or to the main entrances to the suites on each floor.Amphitheatre seating, also known as Hangout Steps is permitted despite accessibility problems – Although this is fixed seating spaces that don’t have chairs and although each bench level is technically a drop-off they are installed without integrated accessible seating with a choice of viewing spaces and the drop-offs do not include the required tactile attention indicators (TAI). The stairs do not have handrails on both sides or the TAI at each bench level.No Service Animal Relief Areas are required on site close to an entrance or inside a secured building, like a courthouse. The number of working dogs and animals has increased to accommodate the needs of those who are blind, deaf, have seizures, are diabetic, have anxiety, have autism, or are quadriplegic. Signage – No accessible signage requirements to ensure consistent design and braille use. That directional signage and elevator lobby directories do not include braille, consistent placement in proximity to the door, braille does not have to translate all of the words on the sign, signage text is not size based on viewing distance, overhead signage has no strategy for tactile with braille alternative.No accessibility requirements for Kitchens and Kitchenettes.No accessible requirements in Change/Dressing Rooms – path of travel throughout the space, with in room accessible washrooms and showers, individual change rooms for those with opposite sex attendants, with accessible lockers, accessible benches for transfer, space for assistive mobility equipment.No accessibility requirements in Offices, Classrooms, Work Areas and Meeting RoomsNo accessible Lockers – Colour contrast so one can see the door, accessible controls so one can open the door, accessible height hooks and shelves, accessible signage that is colour contrasted and includes braille.No broad requirement for Assistive Listening Systems – the code only requires assistive listening systems for large meetings, classrooms and auditoriums with a specified number of occupants. All of these spaces no matter what their size need these systems. Elevators and reception desks need these systems. Electronic kiosks can be installed an maintained that lack proper accessibility features. Even in Ontario where the AODA Information and Communication Standard requires some obligated organizations to include or consider accessibility features in new electronic kiosks, the specific accessibility features of accessible kiosks are not stipulated in the standard or the building code. iSecurity Systems do not need to include accessibility feature requirements. Proximity sensors do not include braille so someone who is blind knows what the box is for. Some include green and red lights to indicate if the door is open or closed but for someone who is colour blind the light means nothing and with no audible tone, people who are blind cannot see the colour.As but one illustration of this in practice, in the fall of 2017 and early 2018, we unearthed and revealed that the former Ontario Government was planning to build a massive new courthouse in the middle of downtown Toronto that was replete with serious accessibility problems. This was so even though the former Government claimed that this new courthouse would meet or exceed accessibility requirements and would be a model of accessibility. Our interventions have reduced but not eliminated these accessibility concerns. The April 9, 2018 AODA Alliance Update included:"Here is more proof that Ontario needs strong new action now to ensure that our built environment becomes accessible to people with disabilities. Back on October 5, 2017, the AODA Alliance wrote Ontario's Attorney General, to raise serious concerns about the Wynne Government's plans to build a huge new courthouse in the middle of downtown Toronto, without effectively ensuring that this facility has full accessibility for court participants and attendees with disabilities. As a result of our efforts, on March 14, 2018, the Government commendably held a consultation on the proposed design for this courthouse, with representatives from the disability community, including from the AODA Alliance. At this meeting, the Government shared the drawings for this new courthouse which the Government has selected after a competitive bidding process. At this meeting, the disability community representatives quickly identified a number of significant accessibility problems with the proposed design of the building. On April 6, 2018, the AODA Alliance again wrote the Attorney General for Ontario. We set out that letter below. In it, we describe a number of the serious accessibility problems that the Government was told about at this consultation meeting. The Attorney General has not yet responded to our earlier October 5, 2017 letter. We await word from the Government on what it plans to do to alter the design of the New Toronto Courthouse to address our accessibility concerns. Our feedback is now being studied. Several important points spring from this incident. First, contrary to its 2014 election promises, the Government is not effectively ensuring that it will not use public money to create new disability barriers. Second this is further proof that Ontario needs a strong new strategy to address disability barriers in Ontario's built environment more generally. We need AODA standards and the Ontario Building Code's accessibility provisions substantially improved. Third, we need Ontario's design professionals, like architects, to receive substantially improved professional training on disability and accessibility, to avoid problems like this new court's design."d) The Ontario Government Should Not Invest Public Funds In or Support Any Private Accessibility Certification Process in OntarioFor a time several years ago, the former Ontario Government toyed with the idea of supporting the establishment of a private accessibility certification process in Ontario. It evidently spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on a private consulting firm, Deloitt, to explore this. Eventually, after Economic Development Minister Brad Duguid was shuffled out of the AODA portfolio in June 2016, this idea was in effect dropped. We opposed the idea of a private accessibility certification process and opposed the Government investing any public money in it. We urge this AODA Independent Review not to re-open that topic, and not to recommend a private accessibility certification process.The February 1, 2016 AODA Alliance Update set out this backgrounder on this issue, including a summary of the AODA Alliance's submission to the Deloitt consulting firm. It said:"Back on November 16, 2015, the Wynne Government launched a public consultation on its proposal that the Government create a private process for an as-yet-unnamed private organization to provide a private, voluntary accessibility certification of the obligated organization. The Government's November 16, 2015 email, news release and web posting on this were thin on details.The Government did not have its own Accessibility Directorate conduct this consultation. Instead, at public expense, the Wynne Government hired the private Deloitte firm to consult the public.Last fall, we moved as fast as possible to prepare and circulate a draft submission to Deloitte. It was emailed and posted on the web for public comment on November 25, 2015. We have repeatedly sent out invitations for input on it via Twitter and Facebook.Last fall, we promptly shared our draft submission with Deloitte and with senior Government officials. On December 5, 2015, we wrote Economic Development Minister Brad Duguid to ask for important specifics on the Deloitte consultation. The Government has not answered that letter. 2. Summary of the AODA Alliance's February 1, 2016 Submission to the Deloitte Company This submission's feedback on the idea of the Ontario Government financing the creation of a private accessibility certification process is summarized as follows:It is important to probe beyond any superficial attractiveness that some might think a private accessibility certification process has.It is important for the Government to first decide whether it will adopt a private accessibility certification process, before public money and the public's effort are invested in deciding on the details of how such a process would work. Several serious concerns set out in this submission are fatal to any such proposal, however its details are designed. Instead of diverting limited public and private resources, effort and time into a problematic private accessibility certification process, the Government should instead increase efforts at creating all the AODA accessibility standards needed to ensure full accessibility by 2025, and keeping its unkept promise to effectively enforce the AODA. A private accessibility certification process is no substitute for needed accessibility standards that show obligated organizations what they need to do, and a full and comprehensive AODA audit or inspection, conducted by a director or inspector duly authorized under the AODA.The Government cannot claim that it has deployed the AODA's compliance/enforcement powers to the fullest, and gotten from the AODA all it can in terms of increasing accessibility among obligated organizations. The Government has invested far too little in AODA enforcement. The entire idea of a private organization certifying an obligated organization as "accessible" is fraught with inescapable problems. Obligated organizations will ultimately realize that a so-called "accessibility certification" through a private accessibility certification process is practically useless. It does not mean that their organization is in fact accessible. It cannot give that obligated organization any defence if an AODA inspection or audit reveals that the organization is not in compliance with an AODA accessibility standard, or if the organization is subject to a human rights complaint before the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal. An obligated organization cannot excuse itself from a violation of the AODA, the Ontario Human Rights Code or the Charter of Rights by arguing that thanks to its private accessibility certification, it thought it was obeying the law. A private accessibility certification could mislead people with disabilities into thinking an organization is fully accessible in a situation where that organization is not in fact fully accessible.Obligated organizations that have spent their money on a private accessibility certification will understandably become angry or frustrated when they find that this certification does not excuse unlawful conduct. They will understandably share these feelings with their business associates. Ontarians with disabilities don't need the Government launching a new process that will risk generating such backlash. A private accessibility certification could have a very limited shelf-life. When the Government enacts a new accessibility standard (as it has promised to do in the area of health care), or revises an existing one, (as the Government is required to consider every five years in the case of existing AODA accessibility standards), that certification would have to be reviewed once new accessibility requirements come into effect.The Government's idea that a private accessibility certification process would be self-financing creates additional serious problems.Any private certification process raises serious concerns about public accountability. As such, the public will not be able to find out how it is operating, beyond any selective information that the Government or the private certifier decides to make public. Without full access to the activities and records of a private certifier, the public cannot effectively assess how this private accessibility certification process is working, and whether it is helping or hurting the accessibility cause…"e) What the Ford Government Has Said about Accessibility in the Built Environment and the AODAIn his May 15, 2018 letter to the AODA Alliance, setting out his party's 2018 election pledges on accessibility, Doug Ford wrote:"Ontario needs a clear strategy to address AODA standards and the Ontario Building Code's accessibility provisions. We need Ontario's design professionals, such as architects, to receive substantially improved professional training on disability and accessibility."On November 9, 2018, The Ford Government made a deeply disturbing statement to CBC news, suggesting that the accessibility of buildings does not fall within the AODA. The November 16, 2018 AODA Alliance Update includes:"The Government's November 9, 2018 statement to CBC includes a very disturbing new and clearly incorrect statement on the reach of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act. The CBC's November 13, 2018 news report does not address this issue. The Ford Government told CBC: "It is important to note that accessibility in buildings does not fall under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA), but under the Ontario Building Code. Accessibility requirements for buildings are included in Ontario’s Building Code to make it easier for organizations by ensuring that all construction requirements are found in one place. The Building Code is the responsibility of the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing."This is obviously untrue. Accessibility in buildings falls well within the AODA. It is true that the Ontario Building Code has provisions, albeit chronically insufficient ones, on accessibility in new buildings and in major renovations of existing buildings. However, it is incorrect for the Government to claim that accessibility of buildings is somehow outside the scope of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act.The very first section of the AODA specifically includes accessibility of buildings. It defines the scope and purpose of the AODA. Section 1 of the AODA provides:" 1. Recognizing the history of discrimination against persons with disabilities in Ontario, the purpose of this Act is to benefit all Ontarians by,developing, implementing and enforcing accessibility standards in order to achieve accessibility for Ontarians with disabilities with respect to goods, services, facilities, accommodation, employment, buildings, structures and premises on or before January 1, 2025; andproviding for the involvement of persons with disabilities, of the Government of Ontario and of representatives of industries and of various sectors of the economy in the development of the accessibility standards."Section 3(d) of the AODA makes the AODA apply, to among others, a person who:" (d) owns or occupies a building, structure or premises…" Section 6 of the AODA requires an accessibility standard to address, among other things, barriers in buildings. Section 6 includes:" (6) An accessibility standard shall,set out measures, policies, practices or other requirements for the identification and removal of barriers with respect to goods, services, facilities, accommodation, employment, buildings, structures, premises or such other things as may be prescribed, and for the prevention of the erection of such barriers;…" "The November 16, 2018 AODA Alliance Update later stated:"It is true that AODA standards to date have not comprehensively addressed disability accessibility barriers in the built environment. The former Ontario Government promised to enact a Built Environment Accessibility Standard, but did not ever do so. It only enacted a much narrower accessibility standard, addressing barriers in a limited number of public spaces.However, that does not mean that "accessibility in buildings does not fall under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act" as the Ford Government claims. It is very important for the Ford Government to correct this serious misunderstanding of its obligations under the AODA."7. The Need for the Ontario Government to Decide Promptly on the Other Accessibility Standards that Ontario Needs to CreateThe current Ontario Government took power at a pivotal point in time in the AODA context. The Government must decide promptly on what all the other accessibility standards are that will be created. This is because these all need to be created during this Government's current term, if Ontario is to reach full accessibility by 2025.We explained this need in the AODA Alliance's April 3, 2018 letter to the leaders of the major political parties. In that letter, we identified the election commitments on accessibility that we were seeking. On this issue we wrote:"Central to the AODA is the Government's duty to create and enforce accessibility standards in different sectors of our economy. These specify what obligated organizations must do to become accessible to people with disabilities. They help business and public sector organizations know what to do. They contribute to the profitability and success of these organizations.We need the Ontario Government to develop and enact new accessibility standards. The AODA requires the Ontario Government to enact all the accessibility standards needed to ensure that Ontario becomes fully accessible to people with disabilities by 2025. The accessibility standards enacted to date will not ensure that Ontario becomes fully accessible by 2025, even if they are fully complied with. While helpful, they are too weak and limited.It can take years to develop a new accessibility standard. With only eleven (Sic. 6.75) years left to reach 2025, it is necessary for the Ontario Government in the next term to ensure that all accessibility standards are developed and enacted that will ensure that the 2025 goal is reached."We do not here list all the additional accessibility standards that the Ontario Government needs to create. The Ontario Government should consult people with disabilities on this. Beyond areas addressed earlier in this chapter, one additional area which current accessibility standards do not cover, and which we know is a pressing need, is the accessibility of goods and products. No current accessibility standards address this in a comprehensive way. The Information and Communication Accessibility Standard explicitly excludes product labelling from its reach. Among the few products or goods that are directly covered, in some degree (albeit insufficiently), are new public transit vehicles (under the Transportation Accessibility Standard), new playgrounds (under the Public Spaces Accessibility Standard), teaching books and like materials used by education organizations (addressed by the Information and Communication Accessibility Standard) and electronic kiosks installed by some organizations. (under the Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation). Those requirements address organizations that purchase and deploy such products and goods, but not the organizations that manufacture or create products. Ontario needs a Goods and Products Accessibility Standard to implement principles of universal design in the design of goods and products.A prompt and proper public consultation would no doubt identify other accessibility standards that Ontario needs to create, beyond the need, addressed in Chapter 3, to substantially strengthen the accessibility standards that have already been enacted, as well as the Health Care Accessibility Standard and Education Accessibility Standard (which were already under development before the 2018 Ontario election, and the work on which the current Government has frozen).8. Developments Since the June 2018 Ontario ElectionDoug Ford's May 15, 2018 letter to the AODA Alliance, setting out his party's election pledges on accessibility, included:"This is why we're disappointed the current government has not kept its promise with respect to accessibility standards. An Ontario PC government is committed to working with the AODA Alliance to address implementation and enforcement issues when it comes to these standards."The July 17, 2018 AODA Alliance briefing note for the new Minister for Accessibility and Seniors, Raymond Cho, includes:"d) The Development of New Accessibility Standards Has Been Too SlowThe main way that the Ontario Government is to lead Ontario to become fully accessible by 2025 under the AODA is by enacting and effectively enforcing all the accessibility standards that are needed to get Ontario to that goal. You will face the challenge that the Government has also fallen far behind on fulfilling its core duty under the AODA to develop and enact all the accessibility standards needed to ensure that Ontario reaches full accessibility by 2025. Section 7 of the AODA provides:"7. The Minister is responsible for establishing and overseeing a process to develop and implement all accessibility standards necessary to achieving the purposes of this Act."In 2005, the previous Government got a good start on developing the first round of needed accessibility standards. The original accessibility standards enacted by the end of 2012 address some new disability barriers in customer service, employment, transportation, information and communication, and in a very small part of the built environment, largely that outside buildings. These first AODA accessibility standards were a helpful start. However, they are limited in scope. The 2014 final report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review identifies several deficiencies with the accessibility standards that had been enacted up to then. Even if all obligated organizations fully comply with all of them on time, those accessibility standards will not ensure that Ontario reaches full accessibility by 2025, or at any future time. Since then, and over the past six years, the Government's work on developing new accessibility standards has proceeded, at best, at a painfully slow snail's pace. No new accessibility standards have been enacted since the end of 2012. For example, we have pressed the Government for over five years to develop the next accessibility standards in the areas of health care, education and residential housing. The Government must review each accessibility standard within five years of its enactment, with a view to revising the standard if needed to ensure that the AODA's goal of full accessibility is reached by 2025. Under the previous Government, only one of the existing accessibility standards, earlier enacted under Premier McGuinty, was revised. That was the 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard. It was by far the weakest accessibility standard enacted to date. The previous Government's revisions to it were, at best, only minor tinkering. They would not significantly strengthen it.Making this worse, the previous Government revised the 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard in a way that further weakened it, when we needed it strengthened. The previous Government took the backwards step of amending it so that private sector organizations with 20 to 49 employees no longer had to keep a written policy on customer service accessibility. They had to have a policy, but no longer had to have it in writing. They still had to train their employees on that unwritten policy, but no longer had to keep written records of the training conducted. These harmful amendments made the 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard virtually impossible to effectively enforce for private sector organizations with 20-49 employees. The previous Government thereby rewarded rampant law-breaking by amending that law to make that very law harder to enforce.In the past two years, the previous Government fulfilled its duty under the AODA to appoint Standards Development Committees to review the transportation, employment and information and communication provisions of the 2011 AODA Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation. However, by the time the previous Government's term came to an end, only one of those Standards Development Committees had delivered its final recommendations to the Government, the Transportation Standards Development committee. That committee's final recommendations were exceedingly weak and inadequate. If implemented, they will leave Ontario's transportation system replete with accessibility barriers. The Employment Standards Development Committee made public its draft recommendations in the 2018 spring. These too need to be substantially strengthened. The AODA requires the new Government to continue with the work of having those 2011 accessibility standards reviewed by the existing Standards Development Committees. It requires the new Government to consider what revisions to make to those standards. This includes considering what revisions are needed to the transportation accessibility standards provisions of the 2011 Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation that were delivered to the previous minister just before this spring's election campaign. We presented a detailed brief last summer to the Transportation Standards Development Committee. It identifies the improvements to the Transportation Accessibility Standard that the Government needs to make.Over the past five years, the previous Government did nothing effective to address the many disability barriers in Ontario's built environment, be they existing buildings or new buildings. Minor amendments were made in 2013 to the Ontario Building Code in 2013 on accessibility. These fell miles short of what Ontarians with disabilities need. They only deal with new buildings and major renovations to existing buildings. No comprehensive Built Environment Accessibility Standard has ever been enacted under the AODA. This is so despite the fact that in the 2011 election, Premier McGuinty promised that the previous Government would enact a Built Environment Accessibility Standard "promptly". In late 2014, the Moran Report of the 2nd AODA Independent Review emphasized the need to address the many continuing barriers in Ontario's built environment, even after a decade of the AODA's implementation. That included the area of retrofitting existing buildings (which the previous, Government had not address.It was only in March 2018, in its final weeks before the spring election, that the previous Government finally started to devote new attention to barriers in the built environment, including the topic of retrofitting existing buildings. In March 2018, the previous Government convened a very good experts' discussion forum on the built environment. At that forum, the previous Government heard what people with disabilities had told the Government for years – that the Ontario Building Code and AODA accessibility standards don't ensure an accessible built environment. A new building can fully comply with those laws, and still have serious accessibility barriers.The previous Government appointed two additional Standards Development Committees. These too Committees are right in the middle of their work. the Health Care Standards Development Committee was appointed in 2017 to make recommendations on what to include in a Health Care Accessibility Standard. The Education Standards Development Committee was appointed earlier this year to make recommendations on what to include in an Education Accessibility Standard. It has two branches. The K-12 Standards Development Committee was appointed to make recommendations regarding disability barriers in the school system. The Post-Secondary Standards Development Committee was appointed to make recommendations regarding disability barriers in colleges and universities.Right now, all Standards Development Committees have been frozen by the Ontario Public Service, pending briefing the new Government. It is important for these Committees to get right back to work. the previous Government cancelled the planned next meeting of the K-12 Education Standards Development Committee, set for June 21 and 22, 2018, pending the new Government taking office. People with disabilities have for years faced an accessible housing crisis. The AODA Alliance had been asking the previous Government for over seven years to create a Residential Housing Accessibility Standard under the AODA. The previous Government never did so, nor did it ever appoint a Standards Development Committee to make recommendations for one. This was so even though in the 2009 summer, the previous Government committed that it would address accessibility in the residential housing area, as well as the area of retrofits to the built environment in existing buildings, through the standards development process, once the promised Built Environment Accessibility Standard was enacted to address accessibility in new construction and major renovations. Once a Standards Development Committee is appointed, it takes years to develop a new accessibility standard. With less than six and a half years left before 2025, the Government must, in this term in office, ensure that all accessibility standards are developed and enacted that will bring Ontario to full accessibility by 2025. That means that the Government must promptly identify all the accessibility standards that need to be developed to ensure that Ontario reaches that goal on time. The current accessibility standards plus the promised Health Care Accessibility Standard, and, if created, an Education Accessibility Standard and a comprehensive Built Environment Accessibility Standard, are not enough to ensure that Ontario will reach that mandatory goal."That briefing note proposes priorities for the minister, amongst which are the following:“Immediately lift the Ontario Public Service's current freeze on the work of AODA Standards Development Committees, which have been working on recommendations for the Government in the areas of education, health care, employment, and information and communication. Free up the unduly narrow mandate of the Health Care Standards Development Committee that is now developing recommendations on what the Government should include in a Health Care Accessibility Standard, so it can consider any part of Ontario's health care system. The previous Government tried to restrict that Committee to barriers in the hospital sector. Yet there are disability accessibility barriers throughout Ontario's health care system. Patients with disabilities need to have access to the entire health care system, not just hospitals. With 2025 looming closer, we cannot afford to put off any consideration of barriers outside hospitals until some future date years from now. Get a Standards Development Committee appointed to develop recommendations on accessibility standards needed to address barriers in the built environment, in residential housing, and in existing buildings whether or not they are undergoing major renovations.One effective way to do this would be to fulfil the Government's overdue obligation under the AODA, which the previous Government failed to fulfil, to appoint a new Standards Development Committee to make recommendations on any revisions needed to the 2012 provisions of the Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation which address disability barriers in public spaces. That Committee should be mandated to make recommendations to the Ontario Government on what a comprehensive Built Environment Accessibility Standard should include, both to deal with new construction/renovations, and to deal with barriers in existing buildings, including residential housing. The Committee should be asked for recommendations for any revisions that can address barriers in the built environment, whether or not these were addressed in the existing standard. This should be part of a broader comprehensive strategy to ensure that Ontario's built environment becomes fully accessible to people with disabilities by 2025. In March 2018, the previous Government held a helpful forum on this topic. The Accessibility Directorate already has at hand good background on what is needed. The built environment accessibility requirements in the Ontario Building Code and in AODA accessibility standards are far too weak to ensure that either new or old buildings will ever be accessible to people with disabilities. Working with the AODA Alliance and the disability community, identify any other areas of our economy where an AODA accessibility standard will be needed, to ensure that Ontario reaches full accessibility by 2025. After that, the Government should appoint any Standards Development Committee needed to develop recommendations in for those sectors of the economy. Effectively improve Ontario's weak Customer Service Accessibility Standard, by bringing together representatives from the disability sector and obligated organizations to produce recommendations to strengthen the existing AODA Customer Service Accessibility Standard. The AODA Alliance has been calling for this for over three years. We and the ARCH disability Law Centre have offered a list of constructive, high-impact, low-cost reforms as a basis for discussion."The Minister's August 15, 2018 letter to the AODA Alliance did not specifically address any of these points. We do not know about anything The Ford Government is doing regarding the development of new accessibility standards, beyond its ongoing freeze on the work of the Health Care Standards Development Committee and the two Education Standards Development Committees. Chapter 5 The Need to Substantially Reform the Standards Development Process Under the AODA 1. IntroductionThis brief has already shown that an absolutely central part of the AODA is the enactment of effective accessibility standards that will ensure that Ontario becomes accessible by 2025. This brief has also already shown that the accessibility standards enacted to date, while helpful, are woefully insufficient to ensure that Ontario reaches accessibility at any time, much less by 2025.Much more needs to be done to develop sufficient accessibility standards in Ontario. At the same time, there is a pressing need to reform the standards development process under the AODA. The 2010 Charles Beer AODA Independent Review report recommended this. Our 2014 brief to the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review also demonstrated this. Events since our 2014 brief to Mayo Moran further demonstrate this. Part 5 of our June 30, 2014 brief to Mayo Moran showed that the reforms to the standards development process which the former Ontario Government implemented in response to the 2010 Beer report did not work. Events since 2014 further show this. The former Government eventually abandoned those reforms to the standards development process over the past two to three years, without announcing that it was doing so. We supported the Government's abandoning those reforms. This is because they had accomplished nothing positive, and, if anything, set back our progress. Since we submitted our brief to the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review in June 2014, further problems with the standards development process have come to light. Last spring, we called upon the former Government's minister responsible for the AODA, Tracy MacCharles, to implement a series of changes to the standards development process. These were well within her authority as minister. There was no need for new legislation or regulations to be enacted. Nevertheless, she did not make these changes. No reason was given for that failure to act.The need for reforms to Ontario's standards development process that we recommend in this chapter are reinforced by the current activities surrounding Parliament's consideration of Bill C-81, the proposed Accessible Canada Act. That bill incorporates some helpful improvements on Ontario's standards development process, though that federal bill too, requires strengthening, as our September 27, 2018 brief to Parliament on Bill C-81 demonstrates.2. Recommended Findings We urge this AODA Independent Review to find as follows:* There is a pressing need to reform the standards development process under the AODA. The problems with the standards development process that the 2010 final report of the Charles Beer AODA Independent Review identified remain present to this day. The former Ontario Government's attempt to address these by temporarily assigning the Accessibility Standards Advisory Council with responsibility for developing recommendations for all accessibility standards was a failure and was properly abandoned by the former Ontario Government by 2016.* The Ontario Government has been and remains in violation of the AODA, because it has thrice failed to appoint Standards Development Committees on time to conduct mandatory 5-year reviews of existing AODA accessibility standards by the AODA's deadline. This includes the former Ontario Government's failure to appoint the mandatory review of the 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard until sometime in 2013, and its failure up until it left office to appoint the mandatory review of the 2012 Public Spaces Accessibility Standard by the end of 2017 and the review of Part I of the 2011 Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation by 2016.* Since taking office in June 2018, the current Ontario Government has also not appointed the mandatory review of the 2012 Public Spaces Accessibility Standard, or the mandatory review of Part I of the 2011 Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation. * Once the former Ontario Government had decided to develop new accessibility standards in the area of education and health care, it took far too long to take the simple first step of appointing Standards Development Committees to start working on recommendations on what those accessibility standards should include. It took some two years for the former Ontario Government to appoint the Health Care Standards Development Committee and over one year to appoint the K-12 and Post-Secondary Education Standards Development Committees. It took that Government longer to set up any of these Standards Development Committees than it had taken the Government to develop the entire AODA legislation and introduce it for First Reading in the Legislature back in 2003-2004.* The new Ford Government has unjustifiably created further delays in reaching accessibility in Ontario, by its excessively-long freeze of the work of existing Standards Development Committees that were already appointed and working on their mandates before the June 7, 2018 Ontario election. It froze the work of the Employment Standards Development Committee and the Information and Communication Standards Development Committee for five months, and then lifted that freeze around November 2018. Its freeze on the work of the Health Care Standards Development Committee and the two Education Standards Development Committees has continued in effect up to the time of this brief. The Ford Government has indicated that it is awaiting the report of the current AODA Independent Review before deciding on whether to lift that freeze.* The former Ontario Government inappropriately tried to restrict or narrow the work of some of the AODA Standards Development Committees that it had appointed.* The Ontario Government has shrouded the work of Standards Development Committees in far too much secrecy, especially in recent years. * The mandatory minutes that each Standards Development Committee must keep and publicly post, regarding their meetings, are too often insufficiently detailed and informative to enable the public to know what these committees are doing, and have confidence in their work.* The former Ontario Government was wrong to require Standards Development Committees to have a 75% vote in support before a recommendation for an accessibility standard could be submitted to the Government, or for any other decision by a Standards Development Committee, e.g. a decision to approve an amendment to its minutes.* It put the cart before the horse for the former Ontario Government to require a Standards Development Committee in its first six months to set priorities for its work, before it had fully assessed which barriers exist in the area that the committee was assigned to study.* The former Government did not give the public sufficient advance notice of when it would be consulting on a proposed accessibility standard.* The Accessibility Directorate of Ontario has been overstepping its role, when supporting the work of Standards Development Committees, by attempting to inappropriately micromanage and influence the direction of their work and recommendations.* Standards Development Committees have not been effectively fulfilling their core role under the AODA to propose an accessibility standard for the Government to consider enacting. For example, in 2018 the Transportation Standards Development committee submitted recommendations that are in significant part made up of items that are not a proposal for revisions to the 2011 Transportation Accessibility Standard. * The recommendations from Standards Development Committees for revisions to the 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard and the 2011 Transportation Accessibility Standard, and the draft recommendations for revisions to the 2011 Employment Accessibility Standard, are all very weak, and dramatically less than people with disabilities need.* The standards development process requires much more extensive involvement by the Ontario Human Rights Commission.* Standards Development Committees have at times insufficiently consulted with the disability community, especially when formulating their draft recommendations.* Since 2013, the former Ontario Government has broken its 2007 election promise to provide dedicated staff support to disability sector representatives on Standards Development Committees.* In and after May 2018, the Government has inappropriately failed to consult the public on final recommendations it received for revisions to the 2011 Transportation Accessibility Standard from the Transportation Standards Development committee.* The Government' has repeatedly failed to comply with the statutory deadline for deciding on making an accessibility standard after a Standards Development Committee recommends one. * The former Government took the extraordinary and highly problematic step in June 2016 of purporting to amend parts of the 2011 Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation without first appointing a Standards Development Committee to review the relevant parts of that standard, a mandatory precondition under the AODA.3. Recommendations on Improving the Process for Developing New Accessibility Standards and Revising Existing StandardsWe urge this Independent Review to recommend as follows:There is a strong need for the standards development process under the AODA to be substantially strengthened so that it produces stronger accessibility standards that will fulfil the AODA's purposes.The Government should lead by example, by always ensuring that it meets all of its own deadlines set by the AODA, such as the deadlines for appointing Standards Development Committees 5-year mandatory reviews of existing AODA accessibility standards.The Government should immediately lift its freeze on the work of the Health Care Standards Development Committee, the K-12 Education Standards Development Committee, and the Post-Secondary Education Standards Development Committee.The Government should modify the Mandate Letter for the Health Care Standards Development Committee so that it ensures that that Standards Development Committee makes recommendations on barriers throughout the health care system, and not only or primarily regarding barriers in hospitals.The Government should ensure that the Standards Development Committees, appointed under the AODA to make recommendations on what an accessibility standard should include, can operate in a more open and accountable manner and are fully independent of Government. These should not be shrouded in secrecy and non-disclosure requirements. An independent Ontario Access Board should be created to conduct and oversee this work, that is fully independent of and arms-length from the Ontario Government.The Ontario Government should not try to get members of Standards Development Committees to sign non-disclosure agreements when inviting them to serve on an AODA Standards Development Committee.The Accessibility Directorate should provide effective dedicated staff support to the disability sector representatives on each Standards Development Committee.The Government should amend the Terms of Reference for Standards Development Committees, to allow them to make a recommendation on what an accessibility standard should include as long as that recommendation is supported by a simple majority of 50% of the voting members, at least half of which comprise representatives on the Committee from the disability sectorThe Accessibility Directorate should not direct Standards Development Committees that when they vote on other matters such as approving or amending Committee meetings' minutes, they require a 75% super-majority. A simple majority should be all that is required. Minutes kept by Standards Development Committees should be more detailed and informative. They should include minutes of any sub-committee and should have appended to them, as part of any public posting, any documents which are tabled with the Standards Development Committee to review. Minutes of meetings of a Standards Development Committee should accurately and comprehensively record the detailed issue-by-issue deliberations of that committee on accessibility standard proposals. They should be written in a fashion to make them fully understandable by members of the public who did not attend those meetings.The Ontario Government should not direct Standards Development Committees to decide, within their first six months of work, on priorities for their work.The Government should widely publicize the opportunity for community groups to request a chance to present to a Standards Development Committee, when it is developing proposals for an accessibility standard. Because several different AODA public consultations will be coming up, the Ontario Government should make public a schedule of all the forthcoming public consultations that will come up over the next 24 months under the AODA, and ensure they are not overlapping, so that the public can adequately prepare to participate in them all.The Government should now launch the process to recruit members of a new Standards Development Committee to comprehensively review disability barriers in the built environment, including those addressed in the 2012 Public Spaces Accessibility Standard.The Government should now appoint a Standards Development Committee to conduct the overdue mandatory 5-year review of Part I of the 2011 Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation.When it is developing proposals for the contents of an accessibility standard, the Government should strongly encourage a Standards Development Committee to extensively and publicly consult the public, including the disability community. As part of this, each Standards Development Committee should be encouraged to invite stakeholders from the disability community and regulated sectors to meet together with that Standards Development Committee, to informally discuss issues that a Standards Development Committee has found challenging to resolve.When a Standards Development Committee submits an initial or draft recommendation to the Government for the contents of a new accessibility standard, or for revisions to an existing accessibility standard, the Government should then convene face-to-face stakeholder meetings as one avenue for gathering input and should not restrict input to written submissions from the public. It is best when these meeting include stakeholders from all perspectives, rather than isolating disability sector from obligated organizations. When a Standards Development Committee submits to the Government a final proposal for the contents of a new accessibility standard, the Government should obey s. 9(7) of the AODA by the minister, responsible for the AODA, deciding within 90 days what to enact from that proposal. The Government should immediately make that decision public. When a Standards Development Committee is developing a recommendation for the contents of an accessibility standard, the Accessibility Directorate should provide to that committee, and post on the internet for public input, a review of measures adopted in other jurisdictions to advance the goal of accessibility for persons with disabilities in the area that the new accessibility standard or the existing accessibility standard under review is to address.The Human Rights Commission should be far more extensively involved in the formal and informal work of each Standards Development Committee, including during review of public input and discussion and votes on clauses of proposed accessibility standards. This could include having a representative of the Ontario Human Rights Commission sit on each Standards Development Committee, as they work on proposals for the contents of accessibility standards, whether as a voting member or a non-voting member.The Government should encourage each Standards Development Committee, when developing proposals for the contents of an accessibility standard, to identify where changes are needed to provincial or municipal legislation, regulations or bylaws, to advance the goal of a fully accessible Ontario.Standards Development Committees should fully fulfil their core mandates under the AODA by each recommending the specific contents of a proposed accessibility standard, or revisions to an existing accessibility standard. The accessibility standard or revisions to a standard that they recommend should be designed to meet the AODA's goal of achieving accessibility in Ontario by 2025. If they are to recommend any other measures at all, such as non-legislative measures, this should be secondary to their core mandate, and not the core of their recommendations.The Government should now conduct a robust consultation with the public on the Transportation Standards Development committee's final recommendations for revisions to the 2011 Transportation Accessibility Standard, because those recommendations are so weak.The Government should never attempt or purport to amend an AODA accessibility standard without first fulfilling the mandatory AODA requirement to appoint a Standards Development Committee to consider revisions to that accessibility standard.4. The former Ontario Government's Failed and Now-Abandoned Reforms to the Standards Development ProcessAs Part 5 of our 2014 brief to Mayo Moran explained, the 2010 Beer report had commendably recommended that the standards development process should be reformed to make it independent of the Ontario Government. We strongly supported and encouraged that recommendation. The Beer Report concluded:* "It is clear that changes to the standards development process are needed."* "I have reached the conclusion that an arm’s-length advisory body with ongoing responsibilities is required to bring greater focus, experience and expertise to the standards development process. What is needed going forward is focused, continuing attention by a dedicated group that can build the expertise required to review and develop credible accessibility standards.Amendments to the AODA will be required as I do not believe these changes can be accomplished under the current framework in the ernance ModelDetermining the governance model for the Ontario Accessibility Standards Board has been a particular challenge. In fact, many of the issues raised in the consultations on the standards development committee process related to governance questions. I have strived to respect the principle of inclusiveness in the AODA, while addressing the key issues that were raised about the current process.I began with a review of the language in section 1, the purpose clause, of the AODA. Recognizing the history of discrimination against persons with disabilities in Ontario, the clause:?Sets the goal for an accessible Ontario by 2025 through the development and implementation of accessibility standards, and?Requires the involvement of persons with disabilities, the government of Ontario and of representatives of industries and of various sectors of the economy in the development of those standards.I have concluded that for the standards development process to be effective going forward, the best approach is to ensure the inclusion of all the key players (the disability community, the provincial government and the other obligated sectors) from the beginning.The board members should be experienced individuals, able to bring the views of their sectors to the table but also practiced in consensus-building. I see the board process first and foremost as a collaborative one. The chair should be a high-profile individual with standing and credibility in the province who is highly skilled in facilitation and has experience working with boards in complex environments.Membership on the board would consist of 15 members, including the chair, who would be non-voting. Persons with disabilities or their representatives would have seven members (50 per cent representation) on the board, consistent with the government’s commitments made in 2007 for the standards development committees. The obligated sectors (broader public, private and not-for-profit) would be represented by six senior and experienced individuals knowledgeable about their own sectors and versed in government structures and processes. The provincial government would be represented on the board by a senior public servant. Various ministries would be involved through sectoral and technical committees.I appreciate that the proposed membership may at times introduce tension in the board’s decision-making process. I believe, however, that with an experienced chair and the commitment of board members to the goals of the AODA, this model can work.The following outlines the purpose, mandate, and roles and responsibilities of the new board.Purpose: To review and develop accessibility standards under the AODA and provide recommendations to the Minister Responsible for Accessibility.Mandate: To build expertise on accessibility standards development; conduct research and monitor national and international accessibility developments; conduct five-year reviews of accessibility standards as mandated by the AODA; advise the Minister Responsible for Accessibility on the need for new standards; and, on the direction of the minister, develop and harmonize proposed new standards and integrate them with other relevant legislation and government policy.Roles and Responsibilities: Similar to those outlined for the standards development committees in Part III (Accessibility Standards) of the AODA, with necessary modifications.Details on the roles and responsibilities of the new board would be articulated in proposed amendments to the AODA and in a memorandum of understanding between the board and the Minister Responsible for Accessibility and the ADO. These would include:?Review and revise accessibility standards in accordance with the AODA through an inclusive process, and submit proposed standards to the government for consideration as regulations?Advise the minister on the need to develop new standards?At the direction of the minister, develop new standards through an inclusive process, and submit proposed standards to the government for consideration as regulations?Support the ADO in the preparation of guidelines and other reference materials and in promoting partnerships to share knowledge and best practices, to further the implementation of the standards ?Develop a transparent and inclusive public consultation process, involving persons with disabilities, to support the review of both existing and proposed new standards?Establish appropriate technical and sectoral committees for the review and development of standards through a process of subcommittees reporting to the board, and establish procedures to guide the subcommittees?Ensure harmonization of the standards?Build expertise on the development and review of accessibility standards.Structure of Board CompositionThe composition of the board would consist of: ?the chair (non-voting)?seven representatives from among persons with disabilities or their representatives?six representatives from the obligated sectors, and?one provincial government representative (a senior public servant).Selection and Appointment of MembersThe chair and members would be appointed by the government through Order-in-Council. The government should develop selection criteria and recruitment strategies in consultation with stakeholders.Board SecretariatThe board would be supported by an executive director and a small, dedicated staff. Consideration should be given to transferring employees from the ADO to ensure continuity. At the direction of the board, the executive director would be responsible for operational activities, budget allocations, stakeholder engagement and liaising with the ADO. Part of the role of the secretariat would be to ensure that the board members from the disability community receive appropriate support. CommitteesThe board would be required to establish technical and sectoral committees to support the review of existing standards and development of new standards. I see the role of these committees as critical in advising the board on the content and form of the standards. The work of the committees must be transparent and accessible to the public and include input from the board’s consultation process.The board would need to establish a process for the committees including mandates, criteria for membership and the term of appointments. Accountability and ReportingThe board would be accountable to the minister and report to the minister on a regular basis. The board would be required to submit an annual report to the minister.Timeframe for Creating BoardThe first standard on customer service came into force on January 1, 2010 for the provincial government and the broader public sector. The government is now completing its review of three of the remaining four standards (information and communication, employment, and transportation) and I expect it to be preparing regulations for each. The built environment standard is still in the committee stage. As I have recommended above, it is imperative for the government to ensure that all five standards are fully harmonized. Once the five accessibility standards have become law and the AODA moves to the next phase of implementation, the new Ontario Accessibility Standards Board should commence its work.I, therefore, recommend that:The AODA be amended to establish an arm’s-length advisory body — the Ontario Accessibility Standards Board — to review and develop accessibility standards — replacing the standards development committee process. Interim Recommendations to Begin TransitionBecause the recommendation for a new board would require amendments to the AODA, it may take some time for the changes to take effect and the board to be established. I am therefore recommending the appointment of a director under the existing legislative framework to achieve some necessary interim steps. The director could be provided with sufficient authority to enable him or her to start the process of establishing the new board, until the proposed amendments to the AODA are considered by the legislature."We agree that Standards Development Committees should operate at arms-length from the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario, and other Ontario ministries. It would be preferable for these committees to operate more like the U.S. Access Board. Of course, Ontario's Cabinet would always have the ultimate and final say on what accessibility standards to enact as enforceable regulations. The former Ontario Government did not fully implement that recommendation. It did not open up the AODA for legislative amendments. We agreed at the time with the Government using ASAC to make recommendations on accessibility standards, and with the Government's not opening up the AODA. Our 2014 brief to Mayo Moran described the former Ontario Government's action on that recommendation as follows:"Since the start of 2013 one of the Government's few major initiatives to improve the AODA's implementation was its transferring responsibility for developing new accessibility standards, and for reviewing existing ones, to the Accessibility Standards Advisory Council (ASAC). Before 2013, the Government appointed separate stand-alone Standards Development Committees for each new accessibility standard to be developed. By this reform, ASAC would serve as a permanent Standards Development Committee, responsible for developing all proposals for the new accessibility standards that the Government assigned to it, and for reviewing any existing standard once it had been law for five years. By this reform, the Government could add additional members when ASAC acts as a Standards Development committee. Moreover, ASAC members can change over time, as they have fixed-term appointments. However, ASAC, as an organization, would be the permanent centre of gravity for standards development.We had commended the Government in 2012 and 2013 for this upcoming reform. This move resulted from the Beer AODA Independent Review report. By this reform, ASAC would develop expertise in crafting proposals for accessibility standards. It would not have to re-plough the same terrain each time it started on a new project, as would a stand-alone new Standards Development Committee. It could better ensure familiarity with the needs and views of the different stakeholders, business, the public sector and the disability community. This reform was expected to reduce the cost of developing new accessibility standards, without reducing the number of accessibility standards that could be developed at the same time, or the time needed to develop them. It was not expected that the ASAC members would constitute the sole Standards Development Committee for every new standard to be developed. Rather, it was expected that ASAC would establish subcommittees, including non-ASAC members that could work on more than one standard at a time. This reform was expected have the benefit of ensuring consistency in the development of different accessibility standards. This is because ASAC would be involved with and overseeing all this work at once. In the past, each separate Standards Development Committee operated in its own silo. We found and heard from Standards Development Committee members during development of the first accessibility standards under the AODA that this was frustrating for them. It led them at times to be working at cross-purposes." The former Government's action had the advantage that it could be implemented under the AODA, without requiring any amendments to that legislation. We did not want the Legislature to re-open that legislation.By the time we wrote our 2014 brief to Mayo Moran, we had had a chance to see how that reform had worked in practice for over one year. Our June 30, 2014 brief to Mayo Moran identified two problems with that reform, as follows:"First, when we pressed the Government to assign to ASAC the next three accessibility standards we want the Government to create, the Government raised with us concerns over whether ASAC could work on three new standards at the same time. It seemed to us that in 2013 and beyond, the Government thought that ASAC only had the capacity to work on one new accessibility standard at a time. Such a view flies in the face of the reason why the standards development process was reformed in this way in 2013. Viewed most charitably, it revealed a stunning lack of the most rudimentary institutional memory within the Government. As indicated earlier in this brief, had we been told that the Government would treat ASAC as only being able to work on one standard at a time, we would have strenuously opposed the assignment of this responsibility to ASAC. We would have stuck to the original standards development process, and urged the Government to appoint three new Standards Development Committees to separately develop new accessibility standards for education, health care, and residential housing.Second, the reformed ASAC's only substantive work product is very troubling. On March 3, 2014, the Government made public the reformed ASAC's proposal for revisions to the 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard. This proposal is very deficient." Events since our June 30, 2014 brief to Mayo Moran reinforce our concerns. As addressed further in Chapter 3 of this brief. The final recommendations which the Accessibility Standards Advisory Council submitted to the Government in late 2014 suffered from most if not all of the substantial deficiencies from which their spring 2014 preliminary recommendations had suffered. ASAC ostensibly ignored or rejected all the recommendations which the AODA Alliance had submitted. They gave no reasons for doing so. As a result, their final recommendations to the Government were very weak. They did not propose to significantly strengthen the weak 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard. They only recommended tinkering with it. In one key way, they proposed weakening it. As we explained in Chapter 3, the November 12, 2014 AODA Alliance Update included:"ASAC's proposals that were just made public are palpably weak, paltry and ineffective. They ignore most if not all of the detailed, constructive input that the AODA Alliance submitted to ASAC earlier this year. ASAC's proposals would do nothing significant to improve the accessibility of customer service in Ontario for people with disabilities.Making things worse, ASAC actually recommends that the Government cut back on the already-weak provisions of the existing Customer Service Accessibility Standard that was enacted in 2007. Its proposal would reduce obligations under that Standard for many of the very same private sector organizations which since January, in huge numbers, have been violating mandatory requirements in the 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard. The Government has known about those massive violations of the AODA since January 2013.If the Government adopted ASAC's flawed proposal, it would wrongly reward that massive law-breaking by reducing the obligations of those obligated organizations under the Customer Service Accessibility Standard. That would send the wrong signal to obligated organizations. Instead, the Government at last needs to keep its unkept promise to effectively enforce the AODA, rather than wrongly reducing the AODA obligations of organizations that have in massive numbers been violating this law with impunity.For the Government to follow ASAC's advice in this regard would also violate the Government's promise not to cut back on accessibility protections we have previously won. We call on the Wynne Government to confirm that it will keep its word to us, and that it will not cut back on any existing accessibility standards provisions.ASAC also proposes to preserve in the Customer Service Accessibility Standard a provision which should never have been there in the first place, because it wrongly creates a barrier against people with disabilities. An accessibility standard cannot create barriers against people with disabilities. An accessibility standard is supposed to tear down disability accessibility barriers.Now the 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard wrongly lets an organization dictate to a customer with a disability, in some situations, that the customer must bring his or her own support person at their own expense, or else entry can be barred. It wrongly lets the organization charge people with disabilities a second admission for that support person, even if the customer doesn't want a support person, or feel they need one. Rather than recommending that the Government repeal this unlawful provision in the 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard, ASAC merely recommends some minor tinkering with its wording."After ASAC's mandatory 5-year review of the 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard in 2013-2014, the former Ontario Government abandoned its earlier plan to assign ASAC to serve as the Standards Development Committee that would develop or oversee recommendations for the contents of all new accessibility standards, and that would conduct mandatory five-year reviews of all existing AODA accessibility standards. In 2017-18, the former Ontario Government appointed fully six new Standards Development Committees under the AODA. These included separate Standards Development Committees to:* Review the 2011 Transportation Accessibility Standard;* Review the 2011 Information and Communication Accessibility Standard; * Review the 2011 Employment Accessibility Standard;* Recommend what should be included in the promised Health Care Accessibility Standard;* Recommend what should be included in the promised Education Accessibility Standard for Kindergarten to Grade 12, and * To recommend what should be included in the promised Education Accessibility Standard for post-secondary education.ASAC did not itself serve as any of these Standards Development Committees. There was no indication that ASAC played any new oversight role, e.g. with each of these new Standards Development Committees serving as sub-committees under ASAC's coordination. As in the past, individual ASAC members were able to be appointed to a Standards Development Committee. However, these six new Standards Development Committees separately operated in substance the same way as the first five Standards Development Committees had operated from 2006 to 2010, i.e. on their own. The Government never announced that it was reverting back to that prior process, nor gave any reasons for doing so. To be clear, the AODA Alliance did not object to this reversion back to the earlier approach, because ASAC had earlier done such a poor job with the one accessibility standard that it had been given to review. That accessibility standard, the 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard, had been by far the weakest of all the accessibility standards that had been enacted under the AODA. It afforded ASAC an excellent opportunity to review it and recommend that it substantially strengthen it. After ASAC did such a poor job, we could have no confidence in ASAC's being involved with developing or reviewing any further accessibility standards.This left Ontario back in the situation we earlier faced when the Beer report commendably recommended in 2010 that Ontario should transfer the standards development process to an arms-length body akin to the US Access Board. We support Charles Beer's proposed reform to the standards development process, set out above. Over the past two years, as the Federal Government has been consulting on what to include in its promised national accessibility legislation, we have recommended that the Federal Government establish a new national body akin to the U.S. Access Board, that is independent of the Federal Government, and that can recommend model or draft accessibility standards to the Federal Government. We have applauded the Federal Government for proposing in Bill C-81, the proposed Accessible Canada Act, the establishment of a new Canadian Accessibility Standards Development Organization (CASDO). It is modeled after the U.S. Access Board. Our September 27, 2018 brief to Parliament on Bill C-81 recommends some fine-tuning of that proposal, e.g. to ensure its full independence from the Federal Government. In the same way, we would modify Charles Beer's recommendations, by proposing that a new AODA Access Board should report to the Legislature, and not to the minister responsible for the AODA, to ensure its true independence from the Government.5. The Government's Failure to Appoint Some of the Mandatory Five-Year Reviews of Existing Accessibility Standards By the AODA's Mandatory DeadlineBy the end of 2017, the Ontario Government was required to appoint a Standards Development Committee to conduct the mandatory five year review of the Public Spaces Accessibility Standard. That accessibility standard was enacted in December 2012. Five years after that was December 2018. Section 9() of the AODA provides:" (9) Within five years after an accessibility standard is adopted by regulation or at such earlier time as the Minister may specify, the standards development committee responsible for the industry, sector of the economy or class of persons or organizations to which the standard applies shall,re-examine the long-term accessibility objectives determined under subsection (2);(b) if required, revise the measures, policies, practices and requirements to be implemented on or before January 1, 2025 and the time-frame for their implementation;develop another proposed accessibility standard containing such additions or modifications to the existing accessibility standard as the standards development committee deems advisable and submit it to the Minister for the purposes of making the proposed standard public and receiving comments in accordance with section 10; and (d) make such changes it considers advisable to the proposed accessibility standard developed under clause (c) based on the comments received under section 10 and provide the Minister with the subsequent proposed accessibility standard."Neither the former Wynne Government nor the new Ford Government has appointed this mandatory committee. As far as we can tell, the Ontario Government has never posted an announcement to invite people to apply to serve on this committee.The former Government was well-aware of its obligation in this regard. We brought this obligation to the attention to the new fulltime Minister for Accessibility and Seniors in our July 17, 2018 correspondence and accompanying briefing note, which recommended, among other things, the following:"4. Get a Standards Development Committee appointed to develop recommendations on accessibility standards needed to address barriers in the built environment, in residential housing, and in existing buildings whether or not they are undergoing major renovations.One effective way to do this would be to fulfil the Government's overdue obligation under the AODA, which the previous Government failed to fulfil, to appoint a new Standards Development Committee to make recommendations on any revisions needed to the 2012 provisions of the Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation which address disability barriers in public spaces…."As well, as far as we can tell, neither the former Ontario Government nor the current Government has appointed any Standards Development Committee to conduct the mandatory 5-year review the preliminary provisions of the 2011 Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation, sections 1 through 8 in Part I of that regulation. This was required to begin in 2016, five years after the 2011 Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation was enacted. These deal with such important topics as the regulation's purpose, definitions, the duty to make accessibility policies, accessibility plans and accessibility reports to the Government, accessibility duties when procuring goods and services, accessibility of electronic kiosks, and accessibility training for employees. . Some of the Standards Development Committees conducting 5-year reviews of other parts of the Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation may look at parts of these provisions as they arise in their context. However, there is a duty to review these provisions as a whole, top to bottom. This is not the first time that the Ontario Government violated this mandatory AODA deadline. The November 12, 2014 AODA Alliance Update explained:"The Customer Service Accessibility Standard was enacted in 2007. Its review was required to start in 2012. However, the Government delayed appointing all members of ASAC until mid-2013. That delayed the start of this mandatory review of the Customer Service Accessibility Standard for over a full year beyond its legal deadline, contrary to the AODA."6. Excessive Delays in Setting Up New Standards Development CommitteesChapter 4 of this brief shows that the former Ontario Government took an unjustified and excessively long time to decide on our request that it agree to develop new accessibility standards in the areas of education and health care. Making that worse, once the former Ontario Government decided to create those new accessibility standards, it took an excessive and unjustified amount of time to take the next simple step in the standards development process, namely appointing Standards Development Committees to give the Government recommendations on what the promised Education Accessibility Standard and Health Care Accessibility Standard should include. It took the Government some two years to appoint the Health Care Standards Development Committee, after it had announced its decision on February 13, 2015 to develop a Health Care Accessibility Standard. It took the former Government over one year to appoint its Education Standards Development Committee, after it announced on December 5, 2016 that it would create an Education Accessibility Standard. Recruiting a Standards Development Committee need not take anywhere near that long. The former Government took longer just to set up either of these committees than it had taken that same Government to develop the entire AODA bill from scratch from October 2003 to October 2004, and to introduce it into the Legislature for First Reading. We had to mount a long and tenacious campaign to get these Standards Development Committees appointed, after they were promised. This included our conducting media interviews, social media blitzes, questions in the Legislature, and meeting after meeting with provincial officials. The price of this delay was significant. Students with disabilities continued to face unfair barriers in Ontario's education system. Patients with disabilities continued to face barriers in Ontario's health care system. New education and health care barriers continued to be created. The 2025 deadline was looming closer and closer.In the case of the promised Health Care Accessibility Standard, the former Government's delay in setting up the Health Care Standards Development Committee was lengthened because it decided that the Accessibility Directorate should first conduct an unnecessary and duplicative "pre-consultation" on what the Health Care Accessibility Standard should include. Thankfully, the Government did not hold such "pre-consultations" before appointing Standards Development Committees in 2006-2009 to address barriers in customer service, transportation, employment, the built environment or information and communication. There was similarly no need to hold a "pre-consultation" here. After we took part in a 2016 health care "pre-consultation" meeting at the Accessibility Directorate, the August 4, 2016 AODA Alliance Update addressed this:"We have been urging the Wynne Government for months to at last appoint the long-overdue Health Care Standards Development Committee. When the Wynne Government finally appoints that Committee, its job will be to consult the public, including people with disabilities, and then to recommend to the Government which accessibility barriers the promised Health Care Accessibility Standard needs to address, what measures it will require, and the time lines for action. During this "pre-consultation" meeting, the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario spent most of the time asking disability sector representatives to identify the barriers people with disabilities face in the health care system, and what measures should be imposed to fix them. We explained at this meeting that this "pre-consultation" flies in the face of the AODA itself. The AODA gives this responsibility to an independent, arms-length Standards Development Committee. This is an unnecessary duplication of the very work that the Health Care Standards Development Committee will be required to do. The Government's PowerPoint, set out below, states:"Pre-Consultation GoalsTo identify in health care:oAccessibility gaps and barriers not addressed by other accessibility standards;oRecommendations and best practices for barrier reduction or prevention; andoPossible focus areas for a potential accessibility health standard""The former Government's delay in appointing these Standards Development Committees was further exacerbated because it decided to retain the KPMG consulting firm to prepare reports for the Government on barriers in the health care system, in the transportation system and in the education system, respectively. We regret that these reports were largely of limited usefulness. They appear largely if not totally to be based on KPMG conducting web searches for relevant information. We question why the former Government needed to retain KPMG at public expense just to conduct such web searches, rather than having its own Accessibility Directorate public servants with accessibility expertise conduct that web research. KPMG is not known to us to have expertise in disability accessibility. The November 9, 2016 detailed AODA Alliance analysis of KPMG's report on barriers in Ontario's education system showed that KPMG missed significant barriers in our education system. KPMG did not reach out to the AODA Alliance for input on disability barriers in Ontario's education system, even though we were known to the Government to be leading the provincial campaign for several years for accessibility in this area.Similarly, we said this about the KPMG report on transportation barriers, in the July 31, 2017 joint AODA Alliance/ARCH brief to the Transportation Standards Development committee on its draft recommendations for revising the 2011 Transportation Accessibility Standard:"The AODA Alliance and, to the best of our knowledge, the broader disability community, were never consulted by KPMG in the preparation of this report. As such, it does not take into account the front-line experience with disability accessibility barriers that people with disabilities face in transportation in Ontario. Moreover, KPMG oddly did not identify the AODA Alliance as a leader on transportation accessibility, for the Ontario Government to secure input and assistance on this issue. This is so, even though the AODA Alliance have led the non-partisan campaign for accessibility in Ontario since the AODA's enactment. As well, the AODA Alliance is the successor to the Ontarians with Disabilities Act Committee, which led the decade-long campaign to get the AODA enacted." Nevertheless, the KPMG reports on Ontario's education system and transportation system included some useful information. We have not yet analyzed the KPMG report on barriers in the health care system.In the case of the promised Education Accessibility Standard, the former Government injected yet more delay in the appointment of the Education Standards Development Committee, while it conducted an online survey of the public on accessibility barriers in Ontario's education system. We recognize that there can be value in conducting such a survey, if properly designed. However, it should not hold up the appointment of a Standards Development Committee. The Government conducted this online survey from June to October 2017. It did not get the Education Standards Development Committee appointed and up and running until months later, by February 2018. Later in this chapter, we identify serious problems with that survey's contents.7. The New Ontario Government's Unwarranted Freeze on the Work of Standards Development Committees It is very important for the new Ford Government to immediately lift its freeze on the work of the Education Standards Development Committee and Health Care Standards Development Committee. After the June 7, 2018 election, but before The Ford Government was sworn in, the Accessibility Directorate announced that the work of all Standards Development Committees, then underway, was being frozen. We were told that this was being done in order for the new minister to be briefed. The AODA Alliance has been vigourously campaigning since then to get this freeze lifted. Late in 2018, The Ford Government lifted the freeze on the Employment Standards Development Committee and on the Information and Communications Standards Development Committee. However, the Health Care Standards Development Committee, the K-12 Education Standards Development Committee and the Post-Secondary Standards Development Committee remain frozen. The Government has not said how long this would last, or what the issue is that is holding up the resumption of their work.On August 29, 2018, the AODA Alliance wrote Minister for Accessibility and Seniors Raymond Cho to press for this freeze to be lifted. That letter states in part:"Let me offer, as an illustration, the example of the Education Standards Development Committee, whose work is now frozen. Next week, students head back to school. Over one third of a million students with disabilities in Ontario schools face too many disability barriers in Ontario's education system. They number around one out of every six students. That huge number swells even larger when we add to it the barriers impeding students with disabilities in Ontario post-secondary education programs. These barriers make it harder for students with disabilities to succeed in Ontario's education system. They contribute to the high unemployment rate among Ontarians with disabilities.We tirelessly campaigned for over six long years to get the former Ontario Government to agree to create an Education Accessibility Standard under the AODA. An Education Accessibility Standard is needed to remove recurring accessibility barriers in our education system, so students with disabilities and their families don't have to sue one barrier at a time, one education organization at a time. It could eliminate the need for each education organization to have to re-invent the same solutions, saving them money. An Education Accessibility Standard would better serve students with disabilities. It would better support the efforts of the many dedicated people working throughout our education system, who want to ensure that students with disabilities can fully benefit from education programs. It would reinforce Ontario's commitment to achieve an accessible province by 2025, the mandatory deadline enshrined in the AODA for which your Party unanimously voted in 2005.Former Lieutenant Governor David Onley has said that the unemployment rate facing people with disabilities in Canada is not only a national crisis, but a national shame. We agree, and add that a good education is essential to get a good job.Originally, Ontario's education system was not designed to fully include students with disabilities in the mainstream. As one example, when 2016 began, only 85 of the Toronto District School Board's 550 schools had physical accessibility. Historically, mainstream classroom teachers were trained to teach students without disabilities. Only special education teachers were trained to teach students with disabilities. Too often, classroom curriculum, gym and playground equipment, and new digital equipment in our education system lack universal design and the accessibility that students with disabilities need.The Ontario Human Rights Commission's ground-breaking 2003 report, The Opportunity To Succeed: Achieving Barrier-Free Education For Students With Disabilities, documented serious education accessibility barriers. Despite some progress, too many of these barriers still persist today. A new policy on accessible education which the Ontario Human Rights Commission unveiled today demonstrates this. Removing and preventing accessibility barriers lets students with disabilities be fully included in and fully participate in our education system. When it was in the opposition, Ontario's Progressive Conservative Party took much-appreciated action to pressure the former Ontario Government to agree to create an AODA Education Accessibility Standard, after that Government unjustifiably dragged its feet for years on our request for this. For example, it was only when PC MPP Bill Walker pressed Premier Wynne in Question Period in the Legislature on December 5, 2016 that she finally agreed to create an Education Accessibility Standard. After that, the former Ontario Government again dragged its feet for over one year before setting up the required Standards Development Committee to develop recommendations on what the promised Education Accessibility Standard should include. We very much appreciated PC MPP Sam Oosterhoff pressing the former Ontario Government in Question Period on April 13, 2017 to end that inexcusable delay.I was honoured earlier this year to be appointed to serve as a member of the K-12 Education Standards Development Committee. Once we were finally appointed, we got right to work. We held two meetings, one in February and one in April. Our third meeting was scheduled for June 21 and 22, 2018. However, after the June Ontario election, but before your Government was sworn in, the Ontario Public Service cancelled that meeting, pending briefing the new Government. It froze all the work of any of the four Standards Development Committees then in operation. Your government has not lifted that freeze since then. We have repeatedly tweeted to various MPPs to get this freeze lifted. We also identified this for you as a priority in our July 17, 2018 letter to you and its enclosed briefing note, and in our July 19, 2018 letter to Premier Ford. These list AODA priorities for you and the Premier. Neither your August 15, 2018 letter to us nor Premier Ford's July 31, 2018 reply to us specifically address this request. During the ongoing period of this freeze, your Ministry asked members of our K-12 Standards Development Committee to hold the week of September 24, 2018 for a possible next meeting. However last week, we were told to no longer hold that week. The Chair of the K-12 Standards Development Committee advised our Committee that she briefed you back on July 20, 2018 on the work of our committee. However she has had no information to give us since then on when our work might resume.Your Government has not indicated when it will decide on lifting this freeze, or on when our next meeting might take place. We were originally told that the freeze was to take place pending the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario briefing you. You now have been briefed by the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario, by the chair of the K-12 Standards Development Committee, and by us. A resumption of the work of the Standards Development Committees which were already appointed is required under the AODA. These Committees have a statutory job to complete. This is not a discretionary matter. There is no reason to delay the resumption of the work of the Standards Development Committees which have been appointed under the AODA. All those Committees can do is to make recommendations to the Government. They do not themselves adopt any policies or enact any accessibility standards. Once they give the Government their recommendations, your Government will have the freedom to decide what to enact in accessibility standards. Your Government will not be bound to follow any or all of their recommendations.Lifting this freeze now is the first important step your government can easily take to fulfil its election commitments in this area. During the recent Ontario election campaign, your Party recognized that students with disabilities face too many barriers, and that the importance of tackling those barriers as part of the AODA's intent. In his May 15, 2018 letter to the AODA Alliance, setting out the PC Party's election pledges on accessibility, Doug Ford wrote:"Too many Ontarians with disabilities still face barriers when they try to get a job, ride public transit, get an education, use our healthcare system, buy goods or services, or eat in restaurants.Whether addressing standards for public housing, health care, employment or education, our goal when passing the AODA in 2005 was to help remove the barriers that prevent people with disabilities from participating more fully in their communities.For the Ontario PCs, this remains our goal. Making Ontario fully accessible by 2025 is an important goal under the AODA and it's one that would be taken seriously by an Ontario PC government."On your Party's behalf, Doug Ford there also recognized the importance of tackling the barriers in Ontario's education system, when he wrote:"The Ontario PC Party believes our education system must minimize barriers for students with disabilities, providing the skills, opportunities and connections with the business community that are necessary to enter the workforce."Premier Ford's May 15, 2018 letter to us also recognized the leading role that Christine Elliot plays in the area of disability policy, writing:"Christine Elliott, our former Health Critic and Deputy Leader, has been a tireless advocate for Ontarians with disabilities."Christine Elliot was designated to speak for your Party at the May 16, 2018 province-wide all-candidates' debate on disability issues. At that debate, she spoke eloquently and passionately about the need to more effectively implement the AODA, and to take effective action on the barriers impeding students with disabilities in Ontario's education system. Under the former Ontario Government, Ontario fell behind schedule for reaching full accessibility by 2025, the AODA's mandatory goal. The three month delay in the work of the Standards Development Committees, since the election of your Government, has pushed Ontario further behind schedule for reaching that goal. Any further delay in our getting back to work pushes Ontario even further behind schedule.Please now lift your Government's freeze on the work of the Standards Development Committees. Let us get back to work. We are eager to do whatever we can to help your Government succeed in fulfilling its mandate under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act."On November 13, 2018, CBC TV and radio news each aired reports on this freeze. The Ford Government sent a statement to the Government, as this story was being prepared. All it says about this freeze is:"Under the AODA, Standard Development Committees engage in important work recommending and reviewing Ontario’s accessibility standards. Active committees were paused in advance of the spring election, however we are pleased to confirm that the Employment and Information & Communications Standards Development Committees have been notified that their work will be resuming this year. The Transportation standards committee’s work is complete, and their final recommendations were posted on Ontario.ca in May of 2018. We will have more to say regarding the resumption of the Education and Health Standards Development Committees upon further consideration."The Government has not announced what "further consideration it requires, or how long that will take.The November 13, 2018 CBC TV report, posted on line, includes:"Accessibility advocates want the Ontario government to put them to workCommittees working on provincial accessibility standards say their work's been paused for too longTaylor Simmons CBC News Kathleen Lynch, a student at Humber College, looks down at a garbage can blocking the path to her classroom. She wants Ontario to get back to work creating accessibility standards, so all of her classrooms will be equipped with automatic doors. (Mehrdad Nazarahari/CBC)A Toronto student with multiple sclerosis has a message for Premier Doug Ford: "Get in my chair" and see how you experience the province.Kathleen Lynch, a journalism student at Humber College, is one of some 74,000 post-secondary students with disabilities in Ontario.She says if Ford could only see the daily challenges she faces, he'd work much harder to ensure the province accomplishes its goal of becoming fully-accessible by 2025."Do you know how quickly he'd be snapping his fingers saying, 'We need to do something about this?'" she said.And Lynch isn't alone in her criticism. Kathleen Lynch wants to see the government do more to make post-secondary institutions more accessible to students with disabilities. (Mehrdad Nazarahari/CBC)Accessibility advocates say the government hasn't put several Standards Development Committees (SDCs) — special groups looking at how to get rid of accessibility barriers in the province — back to work almost five months after the spring election.Their work is an essential part of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA), passed in 2005. All the parties voted to work toward making the province barrier-free by 2025.Creating a standardThe SDCs are meant to study barriers in different sectors to make recommendations for an accessibility standard.The three still paused — looking at health care, schools K - 12 and post-secondary institutions — are the most recent to begin their work.They stopped work on May 8, 2018, when the provincial election campaign officially began. Raymond Cho became Ontario's new minister of Seniors and Accessibility in June 2018. He was a previously a Toronto city councillor. (John Sandeman/CBC)In a statement, the Ministry for Seniors and Accessibility said they've resumed some of the other committees, but they'll have more to say on the ones still paused "upon further consideration."That doesn't sit well with David Lepofsky, the chair of the AODA Alliance.He said as the official opposition, the PCs had previously criticized the former Liberal government for not moving fast enough to create the committees."On our behalf they slammed the former government when it delayed," he said. "The Conservative Party that used to press to move forward on this has frozen our work ... That's not fair."When he inquired, Lepofsky said a spokesperson told him the government needed time to brief the new minister before resuming the committees' work.David Lepofsky is also a member of the K-12 Standards Development Committee. (CBC)"It doesn't take four months to brief a new minister," he said. "Our students with disabilities have been facing this uphill situation in schools for years. It's long overdue time to fix it, so we can't afford a delay."Why the standards matterIn the absence of a standard, Lynch feels she's been left to fight her own battle.As a result of her disease, she isn't able to move her left arm and uses a power wheelchair to get around.Most of her classrooms are not equipped with automatic door openers, which she said makes it extremely difficult to get through them. "If there is an automatic button … that's my independence," she said. "There's a lot of handicapped kids, and I don't know if their needs are being met."Lynch said this is the only classroom door, as part of her program, she can open using an automatic door opener. Otherwise, she's left flagging other students down for help. (Mehrdad Nazarahari/CBC)On top of that, she said other students are often using the barrier-free washrooms, which are the only ones she can use."Several times I've come here and I'm waiting 10, 15 minutes for somebody to walk out that door. And it's kind of demoralizing, it's kind of dehumanizing and it's a basic need to go to the washroom," she said.As a fix, she'd like to see the college give out key cards to students with disabilities so only they can use those washrooms.In a statement, Humber College said Lynch's building exceeds accessibility standards, and has automatic door openers installed at all public entrances and at barrier-free washrooms.But an accessibility standard might require them to do more.When a student with a physical disability enrolls in a program, the standard might require the school to offer those classes in rooms already equipped with automatic openers.Lynch said those openers would give her back her independence, which is why she's also eager for the SDCs to get back to work."It's 2018. They're too far behind," she said.'We're disappointed to still be waiting'Sandi Bell, the chair of the Health Care Standards Development Committee, agrees."We're disappointed to still be waiting," she said. "I have been particularly concerned because we are one of the most recent ... committees to have been formed. So we're still working on our very first set of recommendations."Bell said they're looking at complex barriers, such as what a hospital might do with a person's service animal should they experience an emergency."The issues are huge," she said. "Every day that goes by, someone may not be being afforded the accessibility, the accommodation that they need."Jeanette Parsons is a member of the Post-Secondary Standards Development Committee. (Grant Linton/CBC)Jeanette Parsons, the chair of the Inter-University Disability Issues Association and a member of the post-secondary SDC, is also eager to resume."We really, really do want to come back to the table with this and we're looking forward to the resumption of this work," she said.Parsons's committee had just begun to identify some of the biggest barriers facing post-secondary students with disabilities, such as transitioning from high school, accessible learning materials and mental health."It's valuable for universities to sort of have a road map as to how they can enhance accessibility generally," she said.Many hospitals and schools have created their own accessibility standards, but according to Lepofsky: "There's no specific accessibility standard regulation that's enforceable in Ontario for schools, colleges, universities, hospitals and other health care providers."There are accessibility requirements for buildings under the Ontario Building Code, but they're "completely inadequate," Lepofsky says.People can also file complaints under the Ontario Human Rights Code, but it's up to the individuals to fight those battles."If we set one provincial standard then everyone will know what they've got to do,” Lepofsky said. "We're eager to get back to work so we can give this government good recommendations ... but we can't do that until they lift their freeze."" 8. Inappropriate Government Attempts to Unduly Restrict the Work of Standards Development Committees Over the past five years, the former Ontario Government inappropriately tried to unduly narrow and restrict the work of some of the Standards Development Committees. This works against the goal of ensuring that Ontario becomes accessible by 2025. It is especially inappropriate as 2025 gets closer and closer, and as Ontario keeps falling further behind schedule. We here give specific examples of this.As a first example, in the 2016 summer, when the former Government held its "pre-consultation" on barriers that should be addressed in the promised Health Care Accessibility Standard (addressed earlier in this chapter), the Government announced at the very outset that it did not intend for that standard to address barriers in the built environment of the health care system. The August 4, 2016 AODA Alliance Update, whose accuracy the Government did not dispute, stated as follows:"The Accessibility Directorate of Ontario initially told us at its July 26, 2016 "Pre-Consultation" meeting that built environment barriers were not to be addressed in the promised Health Care Accessibility Standard, since the built environment is now addressed in the Ontario Building Code. The Government had decided this before it even began the AODA's mandatory process for reaching out to the disability community. The Government's PowerPoint, set out below, stated:" What's out? Improving access to health programs and services New requirements for the built environment where health services are provided"At this meeting we strongly objected to this. People with disabilities face too many built environment barriers in places where health care services are provided.The accessibility amendments to the Building Code that went into effect in 2015, while partially helpful, are still clearly inadequate. They leave Ontario well behind on accessibility. They don't ensure that new buildings and major renovations will be disability-accessible. Moreover, they don't require any retrofits in any existing building that is undergoing no major renovations. This is so no matter how easy and low-cost those retrofits might be.Troubling accessibility problems in the brand new Women's College Hospital in Toronto have been depicted on Twitter in the AODA Alliance's "Picture Our Barriers" campaign. You can find these tweets by searching on Twitter, looking for the #AODAfail hashtag. These help show why the Health Care Accessibility Standard cannot exclude built environment barriers. Patients with disabilities cannot get accessible health care services if they cannot even get into and get around places where health care services are provided. We told the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario that the Government should not arbitrarily restrict the future Health Care Standards Development Committee, to be appointed under the AODA, from being able to consider any accessibility barrier that people with disabilities face in Ontario's health care system. During the meeting, Ann Hoy, the Assistant Deputy Minister for the Accessibility Directorate, said that if built environment barriers were addressed in the Health Care Accessibility Standard, that accessibility standard would become very big. We responded that this is surely no reason for excluding built environment barriers from that accessibility standard.In the face of these points, the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario committed at this meeting that the Health Care Standards Development Committee will not be restrained by anything that has gone on during this "pre-consultation" and by any work that has gone on before that. From this, we understand from this that the Government will not try to block the Health Care Standards Development Committee from considering any accessibility barriers in its discussions and recommendations. That Standards Development Committee will be free to address any accessibility barriers that people with disabilities face in the health care system, including built environment barriers. We commend that decision. As well, Assistant Deputy Minister Ann Hoy said that the Accessibility Directorate will not be directing the Standards Development Committee how prescriptive to be."As a second example, in the mandate letter which the former Government later issued to the Health Care Standards Development Committee, it focused that committee on barriers in the hospital sector. the Government announced this on its website and forwarded this information to the AODA Alliance in an email, on our request:"Feedback from over 200 participants during pre-consultations, identified barriers that could potentially be addressed through a new health care standard.Based on this feedback, the minister asked the committee to focus on:?addressing barriers in the hospital sector….…The minister also requested the committee to consider the following accessibility barriers which have been identified through research and stakeholder feedback:?disability awareness and sensitivity when communicating with persons with disabilities?accountability for accessibility within the administration of health sector institutions?training for health care providers to accommodate persons with disabilities"We of course recognize that it is open to the minister in his or her mandate letter to set parameters or priorities for a Standards Development Committee. However, the Health Care Standards Development Committee did not get appointed until sometime in 2017, some two years after the former Government promised a Health Care Accessibility Standard, and at least seven years after we began to advocate for a Health Care Accessibility Standard. Only eight years were remaining before 2025. Insufficient time remained for the Ontario Government to gradually develop and roll out a series of accessibility standards for different sectors of the health care system, one after the other, if the 2025 deadline is to be reached. That would have been a more plausible approach had the Government started on developing the Health Care Accessibility Standard many years earlier. Of course, hospitals are an important part of the health care system. However, we anticipate that most people get most of their health care services from other sources, not hospitals. Even if Ontario's hospitals become fully accessible, most patients with disabilities will still face accessibility barriers when they go to get health care services elsewhere in the health care system. A third example concerns the promised Education Accessibility Standard. The former Government originally intended to use its online survey, discussed earlier in this chapter, of barriers in Ontario's education system to define the scope of the Education Standards Development Committee that it would appoint. In its survey, which we made public in the May 29, 2017 AODA Alliance Update, the Government stated:"Your feedback will help us determine the scope of the standard and the mandate of a Standards Development Committee working on new accessibility standards for education in Ontario."The former Government's online survey of barriers in Ontario's education system was quite narrow and deficient. The June 16, 2017 AODA Alliance Update stated:"It is very troubling that the Government's survey's five focus areas leave out many if not most of the recurring disability accessibility barriers in Ontario's education system. If the promised Education Accessibility Standard was limited to those five areas, listed later in this Update, the Government would not ensure that education in Ontario becomes fully accessible to students with disabilities. It would leave many if not most disability accessibility barriers in place forever in Ontario's education system.By inappropriately narrowing the survey, the Wynne Government is narrowing the public discussion from the start. The Government appears to be trying to narrow the work of the forthcoming Education Standards Development Committee. That Committee, once appointed, will use your feedback to make reform recommendations to the Government."Later, the June 16, 2017 AODA Alliance Update announced:"The survey wrongly places an emphasis on accessibility barriers in buildings problems in designed and constructed before current accessibility requirements were established. You should tell the Government about accessibility barriers in new buildings and surrounding grounds, and not just in old buildings. The Government's question lets you tell about new or old properties. It is inaccurate for the survey to leave an impression that newer buildings are in fact more accessible than older ones. Due to poor provincial requirements on the accessibility of the built environment in the Ontario Building Code and AODA accessibility standards, new buildings are regularly built with accessibility problems, and can be worse than an older building."Still later, the June 16, 2017 AODA Alliance Update offered the public tips on what they should address when answering the survey, going beyond the five limited areas that the survey addressed, such as:"* The Education Accessibility Standard should fix all the different kinds of disability barriers in Ontario's education system, not just the narrow ones covered by the survey's five focus areas. Here are examples you are encouraged to tell the Government about:Disability accessibility barriers that students with disabilities face in transportation to get to school (education transportation barriers).Disability accessibility barriers that students with disabilities experienced when trying to use computers, tablets, software, websites, and other digital technology provided at a school, college, university or other educational organization (digital accessibility).Disability accessibility barriers that students with disabilities experienced when trying to use the gym, playground or other equipment or facilities at an school, college, university or other educational organization (equipment accessibility).Disability accessibility barriers that students with disabilities face when trying to take part in extracurricular activities (extracurricular barriers).Disability accessibility barriers that students with disabilities face when trying to take part in work study programs, co-op placements or other kinds of on-the-job "experiential learning" programs (experiential learning barriers).Disability accessibility barriers that students with disabilities face when trying to bring a service animal to school or class (barriers to service animals).Disability accessibility barriers that students with disabilities face when trying to get instructional materials, like text books and class assignments, in an accessible format, at the same time classmates without disabilities receive the course materials (instructional material barriers).Disability accessibility barriers that students with disabilities face in course curriculum that doesn't take into account learning needs of students with disabilities (curriculum barriers).Disability accessibility barriers that students with disabilities face when taking tests, exams or other evaluations if these don't fairly and accurately assess the progress of students with disabilities (testing barriers).Disability accessibility barriers that students with disabilities face in admission rules, criteria or other screening when trying to get into a course or other educational program (admissions barriers).Disability accessibility barriers that students with disabilities face in French immersion or other specialized programs offered in Ontario's education system (specialized program barriers).Disability accessibility barriers and problems that students with disabilities face with the way a school, college, university or other education organization decides how it will accommodate the student with disabilities' needs (placement and accommodation procedure barriers).Explain any policies or bureaucratic barriers that students with disabilities can face when trying to make sure that they can be fully included in and benefit from education programs in Ontario (such as difficulties or roadblocks in getting students with disabilities included and effectively served in a student's neighbourhood school's regular classroom). (policy and bureaucratic barriers.)Explain any legal barriers that students with disabilities have faced when trying to fully benefit from and be fully included in education programs in Ontario (such as problems coming from Ontario's special education laws). (legal barriers.) Any other kinds of disability accessibility barriers that can make it harder for students with disabilities to be fully included in, fully participate in and fully benefit from education programs in Ontario.Overall, how effective has your school, college, university or other educational organization been at ensuring that students with disabilities are fully included in, can fully participate in, and fully benefit from education programs in Ontario?" We had to wage a campaign for the next eight months to get the former Ontario Government not to impose prior restraints on the education barriers that the promised Education Standards Development Committee could consider. We emphasized that this Committee should be free to identify any disability barriers it knows about, and to recommend action on them. We also explained to the Government that any such prior restraints are ultimately futile, since the committee could well identify any barriers it wishes, despite the Government's efforts to hamstring its work. Fortunately, our campaign succeeded. As a result, the former Ontario Government did not in the end impose such restrictions on the mandate of the Education Standards Development Committees.A fourth example involves a Standards Development Committee taking too narrow a view of its mandate when it conducts a mandatory 5-year review of an existing accessibility standard. Our illustration of this concerns the current mandatory 5-year review of the 2011 Employment Accessibility Standard, which the Employment Standards Development Committee is conducting. We documented our concern in detail in the AODA Alliance's May 7, 2018 brief to the Employment Standards Development Committee, which explains:"5. Significantly Understating the Aim of the Standards Development Committee's Review of the Employment Accessibility Standard We are concerned that the Employment Standards Development Committee has been working under a significant misunderstanding and underestimation of the goal of its review of the 2011 Employment Accessibility Standard. From our overall understanding of the process, we anticipate that this likely emanated from the Accessibility Ministry and the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario, and was likely not a creation of the Standards Development Committee itself. Even if this significant error had originated from the Standards Development Committee, and not from the Accessibility Directorate, the Accessibility Directorate has so intensively involved itself in the work of Standards Development Committees that it should have set the record straight. This understatement of the Standards Development Committee's goal weakens the entire review of the 2011 Employment Accessibility Standard.The introduction to the Ontario Government's March 20, 2018 online public announcement, which invites public input to which this brief responds (and which the Employment Standards Development Committee likely did not write) included:"We are updating our accessible employment standards to make employment more accessible to people with disabilities."It also states regarding the Employment Standards Development Committee:"The committee works to ensure employment is more accessible to people with disabilities."Later, the summary of the draft recommendations includes:"The SDC recognizes the importance and priority of reducing barriers …"Taken together, these passages dramatically understate and water down the aim of this review and of the Employment Accessibility Standard. The aim is not merely to make employment "more accessible" for people with disabilities, or to reduce barriers in employment. The AODA requires the goal to make employment "accessible" for people with disabilities, with no diluting qualifiers. This is not a matter of quibbling over inconsequential words. If a mere handful of workplace barriers are removed, employment would become "more accessible" in Ontario. Yet that may not make any real difference for employees and job-seekers with disabilities. They will continue to face too many disability barriers.Similarly, the Government's posting waters down the goal of this review of the Employment Accessibility Standard where it states:"Under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, 2005 (AODA), we must review accessibility standards every five years to determine whether they are working as intended or need adjusting."That substantially understates the goal of this mandatory review of the 2011 Employment Accessibility Standard. As noted above, this review's purpose is to ascertain whether the Employment Accessibility Standard is working sufficiently to ensure that employment becomes fully accessible to people with disabilities by 2025, the AODA's goal. This Review should recommend improvements to ensure that the Standard will achieve that goal. It is not sufficient for the Standards Development Committee to just ask if the Employment Accessibility Standard is working "as intended." By that lesser and weak approach, the Employment Accessibility Standard would be fine, and would need no improvements, if it led employers to merely do whatever the original 2011 Employment Accessibility Standard spelled out. That would be sufficient, even if that left employment and workplaces in Ontario full of disability barriers, now and even long after 2025. If the original intent of the 2011 Employment Accessibility Standard fell below what the AODA requires for employment accessibility by 2025, neither we nor the Employment Standards Development Committee should be locked into or handcuffed by that insufficient goal. As this brief amply documents, the 2011 Employment Accessibility Standard, while helpful, was not capable of ensuring that employment and workplaces will become fully accessible by 2025, or indeed, ever. It appears that this seriously flawed "working as intended" language emanates from the Accessibility Directorate. Substantially the same language was included in the initial draft recommendations of the Transportation Standards Development committee that were circulated last year for public comment.We also note from the Ontario Government's March 20, 2018 posting that the Accessibility Minister's Mandate Letter to the Employment Standards Development Committee may have set too restrictive a focus for the Employment Standards Development Committee. The Government's March 20, 2018 posting includes:"Under this framework, the Minister asked that the review focus on requirements for sectors that were in effect for more than 24 months, as well as to identify any gaps that may remain in the standards, and to consider all possible solutions and tactics, including non-regulatory approaches. The review kicked off during the last year of implementation of the standard, effective for small organizations January 1st, 2017. Potential focus areas for the review were based on pre-consultation feedback and included:oclarity of requirements for individual accommodation plansodesire for clear guidance materialsodisclosure of disability as activation for support and requirements to apply"The foregoing areas are, of course, worth considering. However, the Standards Development Committee should not limit itself to those areas. As addressed further below, key disability barriers in employment are left out of these draft recommendations, but need to be tackled. As well, the Standards Development Committee should consider the 2011 Employment Accessibility Standard as it applies to all sectors, not just those for whom the 2011 accessibility standard has been in operation for 24 months. The disability accessibility barriers we address below are obvious. We need no more experience to know that they are employment barriers. As well, all employers have now had fully seven years to get ready to comply, since the 2011 Employment Accessibility Standard was enacted. The Ontario Human Rights Code's disability provisions (which the Employment Accessibility Standard largely aims to implement) have been in force in some form since 1982, fully 35 years. The duty to accommodate employees and job-seekers with disabilities is not some dramatic new innovation in Ontario law. Years ago, it was substantially clarified by the Supreme Court of Canada, lower courts, human rights tribunals and labour arbitrators.Moreover, the AODA's 2025 deadline for full accessibility is looming closer and closer. It is six and a half years away. Yet people with disabilities continue to face cruel and unfair high unemployment rates. Former Lieutenant Governor David Onley has repeatedly said that the unemployment rate facing Canadians with disabilities is not only a national crisis - It is a national shame. The plight of excessively high unemployment facing people with disabilities was echoed by the Partnership Council on Employment in Ontario for People with Disabilities that the Ontario Government appointed in 2014.As such, the can cannot be kicked down the road to the next AODA review of the Employment Accessibility Standard. That review is likely not to start until 2023 or 2024. By then, there will not be enough time to enact regulatory changes that will go into effect and can be fully implemented by 2025.An AODA Standards Development Committee is not restricted to only address those things that a minister's Mandate Letter outlines. It is open to the Employment Standards Development Committee to recommend any measures it considers advisable. Especially because the 2025 deadline is creeping up on us, it is all the more important for the Employment Standards Development Committee to bring forward any recommendations that it considers helpful, whether or not they fall outside the minister's Mandate Letter." 9. Need to Ensure the Openness and Public Accountability of Standards Development Committees The work of Standards Development Committees has become shrouded in far too much secrecy. The Government has taken an excessive if not an obsessive approach to this secrecy. This requires substantial reform.The intention underlying the AODA was that the standards development process would be an open and accountable one. the former Ontario Government made this clear in election commitments. In his September 14, 2007 letter to the AODA Alliance, setting out his party's 2007 election pledges on accessibility, Dalton McGuinty wrote:"Our process for developing standards is one that is open and consultative."Moreover, the AODA itself imposes requirements to make the work of each Standards Development Committee open and accountable. The AODA creates and sets the legal requirements for the operations of a Standards Development Committee. It does not impose any confidentiality obligations on Standards Development Committee members. It does not give the minister, the Government, or the chair of a Standards Development Committee any powers to impose confidentiality requirements. To the contrary, the AODA imposes important, mandatory requirements of openness regarding the work of a Standards Development Committee:The strong message from the AODA is in favour of openness and public access to information, not secrecy. The AODA requires that minutes be kept of all Standards Development Committee meetings, and that these be made public. Section 8(9) of the AODA provides:" (9) A standards development committee shall keep minutes of every meeting it holds and shall make the minutes available to the public by posting them on a government internet site and by such other means as the terms of reference may provide."The AODA requires the Government to make public such things as a Standards Development Committee's terms of reference (including any compensation for Committee members). Section 8(8) of the AODA provides:" (8) After fixing the terms of reference under subsection (6), the Minister shall make the terms of reference available to the public by posting them on a government internet site and by such other means as the Minister considers advisable. "The Standards Development Committee's mandatory progress reports to the Government on its work must be made public, according to s. 11 of the AODA, which provides:" 11. (1) Each standards development committee shall provide the Minister with periodic reports on the progress of the preparation of the proposed standard as specified in the committee’s terms of reference or as may be required by the Minister from time to time. (2) Upon receiving a report under subsection (1), the Minister shall make it available to the public by posting it on a government internet site and by such other means as the Minister considers advisable."The AODA requires that the Government must make public the initial and final recommendations that a Standards Development Committee submits to the Government on what an accessibility standard should include . This is a powerful and important exception to the usual practice of the Government keeping secret the advice it receives from some other advisory bodies that it establishes in other contexts. Section 10(1)) of the AODA provides:" 10. (1) Upon receiving a proposed accessibility standard from a standards development committee under subsection 9 (5) or clause 9 (9) (c), the Minister shall make it available to the public by posting it on a government internet site and by such other means as the Minister considers advisable."There are no exceptions in the AODA to these openness and public accountability requirements. The AODA's strong message is that the work of a Standards Development Committee is not confidential. This is consistent with the role of members of a Standards Development Committee. These committee members are expected to reach out to the disability sector through the formal and informal networks available to them, to gather input and feedback on issues that may be discussed at the Standards Development Committee table. Despite this, the Government has had an unfortunate and inappropriate requirement of getting or pressing members of Standards Development Committees to sign non-disclosure agreements, that sharply curtail what they can tell the public about what is discussed at the Standards Development Committee. The AODA does not give the Ontario Government any authority to do this, or to require the signing of such non-disclosure agreements before a person is appointed to a Standards Development Committee. Our concern does not require any resort to the Canadian Charter of Rights. However it is reinforced by s. 2(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. That provision guarantees to everyone, including to Standards Development Committee members, the constitutional right to the freedom of expression. A Government attempt to restrict what a Standards Development Committee member can say to others about information that he or she has lawfully learned, would run up against that right. So can Government restrictions on public access to information in the hands of a public institution, where access is necessary for meaningful public discussion and criticism on matters of public interest. (Ontario (Public Safety and Security) v. Criminal Lawyers' Association [2010] S.C.J. No. 23 (SCC)1723) it is not necessary or appropriate for this AODA Independent Review to consider whether the Ontario Government should ever require the signing of a non-disclosure agreement by individuals appointed to any advisory body that the Government creates for any subject, unrelated to the AODA. The only issue here is whether this practice is appropriate in the case of members of a Standards Development Committee, appointed under the AODA. for the reasons we provide here, it is not appropriate for the Government to do so. Such secrecy also undermines the public confidence in the work of a Standards Development Committee. Public confidence in those committees is an important factor for their success. As well, such non-disclosure agreements hamper the ability of a member of a Standards Development Committee to do their work on that committee. The AODA contemplates that Standards Development Committee members will reach out to the sector from which they are drawn, to get input and ideas. This enriches the discussions at the Standards Development Committee table. However, if the Committee member is restricted in what they can tell their sector, this makes them far less effective.This is especially a hardship for members of a Standards Development Committee who is drawn from the disability sector. That sector requires the use of the internet, social media and other such avenues to effectively reach out and gather input. If an idea is being tossed around at the Standards Development Committee table, members should be free to use such no-cost avenues for gathering feedback on that idea.The former Ontario Government appeared to be concerned that a non-disclosure agreement was needed so that members of a Standards Development Committee could feel free to speak their minds when discussing issues at a Committee meeting. We consider such a concern to be incorrect at worst, and overstated, at best.As shown earlier, the AODA intends the standards development process to be an open process, with minutes kept and publicly posted. Even if that concern were a valid and compelling one, it would not justify secrecy surrounding things presented to a Standards Development Committee by officials of the Ontario Government, or other public sector organizations. The public has a right to know what those officials, paid by the public, are proposing.Why should any member of a Standards Development Committee be prevented from letting the public, including their own organization, know what they themselves have proposed or said at a meeting of a Standards Development Committee? By the current approach of the Accessibility Directorate, unless a super-majority of 75% of the committee's membership agree to include an item or comment in the minutes, a non-disclosure agreement would muzzle a committee member from even reporting to their own organization, or to the public, what they have themselves presented or proposed. This is harsh, excessive, and unjustified on any view of the confidentiality/openness issue. The former Ontario Government's practice of seeking non-disclosure agreements from Standards Development Committee members flew in the face of that Government's oft-stated commitment that it would be the most open government in Canada. We offer a powerful analogous example that shows that such a shroud of secrecy is entirely unnecessary. During 2016 and 2017, the Special Education Advisory Committee of the Toronto District School Board undertook a major review of special education at TDSB, Canada's largest school board. It was led by David Lepofsky who was then the chair of that Special Education Advisory Committee. At the same time, he was and continues to be the AODA Alliance chair.That review was conducted in a series of SEAC meetings that were open to the public and the media to attend. Members of the public routinely attended those meetings. During those meetings, SEAC received input from TDSB staff and other contributors. Presenters were extensively probed through a lively question and answer process. SEAC members discussed and debated a detailed series of recommendations to the TDSB on needed reforms to special education at that school board. Six major motions were passed, setting out these recommendations. Together, these are a virtual template for an Education Accessibility Standard. The public exchanges at SEAC involved widely differing views on important issues, and deeply held views. This all took place in the open, including votes on the motions, paragraph by paragraph. There was no indication that anyone was unable to candidly voice their views. We found that an atmosphere of undue secrecy seems to pervade at least some of the Standards Development Committees. Some members have talked to us quietly about what has gone on at Standards Development Committee meetings but have noted that they thought they were not supposed to do so. When the previous Accessibility Minister, Tracy MacCharles, called AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky to invite him to serve on the K-12 Education Standards Development Committee, she told him that the Standards Development Committee is a confidential process. He respectfully disagreed. When the AODA Alliance secured a chance to attend and speak to the Transportation Standards Development committee on November 15, 2017 along with the ARCH Disability Law Centre, we were told by the chair of that SDC that its meeting was confidential. We told that Committee that we respectfully disagreed with any such restrictions. We recently secured an invitation to speak to the Employment Standards Development Committee on November 21, 2018, as a follow-up to the AODA Alliance's brief to that Committee on changes needed to the 2011 Employment Accessibility Standard. In advance of that meeting, we wrote the Accessibility Directorate to seek permission to bring some law students who have volunteered for the AODA Alliance, in order to observe our presentation to that Committee. In a November 7, 2018 email to the AODA Alliance from the Accessibility Directorate, we were told:"Yes, you can bring the law students. However, please note the meetings are confidential and any outside attendees are required to sign a non-disclosure agreement."As addressed initially in Chapter 1 of this brief, the Accessibility Directorate sent AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky a draconian non-disclosure agreement, which he was told he'd have to sign in connection with his forthcoming November 21,2018 presentation to the Employment Standards Development Committee. It is set out in Chapter 1 of this brief. As DISCUSSED IN Chapter 1, he did not sign it. Our presentation to the Standards Development Committee proceeded quite well with no such non-disclosure agreement signed.By the Accessibility Directorate's approach, the AODA Alliance would presumably be forbidden from telling its own supporters or anyone else what we say to the Employment Standards Development Committee, even if it is the same as what we have said in our brief to that Committee, which we made public months ago and which is open for all to read on our website. We note that a year earlier, neither the AODA Alliance chair nor the ARCH Disability Law Centre counsel who presented to the Transportation Standards Development committee on November 15, 2017 had been told that they had to sign a non-disclosure agreement. We emphasize that these Standards Development Committees are not dealing with state or military secrets. Moreover, in every case, some of the members of these Standards Development Committees are themselves public servants. They may be officials of a school board or municipal government or public transit authority. What public officials say in this context should certainly not be shrouded in secrecy. These officials should be accountable publicly for the positions they take. The public clearly has a right to know what they are saying at the Standards Development Committee table.10. Insufficiency of the Publicly-Posted Minutes of Some if Not Many Standards Development Committees As noted earlier in this chapter, a key avenue for public accountability of the standards development process is the AODA's requirement that each Standards Development Committee keep and make public minutes of every meeting. Our 2014 brief to Mayo Moran raised concerns about the quality of the minutes that these committees had kept. We wrote:" To provide a means for public accountability in the standards development process, section 8(9) of the AODA requires each Standards Development committee to keep minutes of its meetings. Section 8(9) provides:" (9) A standards development committee shall keep minutes of every meeting it holds and shall make the minutes available to the public by posting them on a government internet site and by such other means as the terms of reference may provide."We found some of the Standards Development committee minutes difficult to understand. They were not in all cases written to be clear and understandable by a member of the public.Where a Standards Development committee was reviewing a draft of a standard or other document, there were times that the minutes referred to the document without quoting it, or making it part of the minutes. This made the minutes impenetrable.As well, it is our understanding that some if not all Standards Development Committees assigned important work to subcommittees. Some or all of those subcommittees either didn't keep minutes, or did not post them on the internet. When dealing with the Government on issues, after a Standards Development committee had submitted its final report, concern arose over whether a Standards Development committee's recommendation was correctly reflected in the final proposal. The key decision on point had been made in a subcommittee, for which there were no minutes available to the public.It is important that all deliberations of a Standards Development Committee, including those of ASAC when it serves as a Standards Development Committee, are fully documented in minutes that the public can read and fully understand. The minutes should include any document that the Standards Development Committee considers. If any subcommittee does any work on the development of an accessibility standard, it should keep minutes. Those minutes should similarly be made public."We have seen no indication since 2014 that the Accessibility Directorate did anything to improve the quality of minutes being kept by Standards Development Committees. To the contrary, any Standards Development Committees minutes we have reviewed since then, have been of very limited help to get an understanding of what a Standards Development Committee was considering. We have found the minutes of little if any use when preparing a brief to the Standards Development Committee on any draft recommendations it makes public. That is the time when it is most important for those minutes to be useful.From the experience of the AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky, who sits on the K-12 Education Standards Development Committee, the minutes that that committee has made public have been extremely general and limited in scope. They give the public a very limited understanding of what was discussed or considered at the Committee table. We do not suggest that these minutes should be a verbatim transcript of the entire meeting. However, they should make it much more clear what issues and barriers a Standards Development Committee has been considering, what specific options for addressing those barriers are under consideration, and what arguments are presented for and against various options and timelines. Where an option is rejected, the minutes should explain why it was rejected. If conflicting views are expressed, these should be reflected in the minutes.It appears to us that the minutes are written by the Accessibility Directorate staff, and then possibly reviewed by the chair of the Standards Development Committee. From our experience being represented on the K-12 Education Standards Development Committee, no one from the committee was ever recruited by the committee to prepare the minutes. We anticipate that some internal Ministry vetting of draft minutes may well have been going on during this process. It has been our experience that anything that may get posted on a Government public website can get vetted by the Government, e.g. to bring it in line with the Government's communication agenda or strategy. As addressed further later in this chapter, under the Accessibility Directorate's direction, a committee member cannot get those minutes amended, unless the chair of the committee approves the change, or unless fully 75% of the Standards Development Committee approves the amendment. This puts an excessive impetus in favour of the Accessibility Directorate's version of the minutes. It makes it hard to get these amended, absent overwhelming Committee support. At its inaugural February 2018 meeting, a 68% majority of the K-12 Education Standards Development Committee voted in favour of an amendment to the minutes that AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky proposed. Fifteen members voted in favour of his proposed amendment. A mere seven voted against it. Two did not vote. Yet the Accessibility Directorate took the position that the amendment was defeated, because it was not a 75% vote in favour. No one on the committee disputed the accuracy of the proposed addition to the minutes that AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky had put forward.11. The Previous Government's Excessive Requirement that a Standards Development Committee Decision Requires a 75% Super-Majority Vote As just discussed, the former Ontario Government required each Standards Development Committee to get the support of a 75% super-majority before a recommendation could be approved. In our April 23, 2018 letter to her, we asked the previous minister, Tracy MacCharles to reduce this to a simple majority. She did not do so, or make public a reason for not doing so. Our April 23, 2018 letter to Minister MacCharles explains our concern, as follows:"We are very concerned that the Government has directed each AODA Standards Development Committee that a 75% super-majority vote is needed to pass any recommendations at a Standards Development Committee. We ask you to revise this as soon as possible. Please direct that a simple majority is sufficient. We concur with the requirement that at least half of the majority, supporting a recommendation, must be made up of Committee members appointed to represent the disability sector.We and, as far as we know, the disability community, were never consulted by the Government before imposing this 75% super-majority voting requirement. Had we been consulted, we would have strenuously opposed it. We would have rallied others in the disability community to oppose it. We know of no one in the community or the public who has ever called for a 75% super-majority requirement.Under the AODA, you, as the responsible minister, can set Terms of Reference for a Standards Development Committee. Section 8 of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act gives the Minister the power to make Terms of Reference for Standards Development Committees. It is open to the AODA Alliance to ask you, as the Minister, to alter the Terms of Reference accordingly.Here is what the key provisions of your Ministry's Terms of Reference provide for voting on recommendations by each Standards Development Committee:"7. QuorumIn order to hold a discussion, 75% of SDC members must be present at the meeting to constitute a quorum.8. Voting …In order to pass formal resolutions on proposed standards and recommendations for the Minister, agreement by 75% of the voting members present at the meeting will constitute approval.Of the 75% who vote to pass a formal resolution, proposed standard or recommendation, 50% must be comprised of representatives from the disability community or persons with disabilities."We discussed our concerns regarding this 75% rule with your Ministry. We were told that it was meant to ensure that anything that the Standards Development Committee recommends to the Government regarding the content of AODA accessibility standards is supported by a vote that includes equal representation from the disability sector. We were also told more generally that the Ministry wants the Standards Development Committee to work towards reaching a consensus position where possible.We agree with both goals. Indeed, the requirement that Standards Development Committees have an assured equal representation at each Standards Development Committee originated with the AODA Alliance. We secured it as an election commitment in 2007. This was promised to us in that election. As well, a consensus position on a recommendation on an issue at a Standards Development Committee is desirable, where it can be achieved.However, this 75% super-majority voting requirement is not necessary for these laudable goals. In fact, it works against these goals.Let us give you an example. Assume that a Standards Development Committee has 20 members, including 10 from the disability sector and 10 from the obligated sectors. Assume that all 20 members attend a meeting where the Committee is to vote on its recommendations to the Ontario Government on what an accessibility standard should include. Assume further that a specific proposal for a recommendation is on the table for a vote. Assume that every representative of the disability sector on that Standards Development Committee votes in support of that specific recommendation. Assume further that two other members of that Standards Development Committee (from the obligated sectors, such as from business or the broader public sector) also vote for that recommendation. All eight other representatives from the obligated sectors vote against that recommendation. The vote therefore is 12 in support of the recommendation (including all 10 disability sector representatives), and 8 against it. That recommendation would fail, under your current terms of reference, because it did not secure 75% support, or 15 votes out of 20. This is so, even though it got more than 50% support, and even though the entire disability sector, represented on that Committee, voted in favour of that recommendation. Your Ministry's 75% super-majority voting requirement does not ensure an equal and strong voice for the disability sector.The real effect of a 75% super-majority requirement is that the only recommendations that will pass will tend to be weaker ones. The 75% super-majority rule simply makes it harder to reach a sufficient consensus to pass a recommendation. It forces the Committee to only come forward with recommendations that are the lowest common denominator. Rather than empowering the disability sector, it will force that sector to agree to weaker positions, in order to garner all the votes needed to reach the excessively-high 75% threshold. If 75% is not reached, the Committee recommends nothing. The disability community would be stuck with the status quo, a world full of disability accessibility barriers. We, along with the ARCH Disability Law Centre, have amply documented that the recommendations from the last two Standards Development Committees (regarding customer service and transportation) were very weak. We demonstrated this in our 2016 brief to your Ministry on the final recommendations of the Customer Service Standards Development Committee and in our 2017 brief on the interim or draft recommendations of the Transportation Standards Development committee. If anything, we need each Standards Development Committee to bring forward more bold recommendations, not weaker ones. The 75% super-majority rule will not help achieve this. In sharp contrast, under a simple majority rule, if a Committee happens to garner a stronger majority of votes in favour of a recommendation, its recorded voting record will reflect this. On the other hand, if a smaller majority (but still a majority) supports a recommendation, it would still go forward to the Government for the Government's consideration. On the other hand, on your Ministry's current approach, if a 75% super-majority is not mustered, a proposed recommendation dies on the Committee table, and does not come forward to the Government as a Committee recommendation worthy of consideration.There is no good reason for this 75% super-majority voting requirement for a Standards Development Committee to pass a recommendation on what an accessibility standard should include. By stark comparison, the Legislature requires only a simple majority to enact a law. Cabinet only requires a simple majority to enact or amend an AODA accessibility standard. Why should a Standards Development Committee have a much tougher threshold to overcome? For the Government to make it harder for a Standards Development Committee to make a recommendation to the Government is not consistent with the aims of the AODA. The AODA was passed to ensure that disability barriers impeding people with disabilities in society are torn down by 2025, less than seven years from now. Ontario is lagging behind schedule to reach accessibility by 2025. We need action on accessibility that is bolder, not more tepid and diluted. Once a Standards Development Committee makes a recommendation, the Government must consider whether to enact it as a regulation, as proposed, or with changes. We have found over and over that once a Standards Development Committee makes a recommendation, the Government tends to be very reluctant to go any further than that recommendation, in an AODA standard regulation. If we propose to the Government that the regulation should include something that the Standards Development Committee did not recommend, or if we propose to the Government that a measure should be stronger than what the Standards Development Committee recommended, the Government typically and predictably tells us that it places great weight on what the Standards Development Committee had recommended. In other words, the Government will use the limited reach of the Standards Development Committee's recommendations as its own justification or excuse for going no further. For the most part, the regulations that the Government has enacted under the AODA have been weaker than what the Standards Development Committees have recommended. As mentioned earlier, in 2007, the AODA Alliance approached all the political parties to seek commitments to reform the standards development process during that year's provincial election. This was because we had received feedback from disability sector representatives on the earliest Standards Development Committees. They reported to us that the Government had created the earliest Standards Development Committees, with disability sector representatives being a minority on each Committee. They were out-numbered and out-voted by the members from the obligated sectors. This led to those Committees coming forward with weaker recommendations. Disability sector representatives reported to us in 2007 that they faced the cruel choice of either voting for a very weak recommendation, which they felt was inadequate, or running the risk that the Committee would pass no recommendation at all.To rectify this, in 2007, as noted above, the Government commendably agreed to our proposal that the disability sector be assured an equal number of seats at each Standards Development Committee. The Government's later creation of this 75% super-majority voting rule has in a real way counter-acted the progress that we made in 2007. We ask you to rectify this now, by amending the Standards Development Committee Terms of Reference as we have requested.To adopt a simple majority voting rule does not disempower or silence a minority viewpoint on a Standards Development Committee. If a majority votes for a recommendation, it is open to a minority to submit a minority report to the Government. All voices can thereby be raised and heard. The Government can be enriched from a diversity of viewpoints."We also raised specific concerns in our April 23, 2018 letter to Minister MacCharles about the former Government's erroneous requirement that a 75% super-majority is needed for a Standards Development Committee to decide anything, not just a recommendation on the contents of a proposed accessibility standard. In the 'AODA Alliances April 23, 2018 letter to Minister MacCharles, AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky stated:" From my experience sitting as a disability sector representative on the K-12 Education Standards Development Committee, I have learned that the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario has also directed that each Standards Development Committee should apply this 75% super-majority rule on other voting matters, and most particularly, on votes to approve or amend the minutes of each Standards Development Committee meeting. We ask you to get the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario, which reports to you as minister, to change this to a simple majority vote as well.It is clear that the Minister's Terms of Reference for the AODA Standards Development Committees, quoted above, only imposes a 75% super-majority voting requirement for a Standards Development Committee, when it votes on recommendations to the Government on what an accessibility standard should include. Those Terms of Reference do not impose this 75% super-majority requirement for any other votes by the Standards Development Committee, such as a vote to approve or amend the minutes of a Standards Development Committee meeting.I have asked the Accessibility Directorate where this additional 75% super-majority voting requirement comes from, i.e. for things other than votes on recommendation to the Government on what an accessibility standard should include. The Accessibility Directorate has not substantively answered this inquiry, and has pointed to nothing that grants it the authority to impose this 75% voting requirement on Standards Development Committees. Nothing in the AODA sets this requirement. Nothing in the AODA empowers the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario to unilaterally impose this requirement on a Standards Development Committee, that is appointed under the AODA. It is an unwarranted interference in the independence of those Committees.Over the years, I myself have taken part in innumerable meetings of different organizations and committees, at which minutes are kept. Votes to approve or amend those minutes have always been decided on a simple majority basis, not a 75% super-majority basis. The Accessibility Directorate has offered no policy rationale for changing that longstanding common practice, in the case of Standards Development Committees.To many, the minutes of meetings may seem of little consequence, and hardly worth any attention or concern. In the case of AODA Standards Development Committees, this is not the case. Under s. 8(9) of the AODA, each Standards Development Committee is required to keep minutes of every meeting. These must be publicly posted. Section 8(9) of the AODA provides:" (9) A standards development committee shall keep minutes of every meeting it holds and shall make the minutes available to the public by posting them on a government internet site and by such other means as the terms of reference may provide."These minutes are an important way for the public to learn what ideas and options are being discussed at a Standards Development Committee, why they are being accepted or rejected, whom the Standards Development Committee is consulting, and generally, how the Standards Development Committee is going about its work. This provides an important measure of openness, transparency, and accountability for the work of the Standards Development Committee, and more generally, for the operations and implementation of the AODA. These are not secret committees. Public confidence in the work of each Standards Development Committee is a key requirement for making the AODA work. It is especially important since the 2014 report of the second AODA Independent Review, conducted by Mayo Moran, found that there is a significant amount of frustration and skepticism within the disability community, due to the slow rate of progress on accessibility.As I understand it, the current practice regarding these meeting minutes is that the Accessibility Directorate staff first prepare a draft of a meeting's minutes. The Standards Development Committee chair then reviews this draft, makes changes if he or she wishes, and then circulates it to the Standards Development Committee members for their approval. According to the Accessibility Directorate, a 75% super-majority is required to approve the minutes. That 75% super-majority is also required to make an amendment to the proposed minutes. This has twice shown itself to be inappropriate in the early proceedings of the K-12 Education Standards Development Committee, on which I sit. When the members of that Committee received a draft of the minutes of our first meeting, which had been held on February 5, 2018, I proposed a minor amendment, to ensure that the minutes included an important point that I had raised. The Accessibility Directorate had not included that point in its draft of the minutes. Fully 16 Committee members voted in favour of my proposed amendment. Only 7 members voted against it. It would seem obvious that it should pass. However, it failed, because it only secured 68% support, not the required 75% support. By this approach, the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario has tremendous, indeed excessive de facto control over what the public sees in those minutes. I raised this concern at the April 18 meeting of the K-12 Education Standards Development Committee. I proposed a motion that our votes on meeting minutes be decided by a simple majority, not a 75% super-majority. I emphasize that the K-12 Education Standards Development Committee had never previously voted to adopt that 75% super-majority rule, and that the Minister's terms of reference for the Standards Development Committee do not impose any 75% super-majority requirement for Committee votes on things like approving or amending our meetings' minutes.At the April 18, 2018 meeting of the K-12 Education Standards Development Committee, fully 11 Committee members voted in support of my motion, in favour of a simple majority voting requirement on items such as meeting minutes. Only 9 Committee members voted against it. We had a clear simple majority in favour of my motion. Yet the Accessibility Directorate staff directed the Committee chair that my motion failed to pass, because it had not garnered a 75% vote in support. This makes no sense. A majority of Standards Development Committee members wanted votes on their minutes to be decided by a simple majority vote. The Accessibility Directorate had no authority to override this.We ask you, as the Minister, responsible for oversight of the Accessibility Directorate, to direct the Accessibility Directorate to stop purporting to impose a 75% super-majority voting requirement on Standards Development Committees when they take a formal vote on such issues as approving or amending Committee minutes. The Accessibility Directorate should not be trying to exert such control over the work of independent Standards Development Committees."Here again, the former minister did not answer this letter and did not advise that the former Government took any action on this request.12. Putting the Cart Before the Horse – Previous Minister's Direction to Standards Development Committees to Set Priorities in Their First Six Months A further problem with the standards development process was the former Ontario Government's practice of directing a Standards Development Committee to set priorities for its work within its first six months of its two years of work. At first, this might seem to make sense. On closer inspection, it is wasteful and counter-productive.The AODA Alliances April 23, 2018 letter to the previous minister, Minister MacCharles, asked that this direction be retracted. There is no indication that she did so. we were given no reason for her failing to act on our request.Our April 23, 2018 letter to the previous minister explained this concern as follows:"In your Mandate Letter to the K-12 and Post-Secondary Education Standards Development Committees, you directed each Committee to report to you within six months, on the priorities they recommend. We write to ask you to reconsider and withdraw this direction.We raise three concerns with this direction. First, it is not clear what you mean by "priorities". Are you asking these Standards Development Committees to report to you on what areas they should address first in their work plan, as they work through the disability accessibility barriers in the sector of Ontario's education system they are reviewing? Alternatively, are you asking them to report to you on which accessibility barriers are a priority to be addressed by the promised Education Accessibility Standard? We have not been able to get this effectively clarified by the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario.Second, if your Mandate Letters' request is for each Standards Development Committee to decide in the first six months of their work on which accessibility barriers should be a priority for the promised Education Accessibility Standard to address, this, respectfully, is inappropriate. It puts the cart before the horse. It would not be possible to make appropriate and informed decisions on this before the Standards Development Committee has had enough time to effectively identify and list all the accessibility barriers that need to be addressed.Third, if you are asking each Standards Development Committee to decide which, among the various barriers in Ontario's education system, should be a high priority or a low priority to fix, this would be problematic. It would call on each Standards Development Committee to pick and choose among different disabilities, and in effect, to rank some as a greater priority than others. A Standards Development Committee would thereby in effect be wrongly choosing winners and losers among students with disabilities.For example, if a Standards Development Committee decides that physical barriers are a greater priority, but accessibility of instructional materials is a lower priority, this would make students with mobility disabilities the winners and students with vision loss or dyslexia the losers. The Education Accessibility Standard must ensure an accessible education system for all students with disabilities, not just some of them. For a Standards Development Committee to in effect choose winners and losers flies in the face of the guarantee of equality in the Ontario Human Rights Code and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. We do not believe you intended for a Standards Development Committee to engage in such conduct, or to contradict the AODA's goal of ensuring a barrier-free education system by 2025. However, even if this was not intended, it is the practical result.There is room for a Standards Development Committee to identify priorities among barriers that fall within a category or class of barriers. A Standards Development Committee could, for example, recommend that when it comes to physical barriers, it is a greater priority to get in a school's front door, around all classrooms and teaching/learning areas, and in the and around the washrooms. The Committee could also recommend that it is a lesser priority to get into the janitor's storage area.We ask you to clarify your Mandate letter accordingly, and to withdraw your request that priorities be set within the first six months of the work of these Standards Development Committees. An AODA accessibility standard in the area of education must ensure an accessible education system by 2025. If a class or category of disability accessibility barriers is treated as lower priority, or left out altogether, the accessibility standard will fail to serve its important objective."13. Ensuring that the Public Can Fully and Effectively Take Part in All Upcoming Public Consultations on Proposals for AODA Accessibility StandardsThe former Government did not give the public sufficient advance notice of when it would be consulting the public on a proposed accessibility standard. Typically, the Ontario Government would simply release a Standards Development Committee's draft recommendations, without any prior warning, and would then give the public the amount of time for input that the AODA mandates. We have needed at times to seek extensions.We raised several concerns with the former Government in this regard, in our April 23, 2018 to the former minister, Minister MacCharles, as follows:"The Ontario Government will be required under the AODA to come to the public over the next weeks and months with a series of at least 12 different important requests for public input regarding the AODA, including:The current request for input on the draft recommendations from the Employment Standards Development Committee on proposed revisions to the 2011 Employment Accessibility Standard. Within some months after that, the Government will seek public input on that Standards Development Committee's final recommendations. (2 consultations) An expected upcoming request for input to the Government on the final recommendations by the Transportation Standards Development committee for revisions to the 2011 Transportation Accessibility Standard. We understand that the Transportation Standards Development committee has already submitted its final recommendations to the Government, but the Government has not released them to the public, for public input. (1 consultation)An expected upcoming request for input to the Government on the recommendations by the Information and Communication Standards Development committee for revisions to the 2011 Information and Communication Accessibility Standard. We understand that the Information and Communication Standards Development Committee is still working on its draft recommendations. Within some months after getting public input on its draft recommendations, the Government will seek public input on that Standards Development Committee's final recommendations. (2 consultations)An expected upcoming request for input to the Government on the draft recommendations by the Health Care Standards Development committee on what should be included in the promised Health Care Accessibility Standard. We understand that the Health Care Standards Development Committee is still working on its draft recommendations. Within some months after getting public input on its draft recommendations, the Government will seek public input on that Standards Development Committee's final recommendations. (2 consultations)Some time in the next weeks, there will be an invitation for public input to be given to the Third Independent Review of the AODA, on how effectively the AODA's employment and enforcement has been. That Independent Review must report by the end of the year. (1 consultation) Likely next year the Government will seek public input on the draft recommendations on what to include in the promised Education Accessibility Standard, that will come forth from the K-12 Education Standards Development Committee and the Post-Secondary Standards Development Committee. Those Committees just started their work. They won't have raft recommendations before next year. Within some months after getting public input on its draft recommendations, the Government will seek public input on those Standards Development Committees' final recommendations. (2 consultations)The Government was required to appoint a Standards Development Committee to review the 2012 Public Spaces Accessibility Standard. Within 12-18 months of its appointment, the Government will seek input on its draft recommendations, and later, on its final recommendations for revisions to the Public Spaces Accessibility Standard. Within some months after getting public input on its draft recommendations, the Government will seek public input on that Standards Development Committee's final recommendations. (2 consultations)All told, these requests for public input will call on the public, including the disability sector and obligated organizations, to devote a significant amount of time and effort to reviewing detailed recommendations and to formulating their input, over a short period of time. In contrast, over the half decade since the end of 2012, the Government has reached out to the public, including the disability sector, with four such requests for input:In 2014, input into the second AODA Independent Review, conducted by Mayo Moran.In 2014, a request for input into the Customer Service Standards Development Committee's draft recommendations on revisions to the 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard.In 2015-2016, the Government's request for public input on the Customer Service Standards Development Committee's final recommendations for revisions to the 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard.In 2017, the request for input into the Transportation Standards Development committee's draft recommendations on revisions to the 2011 Transportation Accessibility Standard.When such requests for input come to the public at the same time (as was the case in the 2014 spring) or when they come close on the heels of one another, this can impose an excessive burden on those who want to offer their input. This is so for all sectors. It is especially challenging for the disability sector. Our input comes from individuals, from non-profit charities with huge demands on limited resources, and from the unfunded and volunteer-driven AODA Alliance.We therefore make the following recommendations. All of these lie within your authority as the responsible Minister:Please now announce a rough timetable for all of these public consultations. Where you cannot be precise, offer an estimate of when they will occur. The Accessibility Directorate of Ontario can adjust it over time, and alert the public of these adjustments, as events unfold.This will enable interested organizations to plan ahead. Up to now, the Government has simply announced a consultation on a Standards Development Committee's recommendations on the very day that the consultation period begins. In the past, we have had to ask the Government a number of times to lengthen the consultation period. Happily, the Government has been helpful in doing so.Please ensure that there is no overlap between the consultation periods. Please put a reasonable gap between each of them, to avoid over-burdening interested organizations.Please ensure that the consultation period for any of these does not occupy key periods when we know that many are on holidays, such as in late August or at the end of December. Please allow a longer time for input than the minimum period that the AODA requires. Please make public a Standards Development Committee's draft or final recommendations as soon as the Government receives them. This will enable the public to know what is being proposed as soon as possible. Since the AODA's enactment in 2005, there has often been a period of several weeks after the Government has received a Standards Development Committee's recommendations, before they are made public. Especially now, where so many consultation processes will be coming up, it will help us and the public to know what is on the table in as many of the Standards Development Committees as possible, when we are addressing each.in that spirit, please now immediately make public the final recommendations of the Transportation Standards Development committee for revisions to the 2011 Transportation Accessibility Standard. Your Government already has received them from the Transportation Standards Development committee. Public transit is a major issue in the upcoming Ontario June 7, 2018 election. There is no reason to withhold those final recommendations from the public in these circumstances. There are pressing reasons to now make them public.During these consultations, please hold public meetings to gather input on Standards Development Committee recommendations. The Government did this back in the late 2000s, but regrettably abandoned this practice after 2011. It is helpful to get face-to-face stakeholder input, and for stakeholders to hear from each other.Please work with the Third AODA Independent Review to ensure that its public hearings and consultation process will not take place until after the 2018 Ontario general election."Once again, the former Government did not answer us, or, to our knowledge, take any action on these requests.14. Accessibility Directorate Overstepping Its Proper Role in the Work of Standards Development Committees The Accessibility Directorate is authorized to provide support and assistance to Standards Development Committees. However, the AODA contemplates that a Standards Development Committee is an arms-length advisory body that will formulate its own advice for the Government. What the Government later does with the Standards Development Committee's recommendations is, of course, up to the Government. We raised with the new Minister for Accessibility and Seniors, Raymond Cho, our concern about the Accessibility Directorate overstepping its role, in our July 17, 2018 briefing note for the minister, as follows:"Second, the Accessibility Directorate has been overstepping its role, in the work of Standards Development Committees appointed under the AODA. These Committees are intended to give their own independent advice to the Government on what a specific accessibility standard should include. Your Government is best served when the Standards Development Committee is left free to give its own advice, without the Accessibility Directorate attempting directly or indirectly to steer or influence it. At most, the Accessibility Directorate should serve as a neutral administrative support to these Committees, without overstepping that role. However, we have observed and have heard from others that the Accessibility Directorate is attempting to infuse its priorities and views into the work of these Committees, at times in a nuanced an subtle way. This needs to stop now."For example, from our experience having a representative on the K-12 Education Standards Development Committee, the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario appears to set the Committee's agenda, and not the committee itself. It may consult the committee chair to approve its work, but that leaves out the committee's collective expertise. On the K-12 education Standards Development Committee, the Accessibility Directorate subtly attempted to influence the range of barriers that the committee would explore, by focusing on the results of the former Government's online education barriers survey, addressed earlier in this chapter. As noted earlier in this chapter, that Government survey had left out many if not the majority of disability barriers that students with disabilities face in Ontario's education system. The K-12 Education Standards Development Committee was informed that it was to prepare a "rolling report" of its work, with the intent that this would be later submitted to the minister to whom the Accessibility Directorate reports. It was the Accessibility Directorate that was to write this report. Committee members could then give feedback on it. however here again, the prospect was faced that amendments could require a 75% super-majority vote of committee members –a rule emanating from the Accessibility Directorate, as explained earlier in this chapter. That would skew the report in favour of the terms that the Accessibility Directorate chose to draft. At bottom, this makes it a report to the Government, in which the Government's own officials would have a substantial hand in writing.This is not just a theoretical consideration. The initial draft of the "rolling report presented in the spring of 2018 to the K-12 Education Standards Development Committee included items that the Accessibility Directorate had inserted, and that had not been discussed by members of the Committee.From our review of draft recommendations and final recommendations from other Standards Development Committees, we are concerned that there is a real risk that these are also being written by the Accessibility Directorate, and then offered to the Standards Development Committee for its approval or amendment. If so, this can be a significant intrusion into the work of the Standards Development Committees. Our May 7, 2018 brief to the Employment Standards Development Committee identified a passage in that committee's draft recommendations that was strikingly similar to a report from the Transportation Standards Development committee. the March 20, 2018 report of the Employment Standards Development Committee said this:"The SDC acknowledged that great strides have taken place in achieving accessible employment in Ontario, but there is still work to do."The AODA Alliance's May 7, 2018 brief to the Employment Standards Development Committee included:"The Employment Standards Development Committee offered no evidence for that sweeping conclusion. If there are great strides forward, there is no proof that it was due to the 2011 Employment Accessibility Standard. It is reasonable to infer that this rosy language was included in the March 20, 2018 posting at the initiation of the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario. We understand that the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario takes active part in drafting such reports for Standards Development Committees. Moreover, we found strikingly similar language in the final recommendations of the Transportation Standards Development committee, which the Government posted for public comment two months later, on May 2, 2018. It says:“The Committee acknowledged that, while great strides have taken place in achieving accessible transportation in Ontario by 2025, there is still work to do.”"Since we publicly posted our May 7, 2018 brief to the Employment Standards Development Committee, neither the Ontario Government, nor the Accessibility Directorate in particular, have disputed our concern or denied their involvement in drafting those nearly-verbatim statements.As an effective and positive short term solution, the Ontario Government should instruct the Accessibility Directorate to disentangle itself from the work of each Standards Development Committee in developing its recommendations. As a longer-term solution, we again support and endorse the recommendation on point of the first AODA Independent Review, by Charles Beer. It had recommended that the standards development process should operate independently of the Ontario Government, by establishing an independent Ontario Access Board. As noted earlier in this chapter, this could require an amendment to the AODA. As also noted earlier in this chapter, we commend the Federal Government for proposing in Bill C-81, the proposed Accessible Canada Act, the creation of the proposed Canadian Accessibility Standards Development Organization. Its intent is to operate as an independent advisory body with accessibility expertise that would recommend contents for accessibility standards.15. Standards Development Committees Not Fulfilling Their Duty to Recommend an Accessibility StandardUnder the AODA, a Standards Development Committee is required to develop an actual accessibility standard – something which the Ontario Government could enact as a regulation. Section 8(9) of the AODA provides:"Development of proposed standards 9. (1) Each standards development committee shall develop proposed accessibility standards in accordance with the process set out in this section and with the terms of reference established by the Minister."Contrary to this, the recommendations that have come from Standards Development Committees, especially in the past few years, do not at times come close to being regulations. By this we do not refer to the fact that they are not written in precise legislative language. As but one example, the final recommendations of the Transportation Standards Development committee, made public in the 2018 spring, are made up in no small part by recommendations for measures that are not to be included in an AODA standard regulation. The K-12 Education Standards Development Committee has been encouraged by the Accessibility Directorate to come forward with recommendations for non-legislative action, as well as with measures to include in an accessibility standard.We of course accept that it should be open to a Standards Development Committee to include non-legislative measures, along with recommendations for the contents of an accessibility standard, if it wishes. However, the core job of an AODA Standards Development Committee is to recommend the specifics of an accessibility standard, and what is to be included in it. Recommending other measures should, at most, be a minor part of their work and their work product.16. Weak Work Product from Recent Standards Development Committees As Chapter 3 of this brief shows, the AODA accessibility standards enacted to date are far too weak. Chapter 4 of this brief shows that the efforts to date of Standards Development Committees since 2014 have not reversed that trend. Chapter 4 shows that the 2015 final recommendations of the Accessibility Standards Advisory Council, after its review of the 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard, were far too weak. Chapter 4 also shows that the preliminary and final recommendations of the Transportation Standards Development committee, during its review of the 2011 Transportation Accessibility Standard, were also quite weak and insufficient. As well, Chapter 4 shows that the 2018 draft recommendations of the Employment Standards Development Committee, based on its review of the 2011 Employment Accessibility Standard, fall far short of what employees and job-seekers with disabilities need.We do not fault the members of those Standards Development Committees for those weak recommendations. Rather, we believe that this is the result of systemic deficiencies in the standards development process outlined in this chapter.17. The Standards Development Process Requires More Extensive Involvement by the Ontario Human Rights CommissionThe final report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review recommended more involvement in the standards development process by the Ontario Human Rights Commission. It found:"Creating better linkages between the Code and the AODA could also be advanced by having the Ontario Human Rights Commission play a role in the AODA standards development process, for example, and by co-developing communications materials."We agree. This is especially important since the AODA accessibility standards enacted to date far too often fall short of the Ontario Human Rights Code's accessibility requirements.We are not convinced that the standards development process has been adjusted to achieve this. The K-12 Education Standards Development Committee includes no representative from the Commission. No Commission presenter was included on the agenda for the first three days of that committee's meetings. For example, that Standards Development Committee's extensive orientation did not include any presentation by the Commission on the duties of schools to students with disabilities under the Ontario Human Rights Code. That topic is absolutely central to the work of that committee. The committee was told that a Commission presentation was being considered for its June 2018 meeting. That meeting was cancelled during the ongoing freeze of current Standards Development Committee work, since the June 2018 Ontario election.18. Insufficient Consulting of the Disability Community During the Work of Standards Development Committees Over the past decade, we have urged the Government time and again to ensure that Standards Development Committees effectively and extensively consult with the disability community on the disability accessibility barriers they face. We have also urged that each Standards Development Committee should try to identify a short list of important issues which they are finding challenging. On these, the Standards Development Committee should convene a stakeholder summit to brainstorm solutions.As far as we can tell, this has not happened. For example, no Standards Development Committee has reached out to the AODA Alliance to attend and present its ideas on key issues that the Standards Development Committee should consider. This is so even though the AODA Alliance is widely recognized as playing an important role, advocating on these issues from the disability perspective. Our briefs on each accessibility standard may be among the most detailed, if not the most detailed, on point. A number of disability organizations rely on us to assemble these briefs with their input, and then to add additional points, if any, when they submit briefs to a Standards Development Committee or to the Ontario Government.In 2017, we asked both the Information and Communication Standards Development Committee and the Health Care Standards Development Committee for a chance to present to them. Both declined. We understood that they may be open to our attending after they have made public their draft recommendations. The Employment Standards Development Committee recently took up our offer. We presented to that Committee on November 21, 2018. In Chapter 1 and earlier in this chapter, we address the current Government's effort to get AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky to sign a draconian non-disclosure agreement in connection with that presentation.To defer this input until after a Standards Development Committee has written its draft recommendations is problematic. It comes very late in their work, after they have already done much of their heavy lifting. We had been eager to present earlier in their work, in the hope that this might help guide their work from an earlier stage. The Transportation Standards Development Committee allowed us to present for 30 minutes, jointly with the ARCH Disability Law Centre. We were asked no questions about our extensive brief and its numerous detailed recommendations. In contrast, the Employment Standards Development Committee asked us a good number of good and probing questions during our presentation to them.Standards Development Committees hear from some presenters from outside the committee, earlier in their work. From our review of the work of the Transportation Standards Development committee, it had appeared that these were disproportionately made up of Government officials. In its first two meetings, the K-12 Standards Development Committee was not asked to identify any public community representatives from whom the committee might hear. We reasonably anticipate that the Accessibility Directorate is likely making many if not most of the decisions on whom the Committee will hear from, possibly in consultation with the committee's chair. 19. The Former Government's Broken 2007 Election Promise to Provide Staff Support to Disability Sectors on Each Standards Development CommitteeWithin the first two years of the AODA's enactment, we had learned that disability sector representatives on Standards Development Committees were in a position of real disadvantage, as compared to representatives of obligated organizations. Obligated organizations, such as those representing the public transit sector, came to meetings back with research, proposals and other resources that they could develop with the benefit of their large organizations and taxpayer-funded operations. Disability sector representatives typically include staff or volunteers from non-profit charities and individuals from the community. They don't typically have the same supports.As such, we asked the three political parties to promise in the 2007 Ontario election to provide staff support to assist the disability sector representatives.Premier Dalton McGuinty, who won that election, had promised to provide a staff person to support Standards Development Committee disability sector representatives. We understood that the former Government kept that promise in the first years after the 2007 election.However it is our understanding that the Ontario Government has not done so in recent years. We have no information that the Accessibility Directorate even offered this to Standards Development Committee disability sector representatives since 2013, in the six Standards Development Committees that have been in operation since then. We informally raised this with Accessibility Directorate staff. They did not appear to see the need for this support to disability sector representatives.20. Ministry's Recent Failure to Publicly Consult on a Standards Development Committee's Final RecommendationsOnce a Standards Development Committee submits its final recommendations to the Ontario Government, the AODA contemplates that the Ontario Government will get input from the public before deciding what to enact as an accessibility standard regulation. Section 10 of the AODA requires the Ontario Government to publicly post the Standards Development Committee's recommendations. Section 10 of the AODA provides:" 10. (1) Upon receiving a proposed accessibility standard from a standards development committee under subsection 9 (5) or clause 9 (9) (c), the Minister shall make it available to the public by posting it on a government internet site and by such other means as the Minister considers advisable."While the AODA does not explicitly impose a requirement on the Government to consult the public at this point, it is a natural and obvious part of the overall standards development process. When the first round of accessibility standards were developed and enacted between 2006 and 2012, the Ontario Government undertook such public consultations once a Standards Development Committee had submitted its final recommendations. In light of this, we were deeply troubled in the 2018 spring when the Accessibility Directorate informed us that it was not doing so, vis a vis the Transportation Standards Development committee's 2018 final recommendations. In her May 3, 2018 email to the AODA Alliance, Ann Hoy, Assistant Deputy Minister for the Accessibility Directorate, wrote as follows:"To clarify, the final report and recommendations of the Transportation Standards Development Committee has been submitted to the Minister, and is currently posted for information. We are not seeking public comment at this time." In response, AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky took exception to this, writing on May 3, 2018 to Ms. Hoy:"The whole purpose for public posting of a final recommendation from a Standards Development Committee is for the Government to receive public input on it. Why is the Government not seeking or inviting public input on the final recommendation of the Transportation Standards Development committee?"Neither Ms. Hoy nor anyone else from the Government responded to this. If this was only being done due to the then-impending Ontario election, this is only a minor blip. However, if this were a new general practice, it is a matter of serious concern. Over the seven months since the June 2018 Ontario election, we have heard no word from the Ontario Government, including from the Accessibility Directorate, that it is consulting on the final recommendations of the Transportation Standards Development committee.We have every expectation that the Ontario Government will hear from the transportation sector. That sector has done a very effective job of ensuring that the Ontario Government hears its perspective, as was reflected in the original 2011 Transportation Accessibility Standard. People with disabilities deserve the same opportunity.21. The Government's Repeatedly Failing to Comply with the Statutory Deadline for Deciding on Making an Accessibility Standard after One is RecommendedUnder the AODA, the Government assigns to a Standards Development committee the duty of preparing a proposal for an accessibility standard in a specific field. After the Standards Development committee submits its final proposal to the Government, the AODA sets a specific 90-day time line for the Government to decide whether to adopt that proposal in whole or in part. The Government appears to have repeatedly violated the AODA's mandatory short 90-day time line for the minister responsible for the AODA to recommend to Cabinet what to enact in an accessibility standard, once the Standards Development committee has submitted its final proposal to the minister.Section 9(7) and (8) of the AODA provide:"(7) No later than 90 days after receiving a proposed accessibility standard under subsection (6), the Minister shall decide whether to recommend to the Lieutenant Governor in Council that the proposed standard be adopted by regulation under section 6 in whole, in part or with modifications. (8) On making a decision under subsection (7), the Minister shall inform, in writing, the standards development committee that developed the proposed standard in question of his or her decision."Our 2014 brief to Mayo Moran included:"The Government took at least a year, if not years to make its final decisions on which standard to enact in the areas of transportation, employment, information and communication and the built environment. The Transportation Standards Development committee submitted its final recommendation to the minister in late 2008 or early 2009. The Employment Standards Development committee submitted its final recommendation to the Government in September 2009. The Information and Communication Standards Development Committee submitted its final proposal for the Information and Communication Accessibility Standard to the Ontario Government on May 29, 2009. The Government did not enact the IASR to implement parts of those recommendations until June 2011. The Built Environment Standards Development Committee submitted its final proposal for a Built Environment Accessibility Standard in 2010. The Government did not enact the Public Spaces provisions of the IASR until December 2012.We had negotiated the AODA's detailed tight time lines for this action with the Government during the development of this legislation. Our predecessor coalition, the Ontarians with Disabilities Act Committee was concerned that otherwise; the standards development process would get bogged down in the Government bureaucracy. It turns out that those concerns were well-founded."This same problem has persisted in the case of every Standards Development Committee since 2014 that has submitted recommendations to the Ontario Government, namely in the areas of customer service and transportation.22. Purporting to Make Amendments to the 2011 Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation Without Obeying the AODA's Mandatory Process for Revising an Accessibility StandardThe former Government took the extraordinary and deeply-troubling step in June 2016 of purporting to amend parts of the 2011 Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation, without first appointing a Standards Development Committee to review the relevant parts of that standard. We believe that these purported amendments are not valid. The AODA makes it mandatory for a Standards Development Committee to be appointed to review an accessibility standard before the Ontario Government can amend it. The former Ontario Government did not follow that mandatory precondition to revising an AODA accessibility standard. Put simply, the former Ontario Government had no authority to make the amendments in question. These were tagged on to a series of unrelated amendments to the 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard, which we address at length in Chapter 3 of this brief.We explained in the December 3, 2014 AODA Alliance Update why such amendments to the Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation were outside the scope of the Ontario Government's powers under the AODA, as follows. That AODA Alliance Update was commenting on the former Ontario Government's announced proposal for amendments to the 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard:"In addition to proposing changes to the 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard, the Government's November 9, 2015 Summary announces that the Government also proposes to make other changes to the 2011 Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation. These proposed revisions have nothing to do with the Customer Service Accessibility Standard, or with recommendations submitted to it by ASAC, or with any issues on which the Government had referred to a Standards Development Committee appointed under the AODA. The Government refers to these revisions as “minor administrative/housekeeping changes.” Yet whether they are major or minor, or somewhere in between, the Government cannot make these changes to an AODA accessibility standard unless it strictly obeys the procedure that the AODA legally requires the Government to follow before it can make a change to an AODA accessibility standard. The Government's November 9, 2015 Summary describes these proposed changes as follows:“?Revise provisions related to accessible formats and communications supports to employees in the Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation to remove the duplicative requirement to consult with a person with a disability. ?Revise typographical errors in text by replacing “no more that” with “no more than.” ?Replace “courtesy seating” with “priority seating” throughout the regulation.?Replace the term “pedestrian crossovers” and the definition with the following term and definition: ?“Signal controlled pedestrian crossing” means a pedestrian crossing where pedestrian control signals are installed.”We and the public are in no position, based on The Government's November 9, 2015 Summary, to assess the impact of changes such as the removal of requirements to consult people with disabilities on accessible formats which the Government claims (without explanation) are duplicative, or redefining pedestrian crossovers. However, the issue here is not whether these proposed changes would be good or bad. No one can get to that question until and unless it is lawful for the Government to make those changes in the way it proposes. The Government cannot make these changes to the Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation until and unless it has first appointed a Standards Development Committee under the AODA to review the provisions that are in issue. It has not done so here.The Government once before tried doing this very thing over three years ago. In fact, back then it tried to make two of the proposed changes it again attempts here. It tried to do so using the same improper process which the AODA does not permit. In 2012, the Government backed down after we objected to what it was trying to do. It was wrong then. It is equally wrong now. Here is what the Government tried to do back in 2012: On August 15, 2012, the Government commendably posted for public comment a draft new accessibility standard to address physical barriers in public spaces. That was entirely proper. The Government was thereby acting on recommendations from a Standards Development Committee which had studied that issue and submitted recommendations for accessibility standards on that topic.However, at the same time, the Government improperly tried to tack on to the end of that 2012 draft regulation a series of unrelated changes to the 2011 Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation. The Government called those proposed changes “minor” and “technical,” just as it is doing now. In 2012, we strongly objected to this. We said that an AODA accessibility standard cannot lawfully be amended until and unless the topic had been the subject of a review which the Government had referred to a Standards Development Committee. In our August 29, letter to the Ontario minister then responsible for the AODA, John Milloy, we made the following points which fully apply here:“1.The Government is Wrongly Skipping over Important Requirements in the AODA for Revising an Accessibility Standard RegulationWe are deeply concerned because your Government has failed to take all the important steps it is required to take under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) before it can post a draft regulation to amend the 2011 IAR. The Government cannot amend the 2011 IAR simply by posting a draft regulation, receiving public comments on it, and then passing these changes either as is, or with more modifications. Such an inadequate process is what your Government is here inappropriately proposing to do. Sections 6 to 10 of the AODA require that before the government may enact a new accessibility standard, or may revise an existing one, it must take a series of mandatory steps. These steps are intended to ensure that the process for developing a new accessibility standard, or for revising an existing accessibility standard, is fair, open and fully consultative. They aim to ensure that at all stages when a new accessibility standard is being developed, or when revisions to an existing accessibility standard are being considered, persons with disabilities and others have a full opportunity for input, including a full opportunity for dialogue across the table with other stakeholders, such as the private sector and the broader public sector. Before the Government can revise an existing accessibility standard regulation, it must reconstitute the Standards Development Committee under the AODA that initially recommended that accessibility standard's enactment. That Standards Development Committee must follow all the procedures set out in the AODA to get input from the public, including the disability community. The Standards Development Committee must then submit an initial proposal to the Government for changes to the existing accessibility standard regulation. The public must then be given a chance to comment on this proposal. After that, the Standards Development Committee must develop a final proposal, taking into account the public's input on its initial proposal. The government can then review the Standards Development Committee's final proposal and decide what changes, if any, it wants to make to the existing accessibility standard regulation. Only after that can the Government post a draft regulation on the internet for public comment, in order to amend an existing accessibility standard regulation. After that, the government must assess the public feedback it receives on its posted regulation. Once all of that is done, the government can pass a regulation that amends an existing accessibility standard regulation. It is open to the Government at any time after an accessibility standard regulation has been enacted to assign the Standards Development Committee to review it and make recommendations to revise it. IN any event, the AODA requires the Government to assign the Standards Development Committee to review that existing accessibility standard regulation and to recommend any needed changes no later than five years after the existing accessibility standard regulation was enacted. Section 9(9) of the AODA provides in material part:"9 (9) Within five years after an accessibility standard is adopted by regulation or at such earlier time as the Minister may specify, the standards development committee responsible for the industry, sector of the economy or class of persons or organizations to which the standard applies shall,(a) re-examine the long-term accessibility objectives determined under subsection (2); (b) if required, revise the measures, policies, practices and requirements to be implemented on or before January 1, 2025 and the time-frame for their implementation;(c) develop another proposed accessibility standard containing such additions or modifications to the existing accessibility standard as the standards development committee deems advisable and submit it to the Minister for the purposes of making the proposed standard public and receiving comments in accordance with section 10; and (d) make such changes it considers advisable to the proposed accessibility standard developed under clause (c) based on the comments received under section 10 and provide the Minister with the subsequent proposed accessibility standard." Several years ago, your government commendably appointed Standards Development Committees to develop recommendations for accessibility standards in the areas of transportation, of information and communication, and of employment. In June 2011, as a result of the extensive work of those Standards Development Committees, and after very extensive direct Government discussions with us, with the broader disability community and with other stakeholders, your government ultimately enacted the 2011 IAR. Your government will be obliged to reconstitute these Standards Development Committees, or an amalgamation of those Committees, to review that regulation within five years of its 2011 enactment. Those Standards Development Committees will be able to recommend any additions, changes or revisions to the 2011 IAR. To date, your government has not reconstituted those Committees, or an amalgamation of those Committees, to undertake a review of the 2011 IAR. Put simply, your government cannot unilaterally post a draft regulation with proposed amendments to the 2011 IAR, now, without first subjecting it to a Standards Development Committee process. Your Government cannot pick and choose when it will follow the AODA's mandatory requirements. This is not some tedious technicality. The AODA provisions governing the development, review, and revision of accessibility standards were the product of very extensive discussions, consultations and negotiations between 2003 and 2005 with all stakeholders, including the disability community. Many Ontarians with disabilities fought long and hard for this legislation. Many Ontarians with disabilities campaigned vigorously to ensure that the legislation included important safeguards like the ones just described, to protect the accessibility standards that are developed and enacted under it.Even then, since the 2005 enactment of the AODA, we have also had to campaign vigorously to try to get added protections for the Standards Development Committee process. For example, after 2005, when your government initially established its first Standards Development Committees, it did not ensure that people with disabilities had equal representation on those committees. Our community, and its concerns, were outnumbered, under-represented and overpowered. As a result of that unfairness, on September 14, 2007, Premier McGuinty made a series of election commitments at our request. He promised to ensure that persons with disabilities would have 50% representation on all Standards Development Committees. He pledged that every recommendation that a Standards Development Committee considered could be separately voted on clause-by-clause to ensure that our voices could be fairly heard. He committed that Standards Development Committees could consult with the public including the disability community. He promised that disability sector representation on each Standards Development Committee would have new Ministry staff support to assist them. … …Your Government here in effect proposes to end-run both important protections for persons with disabilities in the legislation itself and the added guarantees set out in the Premier's important 2007 election commitments. This is not fair. It also sends very bad signals to the public. If the Government is not going to strictly obey the AODA, how can it expect others to do so? For the Government to do this now implies that anyone, unhappy with an existing accessibility standard regulation, can try to end-run the legislation by simply asking you and your Ministry to amend that existing accessibility standard regulation without first submitting the issue to the mandatory Standards Development Committee deliberative process. 2. The AODA Creates No Exception or Exemption for Minor or Technical Amendments to an Accessibility RegulationIt is no answer to our concerns that your government's August 15, 2012 web posting calls these proposed amendments to the 2011 IAR minor and technical changes, said to be aimed at clarifying the IAR and making it easier for organizations to comply. The Ministry's website's August 15, 2012 posting on these amendments states:"The draft standards also propose minor technical amendments to the Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation to:?clarify some of the requirements?make it easier for organizations to implement them."Nothing we have found in the AODA creates such an exception or exemption from the mandatory standards development process that we described earlier in this letter. Your government's new approach to amending an existing accessibility standard regulation creates a dangerous loophole through which a truck might later be driven. By your government's new approach, it can at any time amend any accessibility standard to make it "easier" for an organization to comply with that accessibility standard, without first submitting the issue to a Standards Development Committee. Your government could presumably unilaterally repeal any requirement in a standard, or lengthen any time line in a standard, that you've already passed into law. To repeal barrier removal and barrier prevention requirements would make it easier for an organization to comply. To lengthen time lines for removing and preventing barriers would also make it easier for an organization to comply. That could gut a standard without any of the safeguards in the legislation for which we fought so long and hard. Such a lopsided view of the process for developing or amending accessibility standards is unfair to people with disabilities. It undermines the goal of achieving full accessibility for all Ontarians with disabilities by 2025.”Our letter to Minister Milloy later made this additional point that also applies equally here:“6. The Government Will Leave a Cloud of Uncertainty over the Validity of any Amendments to the IAR Enacted in This Incorrect WayTo enact amendments to the 2011 IAR without complying strictly with the requirements of the AODA, will leave a cloud over those amendments. Organizations in the public and private sectors will not be certain if they were lawfully enacted. They will not know whether they should comply with the amendment, or with the original regulation before it was amended. This too does a major disservice to people with disabilities and to organizations in the public and private sectors who are obliged to comply with AODA accessibility standards. They should be able to have confidence that the Government has strictly followed the AODA in developing them."Our August 29, 2012 AODA Alliance Update stated regarding the Government’s attempts to take similar action as here: “We would raise objections even if we liked all the proposed amendments, and even if they were all improvements in protections for people with disabilities."In 2012, in the face of our strong objection, the Government commendably did not pass any of those proposed amendments to the Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation that had nothing to do with the accessibility of public spaces. … …What we have said so far in this analysis is ample to show that it is wrong for the Government to proceed as it here proposes. Making this even worse, two of the four changes that the Government seeks to now slip through without obeying the AODA are the same or virtually identical to those which, among others, the Government had tried to slip through in August 2012 (until we objected). The Government’s August 15, 2012 posting proposed amending the Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation as follows, among other things:“? Accessible formats and communications support for employees: removing duplicative requirement for employers to consult with employees when determining formats and supports? Courtesy seating: amending ‘courtesy’ seating references to ‘priority’ seating”Back in August 2012, we had emphasized to the Government that if it wished to enact such changes to the Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation, it had a readily-available way to do so. It could easily have constituted a Standards Development Committee under the AODA to consider these proposals. The AODA let the Government appoint such a Standards Development Committee any time it wished. Yet the Government never did so.In late 2012 and January 2013, the Government announced it planned to designate the Accessibility Standards Advisory Council to consider future proposals for accessibility standards, both new ones and revisions of old ones. ASAC was meant to be available to work on developing and reviewing accessibility standards on an ongoing basis, as needed. The Government has had fully three years to submit these proposed amendments to ASAC. ASAC had vast amounts of available time during which it could consider this. During most of the intervening years, the Government had not assigned ASAC any new accessibility standards to develop, and no existing ones to review. ASAC spent a few months in late 2013 to early 2014 reviewing the Customer Service Accessibility Standard. Otherwise, it was ready and available for action. To the Government, it may be inconvenient to have to go through the process that the AODA legally requires for any and all revisions to an AODA accessibility standard. However, that is the law. The Government is not above the law. It is a law that this very Government was justifiably proud to have designed, written and enacted. In its many formal and informal discussions with us since the fall of 2012, the Government has not put these specific proposals back on the table. Had it done so, it would have received the same response from us – urging it to constitute ASAC or some other Standards Development Committee to review the proposals, as the AODA requires. The “priority seating” proposal relates to the transportation accessibility requirements in the Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation. Those transportation accessibility requirements are required to be subject to a five year Standards Development Committee review, commencing in the next short while. That is where this priority seating” issue should be submitted.In the face of this concern, we anticipate that the Government might point to the 2014 report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review as supporting a need for the Government to be able to make minor amendments to an AODA accessibility standard without having to subject these to the full Standards Development Committee process. Mayo Moran’s Report states:“Enable minor revisions to standards.As noted in the What the Review Heard section, stakeholders highlighted a host of gaps and deficiencies in the five standards now in place. Some issues are a matter of interpretation and could be addressed through more proactive guidance from the ADO. Others seem to call for regulatory changes but are not urgent and should be set aside until the five-year review of the affected standard by ASAC. Still others, however, involve minor regulatory amendments that warrant more immediate action because the current wording makes implementation and enforcement difficult. Some doubts exist about whether the current process under the AODA provides the means to make small mid-stream changes to standards. This is an undesirable situation. I was frequently told about issues with various standards that were widely acknowledged to be problematic but will apparently nonetheless remain as is until the five-year review takes place. This category includes, for example, inconsistencies between AODA standards and other legislation or regulations. It is important to have a process for ongoing adjustment and calibration of the standards in order to ensure that they are achieving the goals that they were designed to achieve. Otherwise, the rigidity risks undermining confidence in the wisdom of the system. Some stakeholders have expressed the view that no changes to standards can be made outside the full standards review process under the legislation. On the face of it, I see nothing that would prevent amending an accessibility regulation once made. However, if this authority is found lacking, the AODA should be revised to provide it. It goes without saying that the Government would be expected to consult with affected stakeholders – including persons with disabilities – in the course of developing such minor amendments.”The Moran Report does not and cannot make it lawful for the Government to amend an AODA accessibility standard without complying with the AODA’s provisions on the standards development process. In the Report, Mayo Moran said that she didn’t see any reason why the Government cannot do so. Respectfully, she is wrong on this score. Her Report provides no persuasive analysis to support what appears to be an equivocal, cursory and conclusory view. It would not be binding on a court. The Report’s two key sentences from the preceding passage state:“On the face of it, I see nothing that would prevent amending an accessibility regulation once made. However, if this authority is found lacking, the AODA should be revised to provide it.” Therefore, the Government should now withdraw these proposed amendments to the Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation, as it did in the 2012 fall. The Government should submit them to the required standards development process, if it wishes to proceed with them."Chapter 6 Public Education on Accessibility Remains Insufficient1. Introduction Since the organized disability accessibility movement began in Ontario in 1994, every Government and every minister responsible for this issue has proclaimed the importance of and their passionate dedication to educating the public on the need for and benefits of accessibility for people with disabilities. Yet these rhetorical flourishes and the promises that accompanied them too often did not translate into sufficient effective action.Part 6 of the June 30, 2014 AODA Alliance brief to Mayo Moran demonstrated that up to that date, the Ontario Government did a quite inadequate job of discharging its responsibility to undertake public education on disability accessibility and the AODA. As that brief showed, there were times that the former Ontario Government actually gave out harmful and inaccurate information, such as its website for years incorrectly claiming that accessible customer service does not include providing customers with ramps and automatic door openers.The former Government made some limited efforts on public education since June 2014. However that action was not even close to sufficient to address the problems in this area which both the 2010 Charles Beer AODA Independent Review and the 2014 Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review identified. This chapter provides an addendum to Part 6 of the June 30, 2014, AODA Alliance brief to Mayo Moran.2. Recommended Findings We recommend that this AODA Independent Review make the following findings:* With only six years left before we reach 2025, and with the AODA having been the law since 2005, the findings in the 2010 Charles Beer AODA Independent Review report and the 2014 Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review report remain valid and current. Many if not most in the public are not aware of their AODA obligations. Of those who are aware of the AODA, too many, including too many within the Ontario Government itself, are not aware that the Ontario Human Rights Code and, where applicable, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms impose disability accessibility obligations that are as high as or higher than those now imposed by AODA accessibility standards. * Government efforts on public education on the AODA since 2014 have not solved this problem.* The former Ontario Government's ineffective enforcement of the AODA has undermined efforts at public education on the AODA. This is because the message has been widespread that failing to comply with the AODA likely brings no adverse consequences for an obligated organization.* It works against the AODA's goals for the Ontario Government to have publicly posted online that accessible customer service does not include providing ramps or automatic door openers.* There is a pressing need to include disability accessibility and inclusion in school curriculums. Moreover, professional training for a range of professions (such as design professionals e.g. architects and interior designers), needs to include sufficient training on disability accessibility. The former Ontario Government never kept its 2007 election promises to take action in these two important areas.* This many years after the AODA was enacted, it would be wrong to contend that effective AODA enforcement must now await further efforts to educate the public and obligated organizations on their obligations under the AODA. It is incorrect and harmful to treat public awareness and education as some unending precondition to initiating effective AODA enforcement.* While it has made available some useful tools and resources, the Ontario Government has not provided obligated organizations all the tools that could help them comply with the AODA and has not effectively and sufficiently publicized the tools and resources it has provided.* The public, including obligated organizations, will pay far more attention to public education and awareness efforts on accessibility when they know there is effective AODA enforcement.* The aim and core focus now should be raising action, not raising awareness.3. Recommendations on Public Education on the AODA We urge this Independent Review to recommend as follows:The Government should widely advertise on the mass media, and not just on the internet, via email and on Twitter, about the availability of resources, training materials and guides it has already developed for organizations to comply with accessibility standards enacted under the AODA. Promptly after any new AODA accessibility standard is enacted or an existing accessibility standard is revised in the future, the Government should make available and widely publicize a free guide, policy guideline and other like resource materials for obligated organizations to comply with that accessibility standard's accessibility requirements The Government should develop, make available and widely publicize a free web-authoring tool for creating accessible web pages, to comply with the, Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation's information and communication website accessibility requirements.The Government should promptly implement a permanent program to ensure that students in the school system are educated in disability accessibility. For example:The Government should identify the Minister and public officials responsible for this program's development and implementation. School boards and teachers' representatives should be consulted on its development and implementation. The Government should develop a sample curriculum which school boards could adopt if they wish, in lieu of developing their own curriculum.The Government should report to the public on this program's implementation and effectiveness. The Government should promptly require the self-governing bodies for key professions (such as architects, interior designers, planners, other design professionals, lawyers, doctors and social workers) to adopt, implement and require education on disability accessibility to qualify for those professions, and to require continuing professional development on this topic for those already qualified in those professions. Among other things, as part of this effort:For these key professions such as architects and planners, the Government should require that to qualify in future for a licence or other qualifications certificate, a specified amount of training in barrier free design must be completed, that goes beyond the insufficient requirements of the Ontario Building Code and AODA accessibility standards. A lead minister and public servants should be identified as responsible for this initiative. The Government should make publicly available resource materials to help those self-governing professional bodies develop the needed disability accessibility curriculum on accessibility needs of persons with disabilities. The Government should report to the public on this program's monitoring, implementation and effectiveness. Funding to any post-secondary faculty or self-governing professional organization for any of these professions should be made strictly conditional on compliance with this provincial policy and goal. Any college, university or other educational institution that provides training to any of those professions should be required to include accessibility training in their curriculum, especially if they are to receive any public funding.The Government should promptly consult with persons with disabilities, including the AODA Alliance, on the content of these public education materials. This should involve in-person discussions, and not merely an invitation to provide on-line feedback to the Government.The Government should not treat AODA public education or AODA awareness-raising as a substitute for or precondition for effective AODA enforcement. The Government's aim and core focus now should be raising action, not raising awareness.4. What the 2014 Final Report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review FoundThe 2014 final report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review's references to public education and awareness included these key points:* "Awareness of AODAAwareness of the AODA is another important element that bears upon how well we are doing in achieving our accessibility goals. The issue of awareness of the AODA was a theme that was frequently commented upon by participants in the Review. In the context of the AODA, awareness has three dimensions. It refers to awareness among the general public of the AODA's existence and what it stands for; awareness among people with disabilities as to what the AODA does for them; and awareness of obligated organizations that the AODA requires them to do something (as opposed to details on exactly what, which must be conveyed through targeted communications initiatives). The strong message given by participants in the consultations was that efforts to raise awareness have fallen seriously short in all three areas. Participants see this education and promotion function as chiefly the Government's job, though organizations supporting people with disabilities or representing obligated organizations also have a role to play.Upcoming GamesSeveral participants pointed out that a unique opportunity to raise the public profile of the AODA is fast approaching - the Pan Am/Parapan Am Games to be held in Ontario in summer 2015, coinciding with the 10th anniversary of the enactment of the AODA. Many spoke of their hope that the Parapan Games would attract intense media coverage, as the London Paralympics did in 2012. The Review was told of how para-athletes became celebrities in Britain and of how the increased visibility of people with disabilities reportedly led to more positive attitudes about their role in society.The Pan Am/Parapan Am Games in Summer 2015 will coincide with the 10th anniversary of the AODA, creating a unique public awareness opportunity.According to many of the participants in the consultations, the Ontario Games could set the stage for a marketing campaign encouraging businesses and other organizations to welcome visitors with disabilities and profiling accessible facilities and services, especially in the tourism sector. This could serve as a good opportunity, it was suggested, to bring along the private sector where, the perception is, awareness and compliance are both low. Long-Term CampaignIn the longer term, participants stressed the need for sustained, ongoing multi-media initiatives to promote accessibility. The campaign against drinking and driving was frequently cited as a model for changing public attitudes. An emphasis on how accessibility benefits everyone was suggested, coupled with illustrations of how removing barriers can affect the lives of those with disabilities.Some stakeholders shared their belief that a surprising number of people with disabilities have never heard of the AODA. This group, it was felt, should be a prime audience within overall public awareness initiatives. More focused communications were also suggested, such as a plain language guide for people with disabilities and the general public that outlines accessibility obligations under the AODA and what to expect from businesses and other organizations.The Review heard repeatedly that business awareness is very low. This was the opinion of municipal accessibility advisory committee members, municipal officials, representatives of hospitals and other public sector organizations, as well as of business groups themselves. One private sector stakeholder described penalties being imposed on small businesses as appearing to come "out of the blue" and argued that government at this stage should concentrate on education rather than enforcement. Tourism representatives stressed that leaders in their industry understand that accessibility is a competitive necessity and have embraced it with enthusiasm. Smaller "mom and pop" operations, however, are a different story, as they are often unaware of or do not understand accessibility requirements. The AODA is getting lost among the array of government regulations and activities that command the attention of business, especially smaller firms. Business and some other observers sent a strong message that education must precede enforcement. Time and again, the Review was told that businesses will comply if they know what is required. Municipal stakeholders reported that the Province led them to expect much fanfare around the effective date of the Customer Service regulation in the private sector, but nothing happened. One suggestion going forward was to link public awareness campaigns with compliance - for example, insert a reminder about filing deadlines at the end of public service announcements.The suggestion was also made multiple times that the Government should introduce initiatives that would simultaneously raise awareness of accessibility and recognize successful efforts, thereby creating an incentive for other obligated organizations to get on board. Many examples were given but the two most prominent ones were references to the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards and the display of a logo by accessible businesses in the United States, as is done for hotel rooms complying with the Americans with Disabilities Act. Participants also suggested that it would be helpful to create a certification program for AODA-compliant builders; awards for accessible tourism; and a rating system - like colour-coded public health notices for restaurants - that would identify compliant businesses and those that have gone beyond the minimum requirements. A further suggestion for reaching business was to include information about the AODA in the renewal process for business licences. Outreach to BusinessBusiness communications face a number of challenges. One concern expressed by a private sector group is that the AODA is getting lost among the array of government regulations and activities that command the attention of business, especially smaller firms. Moreover, the AODA is widely believed to require massive facility upgrades despite the fact that retrofits to remove existing barriers are not actually required by the current standards. A number of participants worried that an unjustified fixation on ramps, elevators and other capital improvements may be scaring many firms and keeping them from making progress in other much less costly areas.As a solution, business stakeholders and accessibility experts called for more emphasis on the business case for accessibility. Begin by dispelling myths about retrofits and costs, they suggested, and then present accessibility as an opportunity to reach more customers and expand the talent pool, especially as society ages. Ultimately, many believed that Ontario could reach a tipping point where accessibility is a commonly accepted part of doing business."* "Renewing Government LeadershipClosely related to the themes of enforcement, compliance support and OPS accessibility that emerged during the consultations, was the refrain of the need to revive government leadership. Participants often mentioned the recommendation in the Beer Report for the Government to revitalize the implementation of the AODA. Mr. Beer urged the Government to “breathe new life” into the AODA by building momentum for change internally, across the obligated sectors and among the public at large. However, the general impression conveyed to the Review is that, despite the progress that has been made and the considerable learning that has taken place, the momentum seems to have stalled. The overall perception is that the pace of change is extremely slow and much remains to be done to achieve the goals under the AODA. In the words of a participant in an online session, “We need to get the momentum started again so that accessibility will go forward until 2025 and onward from there”.A number of reasons were cited to explain why AODA implementation has not delivered the expected results. Among these, commentators from all sectors stressed the lack of awareness of the legislation and the lack of enforcement – the result, some said, of an absence of government leadership. The Government was also said to be neglecting its responsibilities to get its own house in order and to develop all standards necessary to reach an accessible Ontario. To reassert provincial leadership, disability stakeholders called on the Government to establish a three-year action plan describing the steps it will take, with timelines, to ensure Ontario becomes fully accessible by 2025.“We need to get the momentum started again so that accessibility will go forward until 2025 and onward from there”. – A participant in an online session"* "Recommendation 4: Undertake a comprehensive public awareness campaign. One of the strongest messages that the Review heard concerned the troubling lack of awareness of the AODA nearly 10 years after its enactment. There was a widespread consensus that it will be impossible to achieve the objectives of the AODA without increased awareness on the part of both the public and the obligated sectors. Accordingly, I recommend that the Government launch a public awareness campaign designed to promote understanding of the value of accessibility generally and the demands of the AODA specifically.As one illustration of the kind of initiative that could be undertaken, participants in the Review frequently referred to the upcoming Pan Am/Parapan Am Games as an opportunity not to be missed. The Games provide a rare chance to highlight athletes with disabilities to help change attitudes, to encourage businesses to get ready by improving accessibility and to promote accessible facilities and services. Looking beyond the Games, it was emphasized that building awareness will take a sustained, long-term commitment to education and promotion programs by both Government and partners in the obligated sectors and the disability community. I fully agree."5. The Former Ontario Government's Action Since the final report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent ReviewThe Ontario Government carried on after the final report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review with the same general approach to accessibility public education and awareness as before that date. A number of Enabling Change programs were funded, as was the case before the report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review. The former Government announced that it undertook a media blitz in late 2014 and that this yielded an increase in outreach to the Government from obligated organizations. We attempted to get the former Government to release informative specifics on this. The Government did not do so.Over a decade ago, in the 2007 Ontario election, Premier Dalton McGuinty made key election promises in the area of public education on accessibility. Premier McGuinty's September 14, 2017 letter to the AODA Alliance, setting out his party's 2007 election promises on accessibility for people with disabilities, included:"Institute a new program to ensure that students in schools and professional organizations are trained on accessibility issues. We already include awareness of and respect for students with special needs: in every curriculum document there is a front piece on planning programs for students with special education needs. Disability awareness is an expectation in the Grade 12 Social Sciences and Humanities course. Our government also introduced character education. Character education is about schools reinforcing values shared by the school community – values such as respect, honesty, responsibility and fairness. It is about nurturing universal values, upon which schools and communities can agree. We will ensure that this curriculum includes issues relating to persons with disabilities. The Government of Ontario does not set the training curriculum for professional bodies such as architects, but we commit to raising this issue with the different professional bodies."Premier McGuinty's successor, Premier Wynne, promised in her December 3, 2012 letter to the AODA Alliance that if she became premier, she would honour her party's prior election pledges on disability accessibility. These important 2007 election promises have never been never kept, as far as we could ascertain, and despite our efforts to get the former Ontario Government to keep them.As far as we could ascertain, the former Government did nothing from 2014 up to the 2018 election to keep its 2007 election promise to provide curriculum on disability accessibility for school children. One reinforcement of this unmet need came last year in a recommendation by the Special Education Advisory Committee of the Toronto District School Board, Canada's largest school board. It recommended to TDSB that TDSB undertake such an initiative. On November 6, 2017, that Special Education Advisory Committee, which is constituted under Ontario education legislation, passed a motion that recommended a series of reforms, including:"Recommendation 10: Tearing Down Attitudinal Barriers against Students with Disabilities To eliminate attitudinal barriers among students, TDSB employees and some families of TDSB students, TDSB should:a) Develop and implement a multi-year program/curriculum for teaching students, TDSB staff and families of TDSB students, about inclusion and full participation of students with disabilities, tailored to age levels. Because online courses are inadequate for this, where possible, this should include hearing from, meeting and interacting with people with disabilities e.g. at assemblies and/or via guest presentations.b) Post in all schools and send information to all families of TDSB students, on TDSB's commitment to inclusion of students with disabilities, and the benefits this brings to all students.c) Provide specific training to all TDSB staff that deal with parents or students, on the importance of inclusion."TDSB told its Special Education Advisory Committee in 2017 that TDSB, which is Canada's largest school board with over 240,000 students, has no set curriculum for its students on disability accessibility and inclusion. Whether a student learns anything about this at all, and if so, what is taught, is up to each teacher. The former Ontario Government also did nothing, as far as we could tell, to keep its 2007 election promise to advocate to self-governing professions such as architects to include accessibility in curriculum. From our interaction with two Ontario-based architecture faculties, it is clear as a result that comprehensive and effective training on how to ensure that a building is designed to be fully accessible is not a mandatory requirement for design professionals in Ontario, as far as we have been able to tell. The result is that Ontario's publicly-funded faculties that train the next generation of architects and other design professionals are now using public money to produce generation after generation of new professional barrier-creators. It is for that reason that a separate profession, that of accessibility consultants, has had to spring up.The AODA Alliance's January 19, 2015 analysis of Premier Wynne's December 2014 letter to the AODA Alliance included this on the issue of educating school students and key professionals on disability accessibility:"In our September 16, 2014 letter to the Minister of Education, Liz Sandals, we asked the Minister to ensure all Ontario school children receive education on disability accessibility. In our September 16, 2014 letter to the Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities, Reza Moridi, we asked the Minister to advocate to self-governing professions to include disability accessibility training for their members".The Premier's December 23, 2014 letter did not refer to this outstanding 2007 election promise. It committed to no new action on it. Her December 23, 2014 letter stated:"Accessibility issues and requirements for both educators and students is embedded where appropriate in the Ontario curriculum policy documents used by all school boards. In addition, through the Enabling Change Program of the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario, our government has provided grant funding to a number of key umbrella organizations in the education and postsecondary sectors to develop resources for school boards and faculty at colleges and universities. This kind of work is essential to promoting the social inclusion values that underpin the AODA.To serve staff, students, parents and community members who are Deaf, the Ministry of Education's Provincial Schools Branch has developed an American Sign Language (ASL) version of its external website. The branch has also created videos consisting of visual ASL interpretation of its internal employee policies. In addition, the ministry provided Unified English Braille training to teachers in Ontario school boards, and continues to work with the Education Quality and Accountability Office to produce accessible versions of assessments (for example, Braille, large print and DAISY audio) that are used in provincial schools and in school boards across Ontario."From this, we have no idea whether any students in Ontario schools have received any education on disability accessibility, or if front-line teachers know about available resources, or whether teachers have been encouraged to include this in their lesson plans. We have no information that the Government plans to take any future steps to keep its promise to advocate to self-governing professional bodies to train key professionals such as architects, engineers, city planners, doctors and nurses on disability accessibility." The consequence of this broken 2007 election promise is deeply troubling. A public or private sector organization will hire design professionals, such as architects, to design a new building. That leads to an initial design that is likely to include accessibility problems. Thereafter, an accessibility consultant must be paid to identify the accessibility problems that the design professionals created. After that, the architect or other design professional must be paid to rectify these errors, if it is decided to do so. This is a tremendously counterproductive, wasteful and inefficient way to proceed. It is no proper way to use public money, in the case of publicly-funded projects. Part 6 of the 2014 AODA Alliance brief to Mayo Moran explained that as of that time, the former Government had still not produced educational materials on the accessibility amendments to the Ontario Building Code that the Government had passed in 2013. We were later to learn that even by the end of 2014 if not by early 2015, the former Ontario Government had still not produced those materials. As such, design professionals, builders and others were left for a protracted period adrift at sea, trying to figure out what they were required to do. Given that these amendments had been in the works for years, this was an unwarranted delay.It was a cruel irony in 2015 that the former Ontario Government in effect used its failure to carry out sufficient public awareness campaigns on the AODA to justify its failure to effectively enforce the AODA, and the low rates of private sector compliance with the AODA. In late February 2015, just after the former Government made public the final report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review, the Government cut back on the already-weak AODA enforcement. We discuss this at length in Chapter 2 of this brief. In February 2015, we brought this troubling development to the attention of the public and media. As a result, on February 26, 2015, CBC Radio Toronto's flagship Metro Morning program interviewed the Ontario minister with lead responsibility for the AODA's implementation and enforcement, Brad Duguid, the Minister of Economic Development, Employment and Infrastructure. When the CBC host confronted him with the high rates of AODA violations, the minister said in part:* "Having 40 percent compliance, to me, isn't acceptable at this point in time but at the same time, we have to make sure that we let the guys- there's a lot of businesses, and this, I think, is the challenge, that still don't know that the- what they're responsibilities are, number one.…"* "Well, we're not pulling back on our efforts to get compliance, what we're doing is, is using other methods to get there. The problem right now isn't a case of enforcement, uh, the problem is businesses are not quite aware of what their responsibilities are.So the first thing we have to do is make them aware. So we're putting resources into, for instance in the fall we, we had a very significant campaign - publicity campaign that involved radio ads and- among other things, and that really increased our compliance significantly during that period.We received during the course of, of that campaign about 48,000 visits to our website, 18,000 calls to our help desk, 30,000 interactions on social media.So what that tells me, is there's, there's an appetite for businesses to understand what it is they have to do and, I think it's not fair to a small business or medium sized business to tell them that, send in an enforcement officer, write them a ticket, uh, without them knowing what their responsibilities are. It's our job to make sure they know that."* "Well, there- there's two things. Number one, you can't enforce that if the businesses aren't aware of what their responsibilities are. So, the first thing we need to do is make businesses more aware, and we're doing that through a number of different initiatives. There's the advertising campaign. We also have a partnership with the Ontario Chamber of Commerce where we're reaching out to businesses an- and educating them on what they need to do.Secondly, and this is the key, and when you, and I, I just recently appointed David Onley as our special advisor, and this is something we're working very, very closely on. We need to make sure that businesses are, are aware of why there's a competitive advantage for them to become accessible.We don't want businesses just to reach a standard, we want them to go beyond the standard and there's every- there's a really good business case for businesses across this province to do this. In fact, the Martin Institute indicates that there's 7.9 billion dollars in our economy if we can become more accessible.So, that- what I'm saying there is, I don't want to come in and, and take a really hard approach on businesses and turn them off. What I wanna do is get businesses to embrace what this will do to their bottom line. There's a really good business case."In other words, in 2015 the former Government wrongly used the lack of sufficient business awareness in material part to justify its failure to take more action on enforcement, and to justify its February 2015 cutback on AODA enforcement. It did so by claiming it would be unfair to businesses to then act further on enforcement. Yet the lack of business awareness was due to the former Government failing to do a better job in that area.It is incorrect and harmful to treat public education and accessibility awareness-raising as some unending precondition to and precursor before undertaking effective AODA enforcement. When Minister Duguid was making those statements in February 2015, the AODA had been the law of Ontario for a decade. The Government had been claiming for years that it had been engaging in public education and awareness. The Charter of Rights and Ontario Human Rights Code had imposed accessibility duties for a third of a century.In our experience, the public, including obligated organizations, will pay far more attention to public education and awareness efforts on accessibility when they know there is effective enforcement going on. Put another way, key to effective AODA public education is visible, effective AODA enforcement. When, as is now the case, it is well-known that the AODA is not being effectively enforced, there is too little incentive for obligated organizations to pay serious attention to public education on the AODA. When the Ontario Government has only imposed a scant five monetary penalties in 2015, 2016 and 2017 combined, why should any obligated organization take the AODA seriously?Moreover, commendably, the first stage of AODA enforcement is, by necessity, a form of public education or awareness-raising. To take enforcement action under the AODA, the Government must first give an obligated organization notice of a possible violation. That serves as a direct and clear form of awareness-raising for that obligated organization. This in turn gives the obligated organization time to bring itself into compliance. If it does so, no further enforcement takes place. That education process is wisely built right into the AODA enforcement process.We are wary of encouraging this third AODA Independent Review to make recommendations that place a major emphasis on public education and awareness-raising. Such could translate into a major distraction rather than a major help.With less than six years left before 2025, and after the Ontario Government has spent a great deal of time and money on Enabling Change projects aimed at raising awareness, the time has come for raising action on accessibility, not just raising awareness about accessibility. It will be too easy for yet another new government or minister to yet again announce that what we really need is more awareness-raising, to be followed by yet more promises of future public education campaigns.Instead, our recommendations in this chapter and throughout this brief focus on far more targeted efforts that can realistically be expected to produce actual outcomes. For example, the recommendations for strengthened AODA enforcement in Chapter 2, if implemented, will help educate and raise awareness. The recommendations in Chapter 5 that the Ontario Government lift the veil of secrecy that it has unwisely maintained over the standards development process, if implemented, will also help expand public awareness about the AODA, and about forthcoming accessibility standards. The recommendations in Chapter 7, for the Ontario Government to ensure that public money is never used to create or perpetuate accessibility barriers, and widely publicize this fact, would transmit a powerful signal to the private sector and the broader public sector that they should learn more about accessibility and take it far more seriously. The idea that obligated organizations will simply do the right thing once they realize the economic benefits of accessibility within their organization has been proven not to be sufficient. Innumerable excellent speeches about the business case for accessibility have been given by highly-motivated, dedicated and effective speakers. Too often, it hasn't worked. The entire movement for the AODA from 1994 to 2005 was driven by the disability community's experience that "raising awareness," standing alone, doesn't work to ensure accessibility. That is not to fault the efforts of those who have tried this strategy. The aim now is raising action, not raising awareness. Often the awareness will follow, after effective action on accessibility has been undertaken by an obligated organization. Put another way, nothing raises awareness as effectively as an effectively enforced AODA. It is when effective enforcement is partnered with effective public education on AODA that positive change is more likely to take place. Another key area where the Ontario Government has fallen far short for years is by failing to provide obligated organizations with the needed specific tools to obligated organizations to make it easier, quicker and cheaper for them to comply. As noted in Part 6 of our brief to Mayo Moran, the Ontario Government did not even provide any online supports whatsoever on how to comply with the 2011 Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation, for over one year after it was enacted. For some 13 months, all that obligated organizations could do is simply read that new extensive and detailed regulation. Our 2016 Discussion Paper on what the promised Canadians with Disabilities Act should include spoke to this issue. It includes:"The CDA should require the Federal Government to establish a centre to provide educational support to the public, including obligated organizations, such as technical accessibility compliance information. It should mandate the Federal Government to issue policy guidelines or directives that give organizations specific directions on their obligations, beyond that spelled out in CDA accessibility standards. This makes it easier for organizations to comply. It reduces their cost. Provinces and territories should be invited to opt into this national service. For example, a national "Job Accommodation Network", modelled after the successful U.S. service bearing that name, could help employers and employees in the federal sphere. It could be opened up to those in provincially-regulated organizations.Federal educational supports on accessibility must be provided as a help, not as an excuse for delaying federal implementation/enforcement action. The CDA shouldn't proceed on a wrong-headed basis that until an obligated organization is federally educated on its accessibility obligations, it is not expected to comply and won't face enforcement. The CDA will implement accessibility duties which the Canada Human Rights Act and, in the case of the public sector, the Charter have imposed for a third of a century."Throughout this period, the former Ontario Government made available to obligated organizations some useful resources. Yet feedback we have received from people with disabilities and obligated organizations indicates that much more was needed. Chapter 10 of this brief details how the former Ontario Government did not do anywhere near as much as it could have, to use the 2015 Toronto Pan/Parapan American Games as a lever to carry out an effective public education campaign on accessibility for people with disabilities. The minister in charge of the AODA at that time, Economic Development Minister Brad Duguid, focused increased efforts on the retail politics of the issue. The number of awards for organizations and individuals who contribute positively on accessibility increased. At the cost of thousands of public dollars, that minister hosted a major public party in Toronto on June 3, 2015 to celebrate the AODA's 10th anniversary. As detailed in Chapter 2, On June 3, 2015, the minister also announced a major crackdown on AODA violators to begin the next year – a crackdown that we later proved never materialized. Later that summer, The Government hosted a showcase on new technological innovations in the disability context in Toronto. Despite all this, with only less than six years left before we reach 2025, with the AODA having been the law since 2005, and with minister after minister having proudly announced how much the Ontario Government was doing in the area of raising awareness and public education, the findings in the 2010 Charles Beer AODA Independent Review report and the 2014 Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review report remain valid in late 2018 – Many if not most in the public are not aware of their AODA obligations. We would only add that of those who are aware of the AODA, too many, including too many within the Ontario Government itself, are not aware that the Ontario Human Rights Code and, where applicable, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms impose disability accessibility obligations that are as high as or higher than those now imposed by AODA accessibility standards. 6. Developments since the June 2018 Ontario ElectionThe Ford Government has not made any announcements to our knowledge on their plans in this area. Chapter 7. The Government's Failure to Effectively Ensure that Public Money Is Never Used to Create, Perpetuate or Exacerbate Disability Barriers1. Introduction One idea that meets with universal and instantaneous acceptance whenever it is discussed is that public money should never be used to create or perpetuate barriers against people with disabilities. This can be a powerful lever for positive social change in the hands of the Government, if it is used effectively. Public spending to which accessibility strings can and should always be attached includes, for example, infrastructure spending, spending on procurement of goods, the Ontario Government's transfer payments to its transfer partners, services and facilities, and spending on grants or loans such as those given to businesses or local authorities, or the broader public sector. Yet over 13 years after the AODA was enacted, the Ontario Government has not taken the full range of actions that it should to turn this proposition into a practical reality. Disability accessibility barriers continue to be created or perpetuated using public money, for no good reason. Some public officials and offices that should lead in this area too often fail to do so. Rhetoric too often fails to match reality. There is no discernable public accountability for a public official or office that continues to use public money to create or perpetuate barriers against people with disabilities.Part 7 of the June 30, 2014 AODA Alliance brief to Mayo Moran explains how the AODA Alliance has tried for many years to get the Ontario Government to ensure that public money is never used to create or perpetuate disability accessibility barriers. We had too little success on that front up to 2014, as our earlier brief shows. We here show that from June 2014 to the present, the Ontario Government has continued to fail in this area. Strong new Government action is needed.2. Recommended Findings We urge this AODA Independent Review to find as follows:* Public money should never be used to create or perpetuate accessibility barriers against people with disabilities. Public spending to which accessibility strings can and should always be attached includes, for example, infrastructure spending, spending on procurement of goods, services and facilities, transfer payments to the Ontario Government's transfer partners, and spending on grants or loans such as those given to businesses or local authorities, or the broader public sector. It would be irresponsible for any public official or office to permit public money to be used to create or perpetuate disability accessibility barriers. It creates more future costs – the cost of removing barriers that should never have been created in the first place.* The Ontario Government does not have in place effective, monitored procedures for ensuring that public money is never used to create or perpetuate disability accessibility barriers. There is no real accountability or consequences for a public official who permits or directs the use of public money in a way that creates or perpetuates disability barriers. The public has no way to find out who made or advocated for the bad decisions that result in these publicly-funded barriers.* The former Government did not take effective new action to address this concern after the 2014 Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review Report identified it as a concern. * Where the Government has put in place some policies regarding accessibility considerations when undertaking public procurement of goods, services or facilities, there are no publicly-disclosed regimes for monitoring or enforcing these. There are no known consequences for contravening these policies or procedures. * As widely-viewed online videos produced by the AODA Alliance in 2016, 2017 and 2018 reveal regarding the new Centennial College Culinary Arts Centre, the new Ryerson University Student Learning Centre, and new and recently-renovated Toronto area public transit stations, the former Ontario Government broke Premier Wynne's pledge in the 2014 Ontario election that public money would not be used to create or perpetuate disability barriers.* There was no discernable progress in ensuring accessibility of publicly-funded infrastructure from June 2014 to June 2016, when the Minister of Infrastructure was also the minister responsible for the AODA. The fact that both subjects were under one minister should have led to far better provincial efforts at ensuring that new infrastructure is fully accessible to people with disabilities.* An effective use of the Government's lever of power over the use of public money could have a very dramatic impact on the removal and prevention of disability accessibility barriers, at little or no cost to the Ontario Government.* Infrastructure Ontario, part of the Ontario Government, has not shown itself to be effective at or truly committed to ensuring that provincially-funded infrastructure projects are fully accessible to people with disabilities. In connection with public transit, the same problem persists with Metrolinx, the major provincial organization that oversees many transportation infrastructure projects. This is so despite any positive rhetoric on this subject emanating from those Government organizations.3. Recommendations on Ensuring Public Money Is Not Used to Create, Perpetuate or Exacerbate Barriers We urge the Independent Review to recommend that:The Ontario Government should adopt and broadly publicize a cross-government policy that public money may never be used to create or perpetuate accessibility barriers against people with disabilities.The Government should set standards for, implement, widely publicize, monitor, enforce and publicly report on a comprehensive strategy to ensure that public money is never used by anyone to create or perpetuate barriers against people with disabilities, for example, in capital or infrastructure spending, or through procurement of goods, services or facilities, or through transfer payments to the Ontario Government's transfer partners, or through business development grants or loans, or research grants. A senior public official within the Ontario Public Service should be designated with lead responsibility and authority for this effort.The Government should make it a condition of research grants that it funds or to which it contributes that people with disabilities should, where feasible and appropriate, be included in research study as subjects.In any Government strategy to ensure that public money is not used to create or perpetuate accessibility barriers, it is not sufficient for the Government to make it a condition that a recipient of public money merely obey the AODA and AODA accessibility standards. It should require that recipients of public money comply with accessibility requirements in the Ontario Human Rights Code, and where applicable the Charter of Rights. It should require, among other things, that the recipient organization's specific capital project or goods, services or facilities be fully disability accessible or require a commitment to remediate these to become fully accessible by time lines to be set out in the grant, loan or other terms of payment of public money.Any Government contract for infrastructure or for the procurement of goods, services or facilities should include a mandatory, enforceable term that requires the recipient of the public money to remediate any accessibility barriers that the recipient allows to be created or perpetuated at the recipient's expense.The Government should make it a condition of transfer payments and capital or other infrastructure funding to municipalities, hospitals, school boards, public transit providers, colleges, universities, and transfer partners that these recipient organizations adopt comparable initiatives to ensure that their procurement and infrastructure spending, and any loans or grant programs that they operate, do not create, exacerbate or perpetuate barriers against people with disabilities. The Government should make public a resource guide to assist those transfer partners to know how to effectively implement this requirement. The Government should promptly establish a process for monitoring and enforcing the recommended comprehensive strategy to ensure that public money is not used to create, perpetuate or exacerbate accessibility barriers. It should not be left to each ministry to do as little or as much as it wishes to implement Government policy and procedures on this topic, and to have to re-invent the wheel in this area.The Government should widely and prominently publicize as soon as possible to any organization that seeks Ontario infrastructure or procurement funds, or any Government funded or subsidies, loans or grants, that they must prove in their applications that they will ensure that public money isn't used to create, perpetuate or exacerbate barriers against persons with disabilities.The Government should establish and widely publicize an avenue for the public to report to the Government on situations where public money is used to create, perpetuate or exacerbate disability accessibility barriers.The Provincial Auditor should audit the Government to ensure compliance with recommendations on ensuring that public money is not used to create, perpetuate or exacerbate disability accessibility barriers.It should be a mandatory Government policy that when an accessibility consultant is retained on an infrastructure project to which Ontario public funds are contributed, whether that consultant is working for a Government office or a contractor that is hired using public money the accessibility consultant should report directly to the Ontario Government, with the consultant's advice being made promptly public.When a public infrastructure project is undertaken involving any Ontario Government funds, the Project Specific Output Specifications (on disability accessibility PSOS) for the project should be made public well before the competition process, and subject to public input. These should not be kept secret until after the bid competition is completed. The Provincial Auditor should audit the accessibility practices at Infrastructure Ontario, and provide a report to the public, including on any recommended reforms to how that Government organization approaches the planning for accessibility in infrastructure projects.When a Government-funded infrastructure project is undertaken, successive plans in progress for the project should be made public on a real time basis, for crowd-sourced input on accessibility.Where a public official or private contractor project team member, paid out of the public purse, vetoes or decides against an accessibility measure that an accessibility consultant recommends, the identity of that public official or private contractor should be recorded and made public, when successive plans for the project are made public, with an explanation of what the accessibility feature is that was excluded from the project on the decision or advice of that public official or private contractor.4. What the final report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review Said The final report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review included:"A particular concern with the Government, the Review heard, arose where public funds were actually used to create new barriers. Examples given include the Presto smart card, where the cash balance is shown on a screen that cannot be read by people with vision loss or dyslexia; and the absence of accessibility requirements for information technology and electronic kiosks in the Government's 10-Year Infrastructure Plan. These cases sparked some groups to recommend a comprehensive strategy to ensure public money is never used to create, maintain or worsen barriers against people with disabilities. It was also suggested that establishing compliance with the Human Rights Code, as well as the AODA, should be a precondition to obtaining public funds through procurement, grants or loans.Disability stakeholders welcomed the merger of Infrastructure with the Ministry of Economic Development, Trade and Employment to the form the new Ministry of Economic Development, Employment and Infrastructure. This is seen as an opportunity to kick-start the effort to insert accessibility criteria into capital and infrastructure spending."5. 2014-2018: Another Four Years of Using Public Money to Create New BarriersWe observed no discernable improvement on this issue since the Mayo Moran Report was delivered to the former Ontario Government. The January 19, 2015 AODA Alliance Update reported as follows on progress on this issue as of early 2015:"8.Ensuring Public Money is Never Used to Create or Perpetuate Accessibility BarriersIn her May 16, 2014 letter to the AODA Alliance, setting out her Government's 2014 election platform on accessibility, Premier Wynne commendably pledged: "We will continue to ensure that taxpayer dollars are not used to create or perpetuate barriers against Ontarians with disabilities." In our September 19, 2014 letter to Premier Wynne, we asked the Premier to direct the cabinet to develop, implement, enforce and widely publicize effective across-the-board policies and practices to ensure that the public's money is never used to finance barriers against persons with disabilities, especially in the areas of infrastructure, procurement, research, innovation or other business grant or loan spending. We urged that this effort should be led by the Minister of Economic Development, Employment and Infrastructure, the Minister of Government and Consumer Services, the Minister of Research and Innovation, and the Treasury Board President. We asked that the secretary of the Cabinet be directed to devise an action plan to ensure that this is embedded across the Ontario Public ServiceIn the AODA Alliance's September 16, 2014 letter to the President of the Treasury Board, Deb Matthews, we asked the Minister to implement effective measures to ensure that no public money is ever used to create or perpetuate barriers against persons with disabilities. In our September 12, 2014 letter to the Minister of Government and Consumer Services, David Orazietti, we asked the Minister to: ensure the Ontario government only procures goods, services and facilities that are accessible or that will be made accessible. In our August 14, 2014 letter to Economic Development Minister Duguid, we asked him to effectively ensure that in any government infrastructure spending, no barriers against Ontarians with disabilities are created or perpetuated.In response, Premier Wynne's December 23, 2014 letter did little more than recite her general commitment on this topic and recite Government activity already underway. She then made the non-detailed commitment that: "We will continue to ensure that our planning supports the ongoing implementation of the AODA." She directed no new action. There was nothing in the Premier's letter about the Government's unkept 2011 election promises to ensure that new physical or information technology infrastructure is accessible, including electronic kiosks. The pre-existing measures that Premier Wynne's December 23, 2014 re-announced, while helpful, will not ensure that public money is never used to create or perpetuate accessibility barriers. For example, we made public last year the fact that Metrolinx plans to use public money to create new accessibility/safety barriers for people with certain disabilities in the design of platforms in many stations on the forthcoming Eglinton subway line. That barrier was planned while those policies to which Premier Wynne referred were in place.Premier Wynne's December 23, 2014 letter also referred to measures that, it turns out, in fact won't prevent such a barrier. For example, she wrote: "In addition, the Transportation Standard, established under the Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation, addresses ways to prevent and remove accessibility barriers to public transportation so that everyone, including people with disabilities, can travel more easily in Ontario." Yet the Government had earlier refused our request that its Transportation Accessibility Standard, and recent Ontario Building Code amendments, require in detail that public transit stations (like those Metrolinx is building with public money) be designed to be barrier-free. Premier Wynne also wrote:"As referenced in your correspondence, government procurement must include accessibility considerations. The Ministry of Government and Consumer Services, through Supply Chain Ontario, has implemented government wide policies to ensure that procurement processes are accessible, and that all vendors are aware of accessibility requirements. For example, Ontario Public Service (OPS) procurement directives and resource materials have been developed to assist ministries in taking accessibility requirements into consideration in the procurement of goods and services. In addition, the OPS's Chief Diversity and Accessibility Officer is a member of the OPS Supply Chain Leadership Council, and provides advice on accessibility obligations regarding significant government procurements of $2 million and greater."Having those Government policies in writing is commendable. However, the Government has nothing in place, as far as it has told us, to ensure that these policies are obeyed. The Government is loaded with great policy documents on accessibility. Regrettably, filing cabinets full of great policy documents don't readily translate into action on the front lines. Likewise, a Premier's election pledges on disability accessibility have too often not translated into any change in Government action." Four years later, as of January 2019, the Ontario Government still has no effective system in place to ensure that public money is never used to create or perpetuate disability accessibility barriers. The Government has not systematically reviewed its various spending levers, such as its full range of loans and grants to business and other organizations, to which accessibility strings could be attached. Some public Servants have taken some steps in this area in so far as procurement spending is concerned. However, we have seen no effort by the Ontario Government to monitor or enforce this, or to have consequences follow for non-compliance. It appears that any ministry can do as much or as little as it wishes. The AODA Alliance has provided, and has offered to provide training to public servants on this. When our offer has been taken up, we find that well-intentioned public servants have been told far too little about this.Moreover, each ministry is too often left to re-invent the accessible procurement wheel. We have seen no cross-Government standards for accessible procurement. The situation is at least as bad for infrastructure spending by the Ontario Government. We here offer a few examples.The AODA Alliance has over the past two years released well-received online videos. These depict serious accessibility barriers and problems in new construction or recent renovation in public infrastructure. This includes our 2016 video about the new Centennial College Culinary Arts Centre, our 2017 video about the new Ryerson University Student Learning Centre, and our 2018 video about the new and recently renovated public transit stations in the Toronto area. To our knowledge, no one has disputed the accuracy of those videos. By our standards, they have gone viral on the internet, having been viewed thousands of times. They have been used in university courses. They have garnered great media attention. They have been viewed internationally.When York University announced in December 2017 that it was to build a massive new campus in Markham using $125 million of public money, we went public with serious concerns about its accessibility. The December 21, 2017, AODA Alliance news release included:"On the eve of the International Day for People with Disabilities (December 3), it looks like millions of provincial dollars are destined for another brand-new building with serious disability accessibility problems, in a preliminary design revealed two days ago. These problems are similar to some of those which the grassroots AODA Alliance made public a month ago in the Ryerson Student Learning Centre – a YouTube video that has gone viral. It shocked many that a new public building could be designed with such accessibility problems. The AODA Alliance is calling on the Wynne Government to intervene, to prevent this from happening. On November 29, 2017, York University unveiled the preliminary design its Board of Governors approved, for York's $250 million new Markham Campus Centre. The design reveals serious accessibility problems that would face people with mobility disabilities, blindness, low vision or balance issues. Examples are listed at the end of this news release, with links to the preliminary design drawings posted on York's website. York's November 29, 2017 news release says the Ontario Government will contribute over $125 million. In the 2014 election, Premier Wynne promised to ensure that public money is never used to create barriers against people with disabilities. The Ontario Government's 2011 Ten Year Infrastructure Plan also committed that new provincial infrastructure would be accessible."York's plans show barriers akin to some of those in the new Ryerson Student Learning Centre that we revealed in our YouTube video one month ago that's gone viral", said David Lepofsky, chair of the grassroots AODA Alliance, which leads Ontario's non-partisan campaign for disability accessibility. "It looks like history is going to keep repeating itself, unless the Wynne Government finally steps up to the plate, insists through its actions that our money cannot be used this way, and agrees to strengthen Ontario's inadequate Building Code and building accessibility regulations."The AODA Alliance online video, showing serious accessibility problems at the new Ryerson Student Learning Centre, has been viewed over 10,000 times in its first month.* The AODA Alliance's Ryerson video 12 minute version.* The AODA Alliance's Ryerson video 30 minute version.* The 2.5 minute version, edited down by the Toronto Star, taken from the Original AODA Alliance video."A second example of potentially creating new barriers with public money was illustrated in the April 7, 2017 AODA Alliance Update, which included:"The Wynne Government is planning a major renovation to the Macdonald Block, the major complex in the heart of downtown Toronto that houses the headquarters of a number of key Government ministries and offices.The Government recently reached out to the AODA Alliance for input on what it should do to ensure that the new Macdonald Block is fully accessible to people with disabilities. On April 7, 2017, we sent a detailed letter to the senior team, responsible for this project, with nine recommendations. We set that letter out below. AODA Alliance chair presented these recommendations to the Government's senior project team, at a meeting on March 14, 2017. In summary, we made these recommendations:The Government should commit to ensuring full accessibility of the Macdonald Block and to fulfilling the Ontario Human Rights Code's accessibility requirements, not just to exceeding the lesser Ontario Building Code and AODA accessibility standards where practicable.The Government should set accessibility requirements for interior design and not just for building construction.The Government should ensure that the design professionals on the Macdonald Block project have strong accessibility expertise.The Government should promptly make public its accessibility criteria for the Macdonald Block project.The Government should make its entire planning process on accessibility at the Macdonald Block public at every step along the way.The Government should prepare public mock-ups of proposed accessibility designs for public input.The Government should ensure accessibility is required at the very earliest stage of the design process, not just as a later interjection. The Government should crowd-source good accessibility ideas.The Government should implement and publicly report on A strong proactive enforcement process to Ensure that those building the new Macdonald Block fulfil all accessibility requirements.We have to make these recommendations because even in 2017, a dozen years after the Legislature passed the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, the Ontario Building Code and AODA accessibility standards do not set sufficient requirements that ensure that a new building or major renovation is fully accessible to people with disabilities. Last month we wrote Accessibility Minister Tracy MacCharles to ask for her plans on accessibility over the next year, including on the need to strengthen Ontario's laws on built environment accessibility. We await her response."The AODA Alliances April 7, 2017 Letter to David Hallett, Associate Deputy Minister, Government Infrastructure Projects, Ministry of Infrastructure, included:"At our March 14, 2017 meeting, that the Government's aim was to meet the accessibility requirements in the Ontario Building Code and in the AODA accessibility standards, and to exceed them where it is practicable. I told you that that proposed approach is a fundamentally incorrect starting point. It falls well below the Government's duty. Regrettably it appears to be a common approach within the Ontario Government and among too many design professionalsThe Government's proposed approach to accessibility will very likely lead to serious accessibility deficiencies and is inconsistent with the commitments in the Government's new Multi-Year Accessibility Plan, quoted above. The Ontario Government must fulfil its accessibility obligations under the disability equality guarantees in the Ontario Human Rights Code and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The built environment accessibility provisions in the Ontario Building Code and AODA accessibility standards?fall well below those paramount duties. There is ample proof that a new building or major renovation can lack needed accessibility even though it fully meets the weaker accessibility requirements in the Ontario Building Code and AODA accessibility standards. A striking example is the brand new Culinary Arts Centre at Centennial College. As we discussed at our meeting, that new building's accessibility problems are highlighted in a widely-viewed AODA Alliance video, available at . For years, the Ontario Human Rights Commission and the disability community have pressed the Ontario Government to increase the accessibility requirements in the Ontario Building Code in order to meet the accessibility requirements in the Ontario Human Rights Code. See:* from the Ontario Human Rights Commission: * from the AODA Alliance's predecessor, the Ontarians with Disabilities Act Committee: It is a profound ongoing disservice to people with disabilities, to design professionals, to builders and to building owners that Ontario has not made the Ontario Building Code and AODA accessibility standards reach the accessibility bar that the Ontario Human Rights Code and Charter of Rights set. Because of this, too many new accessibility barriers are being created in Ontario's built environment. It hurts all Ontarians. It makes Ontario lag further and further behind schedule for reaching full accessibility by 2025. It exposes design professionals and contractors to liability. As noted above, it is all too common for design professionals, like architects and interior designers, to think that all they must do on disability accessibility is fulfil the accessibility requirements in the Ontario Building Code and AODA accessibility standards. We fear that such an erroneous belief has persisted at Infrastructure Ontario. This is even more troubling, since the Macdonald Block project is being carried out under the Ontario Government's Alternative Finance Procurement (AFP) model. It will be privately financed. Bidders know the Government seeks the lowest bidder. This creates a strong economic incentive for a bidder to do the least they can on accessibility, e.g. by only doing the bare minimum on accessibility under the inadequate Ontario Building Code, just enough to get site plan approval and building permits. A bidder will fear including additional accessibility components because a competitor might win the job, by offering to do less, and at a lower cost. ?Under the Ontario Human Rights Code, the Government can only justify a failure to provide accessibility if it can prove that to provide it would cause the entire Government an undue hardship. The Human Rights Code presumes that accessibility can be achieved, unless the Government can prove the contrary, by evidence. As I explained at our meeting, it is incorrect and harmful for the Government to approach the Macdonald Block?project, from the starting point that it will only do more on accessibility than what the Ontario Building Code and accessibility standards stipulate if practicable. That sets the accessibility starting point far too low. It wrongly reverses the burden of proof. It is commendable that the Ontario Government wants to make the Macdonald Block a good accessibility example, for other public and private sector organizations to follow. However, for the Government to start from such a wrong starting point on accessibility, would set the wrong example for other organizations."A third example is the new courthouse that the Ontario Government has been planning for years for downtown Toronto, the proposed "New Toronto Courthouse." The October 6, 2017 AODA Alliance Update made this issue public. Its summary includes:"Many think any new building built in Ontario must be fully accessible for people with disabilities. Sadly, neither the Ontario Building Code nor the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act ensures this. To the contrary, new buildings are now built in Ontario, even with public money, that lack proper accessibility. In the face of this, the AODA Alliance continues to play a leading role in advocating for Ontario's laws to be reformed to effectively ensure that new buildings are fully accessible. As an illustration of this campaign, we have just written the Attorney General of Ontario, Yasir Naqvi, to raise concerns regarding the Government's plans to build a massive new courthouse in the heart of downtown Toronto. As we explain in our October 5, 2017 letter (set out below), there are no adequate plans for ensuring sufficient dedicated accessible parking spots for people with disabilities at or right by the courthouse. The Government has engaged accessibility consultants, has said it is committed to ensuring accessibility, and has indicated some good accessibility features it is planning to include. However, well into the design process, the Government and the design teams it has hired inexplicably have not consulted with people with disabilities at any time over the past three years that it has spent working up the project's design specifications. We don't know what accessibility advice the Government has received, and how much of that accessibility advice it has accepted or rejected. This accessibility planning to date has all been conducted behind closed doors.Now the Government is going to select a private company to build the project. We don't know how much the Government is doing to ensure that the successful bidder has sufficient expertise in courthouse accessibility." Expanding on these accessibility concerns, the AODA Alliance's October 5, 2017 letter to Yasir Naqvi, then-Attorney General of Ontario, included:"It is essential to ensure that the new Toronto Courthouse is fully accessible. It is very rare that a new courthouse is built. When one is built, it is expected to serve the public for many decades to come.It is good that the Government committed that this new courthouse will be accessible for people with disabilities. We understand that some steps have been taken to address accessibility in the design. We also understand that an accessibility consultant is now connected with the design compliance team for this project. A number of good accessibility features have been listed as part of the plans for the project.Despite these helpful steps, we are not confident that this new courthouse will have full and proper accessibility for court participants and attendees with disabilities. We have learned over and over that strong and commendable Government commitments on accessibility do not always translate into actual full accessibility in practice. We wish to bring to your attention our serious accessibility concerns. 1. Accessible Parking Needs for Court Participants with DisabilitiesAs one obvious example, there does not appear to be in place an effective plan for ensuring the availability of sufficient accessible parking spots, at or very near this new courthouse, that are reserved for court attendees with disabilities. Because this new courthouse is meant to replace several existing courthouses around the Toronto area, court participants such as witnesses and attendees, lawyers, accused persons, and their families, will have to travel much further, right into the core of downtown Toronto to attend a court proceeding. For many, these court proceedings are now held at courthouses outside the downtown core – courts that are slated to close. This means that court participants will have to make this trip, potentially day after day, right into Toronto's excessive downtown traffic jams.For people with disabilities, the TTC may not be an adequate alternative. The TTC is now far from fully accessible. Up to half of the subway stations are not accessible. TTC's plans to fix this stretch out as far as 2025. There remains the risk that this could extend even longer. Yet this courthouse is intended to open in 2023. Wheeltrans does not provide comparable service to passengers with disabilities. It can arrive late, involve excessive wait times, and requires advance booking before the day of travel. We understand that connected with this new courthouse are to be a mere six accessible parking spots. Those six spots are meant for court staff, not for the public (such as witnesses, lawyers, accused persons or other members of the public attending court).It is our understanding from the Ministry that the Government plans to look to the City of Toronto to increase the number of street-level disability parking spots near the new courthouse. This is no solution. We have no assurance that the City of Toronto will create enough new accessible parking spots at street level near the new Toronto Courthouse. There is no assurance that any of those new street-level accessible parking spots will have a fully accessible path of travel from the parking spot to the courthouse. Moreover, even if the City of Toronto were to create a sufficient number of street-level disability parking spots that are sufficiently close to the new courthouse, these parking spots would be open for any people with disabilities to park in, whether or not they were heading to that courthouse. Court participants with disabilities will be uncertain whether or where they will be able to find accessible parking each day. They may have to drive in circles in downtown rush hour traffic, fearing whether they can find parking and then make it to court on time. Many court participants are not regular court attendees. They may only go to court once or a few times in their life. This can subject those with disabilities to unfair confusion and stress. Court attendance itself is stressful enough. Moreover, a proportion of people with disabilities who need accessible parking spots have fatiguing conditions. If they only find an accessible parking spot that is too far from the courthouse, they will be forced to exhaust themselves before getting to court. Toronto's winter weather will make this situation worse.It is commendable that this new Toronto Courthouse design is supposed to include an accessible drop-off spot for people with disabilities. However, that will not solve this problem. That measure only helps those who come to court using Wheeltrans, or those who can bring with them a driver who has no disability, who can drop them off, find parking elsewhere in downtown Toronto, and then return to meet up with them in the courthouse. Some people with disabilities must have a care-giver with them throughout. An accessible drop-off spot is no solution for them, unless they are expected to bear the burden of bringing two people with them to court, a driver as well as a care-giver/support person.2. Court Design and Compliance Teams Have Not Consulted to Date with People with Disabilities on the New Courthouse's Design and Accessibility FeaturesIt is absolutely essential that the needs of people with disabilities be taken into account, from the very start of a building's design process, and at every stage of the design and construction process. To that end, front-line people with disabilities must be consulted throughout, and as early in the process as possible. The later in the process that people with disabilities are first consulted, the greater be the design mistakes. The greater is the cost to rectify them. Unfortunately, the Government cannot count on design professionals (such as architects and interior designers) to ensure that they get it right, when it comes to accessibility. They too often lack sufficient training on accessibility. Ontario's inadequate accessibility laws, such as the Ontario Building Code and the regulations enacted under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, do not ensure that new buildings are designed to be barrier-free. The Government is now at least fully three years into setting the design requirements for this new courthouse. Yet its design teams have not consulted with people with disabilities at any stage of that process up to now. This is a huge failure.After extensive work, the Government last year already set this courthouse's Project-Specific Output Specifications (PSOS). These include the accessibility requirements that the Government plans to list. The Government and the team that designed the PSOS did not consult people with disabilities when designing the PSOS accessibility requirements.We understand that the team that developed the project's PSOS had an accessibility consultant. However, the Government has not made public the advice that that accessibility consultant gave. We do not know whether there are accessibility requirements that that consultant recommended, but which were not included in the PSOS, and if so, by whom, or why. We understand that the private team that the Government hired to work with the Government on developing the PSOS, including the accessibility consultant for that team, have been let go or their involvement with the project has been terminated. Now the Government has a new Project Design Compliance Team, working on the project. It is involved in activity leading to the upcoming selection of a private bidder to build the project. That new Project Design Compliance Team has a different accessibility consultant, working with it. We understand that the new accessibility consultant, working with the Project Design Compliance Team, has given that team some advice on needed improvements to the accessibility requirements for this project that were included in the project's PSOS. We understand as well that the team has accepted some of the new accessibility consultant's recommendations. Others of those recommendations, from the current accessibility consultant, are said to still be under discussion. This clearly suggests that the accessibility requirements in the project's PSOS are not sufficient. As such, the accessibility of this project remains a cause for real concern. We do not know what specific advice the new accessibility consultant has given, or which parts of it have yet to be accepted, or why the project compliance team has not accepted all of that advice. This is all happening in secret, behind closed doors. Here yet again, no consultation has been conducted with end-users with disabilities.This is especially troubling since, a decade ago, the final report of a widely-respected joint committee of the judiciary, the Ontario Government and the legal profession in Ontario recommended that the Government should develop an up-to-date accessibility standard for courthouses. In the decade since then, it is our understanding that no such new up-to-date courthouse accessibility standard has been adopted by your Ministry, based on universal design principles.Several years ago, before this new Toronto courthouse project was underway, your Ministry commendably conducted a public consultation with the disability community, on the accessibility needs of court participants in the design of courthouses. Our coalition was one of the disability organizations that took the time to participate in that consultation. The design compliance team now working on this new courthouse project, including the head of the new accessibility consultant firm working with that team, did not even know about this earlier consultation by your Ministry, much less did they know what feedback that consultation had gathered. That is deeply troubling, with this project already one third the way towards completion. 3. Accessibility as a Priority in Selecting the Successful Bidder for This ProjectWe gather that the Government is not itself building this project. Instead, this project is being undertaken as an "alternative finance procurement" (AFP) project. Through a competitive process, the Government will select a successful private bidder, which will build the project and which will own the building for the next period of some thirty years. The Government will rent the courthouse, once built, from that company. Some three decades later, the building will revert to the Government. It is essential that when the Government selects the successful bidder from among those competing for the project, it must make accessibility a major priority. It should ensure that the successful bidder has sufficient and ample expertise in designing and building a fully accessible and barrier-free building, like a courthouse. We are eager to know what the Government is doing in this regard.It is not good enough for the successful bidder to retain an accessibility consultant, as it builds the project. The company can get the best advice in the world from an accessibility consultant, but then can choose to ignore it. This can all happen behind closed doors, without us and the public able to monitor this as it happens, in order to prevent accessibility problems before the damage has been done.The AFP process for building such a project creates serious risks that accessibility will not be adequately addressed. The contract typically goes to the lowest bidder. This creates a strong economic incentive for bidders to cut costs. Accessibility can easily be seen as an area for cutting costs, especially when this takes place behind closed doors at a private company.We fear that in the AFP process, the private company that builds the building has too much discretion in the building's design and construction. We realize that in this process, that builder, and not the Government, is seen as assuming the risks in so doing. However, from the perspective of people with disabilities, it is we who ultimately suffer as the victims of the heightened risk that accessibility will get messed up in the process.It is not good enough to say that the Government sets the accessibility requirements in the PSOS. As noted above, we have no assurance that the accessibility requirements in the PSOS are sufficient. As noted above, they were designed without any input from people with disabilities. The advice to the Project Design Compliance Team from its accessibility consultant (paid for with tax dollars), is not now public. This is a poor way to approach accessibility, especially in so large an enduring a project as a major new court facility.It is not good enough to say that there are still many steps still ahead in the design and construction process. We know that consultations with people with disabilities on mock-ups of parts of this project can be conducted later in the process. However, as we noted earlier, the later that this comes in this process, the less chance there is for that input to be effectively acted upon. The higher can be the associated costs. Moreover, mockups cannot solve such problems as the accessible parking issue, raised above.4. A Pressing Need for a Far More Open, Accountable and Consultative ProcessNo doubt your Ministry has learned from past serious accessibility errors in its recent construction of new courthouses. However, we cannot afford any more accessibility errors in such a massive project as a new downtown Toronto Courthouse with some 53 courtrooms, and with over one thousand people coming to that building each day. The problem facing us and the public is this: Because all these design and construction decisions are being made in secret and behind closed doors, including the advice of accessibility consultants and the action or inaction in the face of that advice, we and the public cannot monitor what is going on. We won't know the results until some five or more years from now, when the new courthouse opens. By then, it will be too late. Moreover, many if not most involved in making decisions now on accessibility issues will be long gone from their positions, or impossible to identify after the fact. Based on past practice, your Ministry's officials will take this letter, and write a response for you to send us. It will say that your Ministry and your Government is deeply committed to accessibility. It will list all the accessibility features that are said to be included in the courthouse. It will recite all the accessibility standards that are to be considered. It will thank us for our input.Please do not send us such a letter. Even though an organization such as your Ministry can profess to a commitment to ensure accessibility in a new project such as the new Toronto Courthouse, the results that eventuate can nevertheless be replete with accessibility problems. It was just earlier this decade that your Ministry opened huge new courthouses in Durham Region and in Waterloo, at major public expense. Each of those courthouses had significant accessibility problems. The accessibility needs of people with disabilities are not new. Those courthouses were opened decades after the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Ontario Human Rights Code began to guarantee strong equality rights for people with disabilities. Those courts were opened years after your Government enacted the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act in 2005. One of the architects on your Ministry's current design compliance team worked on the new Durham Courthouse project.We therefore urge your Government to take these immediate steps, in order to act on your commitment to the accessibility of the new Toronto Courthouse project:Can you please send us, in an accessible format (not a PDF) the Project Specific Output Specifications that have been already set for the new Toronto Courthouse, including (if possible, in a separate document) the PSOS's accessibility content? Please let us know what specific accessibility requirements or standards will be mandatory in the Project Specific Output Specifications for the new Toronto Courthouse.Please ensure that a company's demonstrated expertise in accessibility is made a major criterion when the Government selects the successful bidder to build this project. Please let us know what has been included in the procurement process for the company that seeks to build this courthouse, regarding the level of skill and expertise on accessibility that is to be sought and demonstrated by the bidders.Please immediately make public any and all advice on accessibility regarding in the new Toronto Courthouse, including e.g. the advice given by the earlier accessibility consultant who worked on the development of the Project-Specific Output Specifications for this project, and the advice given by the current accessibility consultant who is working on the Project Design Compliance Team for this project.Please immediately make public any decisions and reasons for them, on the advice received from any of the accessibility consultants on this project.From now on, please make each step of the design and construction project immediately public as it relates to accessibility, so the public can immediately see what advice or input is being received on accessibility, and what decisions are made on that advice.Please make no further decisions and take no further action on this project until proper consultation with people with disabilities is conducted, on the detailed specifics of the accessibility features to be incorporated into the new Toronto Courthouse.Please take no further steps on the design of the new Toronto Courthouse and its construction until a proper and up-to-date accessibility standard is created for your courthouse by your Ministry, in consultation with people with disabilities. Please ensure that among others, we the AODA Alliance, is included in that consultation. We would like to know who is assigned or retained to develop the new Ministry of the Attorney General's standards or guidelines for accessibility in new courthouse projects. Your Ministry may object to these requests because they can delay this project. We regret any such delay. However, any delay is needed to ensure that so large and important a project is made properly accessible. Any delay would be due to the fact that your Ministry and the teams it has recruited for this project have to date failed to do the proper accessibility consultations."The former Ontario Government refused to make public its accessibility criteria for that courthouse until after the Government had chosen the successful private company that would build that courthouse. The Government treated the accessibility criteria as confidential during the procurement process. this made no sense. There should be no secrets from the public in the accessibility requirements that the Government would demand of any private company that would win a contract to build a new public building, such as a courthouse. What is the secret? All bidders see the same accessibility criteria. This information should not be concealed from the public until after the competitive bidding process is finished, and the proverbial horse has already bolted from the stable. However, once confronted with our concerns, the former Ontario Government commendably agreed to convene an advisory group from the disability sector to review plans for the New Toronto Courthouse. AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky is a member of that advisory group.Within minutes of learning about the courthouse's specific design, this disability advisory group was able to quickly identify a significant range of serious accessibility problems with the courthouse design. This all came after the former Ontario Government had already selected the winning bidder and design. These concerns with that courthouse design were summarized in part in the April 6, 2018 letter from AODA Alliance chair David Lepofsky to then-Attorney General about this, which included:"Since our October 5, 2017 letter, our concerns about accessibility problems with this courthouse have substantially grown. On March 14, 2018, on our recommendation, your Ministry commendably convened a three hour consultation with representatives from the disability community. We were presented with the drawings submitted during the competitive procurement process for the New Toronto Courthouse, from the successful bidder for this project. This was the first time that people from the disability community were invited to be consulted at any stage on this courthouse’s actual requirements or design. Present at this meeting, in addition to the invited disability advisory group, were representatives from the Ministry of the Attorney General, from Infrastructure Ontario, from the company that won the bid to design and build this courthouse, from two different accessibility consultant firms, and a host of others. There appeared to be at least four architects in the room.In summary, the winning design drawings for this courthouse, from the successful bidder, have many serious accessibility problems. It is deeply disturbing that this project has proceeded this far, with such accessibility problems, despite Government commitments to ensure its accessibility. This suggests that there have been significant failures at multiple levels within the Government and among those the Government has hired to design and build this courthouse. In this letter, we summarize a list of some of the key concerns, voiced at this meeting. The lead architect from the presentation team candidly admitted several times that some of the problems identified by the disability consultation group were issues he had not thought of before this meeting. This suggests that the Government did not ensure through the competitive bidding process that a design that was actually accessible and a company with sufficient experience and expertise in disability accessibility was selected through the procurement process.The following issues include some of the significant accessibility concerns and mistakes that were raised at this meeting.1. Lobby StaircaseThe main foyer has a two-storey major staircase with open risers. We emphasized that open risers on stairs are a tripping hazard for many, e.g. people with vision loss. We were told that open risers had been included because of the feeling of light and openness that they create. Yet anything that creates a disability barrier cannot be justified just because it looks pretty. This wrongly makes aesthetics a priority over accessibility.2. ElevatorsThere are only six elevators for hundreds of members of the public to reach fully 53 or so courtrooms on 15 of the 17 floors in this building. We understand that as many as 1,200 to 1,500 people are expected to come to this building each day. With only six elevators, many will likely have to spend quite some time waiting for elevators. More elevators are needed.The elevators are planned to be in two sets of three, facing each other. The ground floor hallway with these six elevators will be open at both ends. We explained that this presents a serious navigation problem especially for people with vision loss. When they get off the elevator, they won't know whether to turn left or right to make their way to the main entrance. It is far better for the hallway to be closed at one end, if two sets of three elevators are to be facing each other across a hallway.Having the two sets of three elevators on opposite sides of that hall may shorten the travel distance to the elevator that has arrived for those with some mobility disabilities. However, it presents a problem for people with hearing loss. If you stand with your back to one set of elevators, you can only see when three of the six elevators arrive. It would be better if all six elevators were side by side along one wall. The advisory group agreed that it was good that the design does not include "destination elevators." These present serious accessibility problems for many people with disabilities. In a destination elevator system, one doesn't push a floor button on the elevator. You must instead find a button panel and push the button for your destination before you board an elevator. Then you have to find that specific elevator that will take you to that floor, not just the first elevator that shows up. It is a confusing system that many don't know how to use and many don’t want to use.3. Accessible ParkingCurrently, there are only plans for the public to have access to six accessible street parking spots outside the building, three on the east side and three on the west side. This is a modest improvement from the earlier plans to have no accessible parking whatsoever available for the public. However, two problems remain. First, for a courthouse with so many people attending each day, more than six accessible parking spots will be needed to serve the people with disabilities among 1,500 court attendees per day. Second, because these six spots are public street parking spots, anyone with a disability parking permit can use these parking spaces, whether or not they are going to court. There is no assurance that any of these parking spots will be available for the people with disabilities who are going to court. 4. Accessible Route to this Courthouse from Nearby Accessible ParkingThere is no public parking on the courthouse site. The nearest major parking facility that is being anticipated for courthouse visitors to use is the parking lot under the new City Hall, southwest of the new courthouse building. According to Google, that is at least a 350 meter walk from the new courthouse. At this meeting, I asked the design team if there is an accessible path of travel from the New City Hall parking lot to the front door of this proposed new courthouse. I was told that they would have to look into this. It is troubling that this was not something that had already been explored by your Ministry and whoever else took part in selecting this site for the new courthouse. 5. Where the Building is Located on the SiteThe new courthouse building will have roads passing by it on three sides, the east, west and south. To the north of the building is a hotel.The courthouse building is planned to be set far back from the street that is on its south perimeter. This means that anyone who is dropped off on Armory Street (on the lot's south perimeter) must walk more of a distance to reach the courthouse's main entrance. From an accessibility perspective, it is far better for the building to be located close to each of the three perimeter roads. Instead, the building is planned to be situated at the north end of the lot, leaving a large plaza in front of the building. If that building were instead situated closer to the south end of the lot, next to Armory Street, this would also make room at the north side of the building for at least some dedicated accessible public parking spots. This wouldn’t meet the entire needs parking for people with disabilities going to court. However, it would provide some help. 6. AtriumThe building's first three floors have a large atrium design with lots of multi-floor windows. This design presents a number of accessibility problems. All that glass can create extensive glare and variations in the amount of light during different times of the day. This presents serious problems for people with low vision, as well as people with sensory integration issues. The multi-floor atrium produces difficult acoustics, because of the echo created by all the hard surfaces. This presents problems for people who are hard of hearing, people with vision loss (who use sound to assist in navigating), as well as for people with some cognitive or sensory integration disabilities. As part of this atrium design, there will be courtrooms on the second and third floors, with a multi-story drop-off, presumably protected by a railing. This is a problem for people with height-related phobias. It can also be a safety concern. People in criminal courtrooms can become angry and agitated, with that anger spilling out into the nearby hallway. Floor-to-ceiling barriers by the railings would help avert the risk of anyone being pushed over a railing during a rage. 7. Locating Court Services Office on the Third FloorAn important destination for many coming to the court will be the court services office. Yet the Court Services office is planned to be situated up on the third floor, instead of locating it where the public enters on the first floor. This means that people will have to make their way up two floors, via stairs, escalators, or the busy elevators, just to reach this important first stop in their trip to the court.8. Wheel-Trans and Street Drop-off SpacesWe were told that the design includes a Wheel-Trans drop-off space in the drop-off area on the building's east side along Chestnut Street. We were also told that this location had been set by the City of Toronto. The project is in negotiations with the City to switch this to the courthouse's west side on Centre Avenue so that it would be much closer to the courthouse's main entrance. Having a drop-off spot on the building's west side for people with disabilities is quite problematic. I asked the project architect how many drop-off spaces were included in the drop-off area. He did not know. From the drawings, he had to estimate that there would be six spots. These spaces, in addition to being Wheel-Trans drop-off and pick up spaces, could be used by everyone, not just people with disabilities. There is no way to ensure that any of those spaces will be actually available at any time for Wheel-Trans vehicles or for other vehicles there to pick up or drop off people with disabilities.It is troubling that this design layout was approved through the bidding process, without a clear definition of how many drop-off spots would be required for this building. It is also troubling that so many years of planning have gone by, without having yet ensured that the Wheel-Trans drop-off space would be required to be nearest to the building's main door. People with disabilities can have to wait for half an hour for a Wheel-Trans ride. I asked if there would be a heated shelter outside near these drop-off spots, or if there is a direct line-of-sight position at the building's entrance doors for waiting indoors close to the Wheel-Trans drop-off spots. We were told that it was not something that the successful bidder had specifically identified. It was unclear to us if this was a project requirement.9. Accessible WashroomsWe were told that there would be one accessible sized stall in the main public washroom on each floor of the courthouse. However there would be only one universal washroom on every third floor. We pointed out that this is insufficient. We emphasized that there should be a universal washroom on every floor. One accessible stall in a public washroom on each floor is not enough. If it is in use, by a person with or without a disability, someone using a mobility assistive device would have to wait for the busy elevators to go to another floor and hope that the universal washroom was not in use there. This is made worse by the fact, noted above, that there are only six public elevators to service the seventeen floors of this building. The greatest demand for the washrooms will come when courts take mid-morning and mid-afternoon breaks. These are typically taken by all the courts at around the same time. Courts only allow a few minutes during these breaks. People with disabilities using existing courtrooms have reported real problems at other courthouses, getting from court to an accessible washroom, waiting in lines, and then getting back to court before their case resumes. 10. Accessible Interview RoomsWe were told that there would only be one accessible interview room on each floor of this courthouse. With so many courtrooms in operation, we made it clear that all interview rooms should be accessible. Nothing would prevent people without disabilities from occupying the one accessible interview room on a floor.11. Tactile Way-FindingThere was no indication of any plans for tactile way-finding, outside across the large open plaza or throughout the building, e.g. through the large open area in the atrium on the main floor. This accessibility feature is essential for people with vision loss, and helpful for people with certain learning and or cognitive disabilities. 12. Consistent Layout on Each FloorWe described the need to ensure that the layout on each floor is the same, as much as possible, and that room numbering is consistent from floor to floor. For example, Courtroom 501 should be in the same position on the 5th floor as is Courtroom 601 on the 6th floor.There should also be similar tactile way-finding on each floor, guiding people from the elevator to each of the courtrooms, washrooms, etc. This is needed to allow for independent navigation in a busy environment and to avoid confusion when navigating on different floors in the building.13. WindowsAt several other points in the building design, disability representatives pointed out a problem of so many large windows bringing in outside light. They pointed out the need to design the building so that there is a consistent amount of light, and shading or blinds to avoid glare. 14. Lack of Proper Colour ContrastFeedback was also given that there were a number of instances in the design drawings where there was a lack of proper colour contrast for key features. Colour contrast is well-known as an accessibility feature needed by people with low vision as well as people with various other disabilities.15. CourtroomsAs for the design of actual courtrooms, we were told that when needed, an accessible prisoner's box could be brought in. We pointed out that it is far better to design key features in the courtroom to themselves be accessible, i.e. instead of designing a prisoner's box known to be inaccessible. That is essential to the principle of universal design. The Government's Multi-Year Accessibility Plan under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act commits to using principles of universal design in new Government infrastructure such as this. We were told that this building's courtrooms were designed to the standard that has been used for many years, back to 1999. Yet the Government was advised over a decade ago in the 2007 final report of the Weiler Committee on courts accessibility that it is important for a new and current standard for court accessibility to be created. It is wrong for a courthouse in 2018 to be designed to meet an outdated 1999 accessibility standard or guideline. 16. Space, Sight Lines and Lighting to Accommodate Sign Language interpreters in CourtroomsWe asked what had been included in the design of each courtroom to accommodate Sign Language interpreters for deaf court participants. We pointed out the need for space for interpreters to stand in the right position, depending on whether they are interpreting for a witness, an accused in the prisoner's box, counsel, or some other court participant. We described the need for proper lighting and sight lines. It was evident that the project team were not aware of this, nor had they considered it. This suggests to us that this was not a design requirement. When we first raised this issue, we were told about features in the courtroom for hearing loops and sound uplifts. Those relate to people who are hard of hearing and not people who are deaf or deafened. We were also told about centralized facilities in the building for interpreters, to be connected to each courtroom. This obviously must have been meant for other spoken language interpreters, and not for Sign Language interpreters. It would be obvious to anyone with working knowledge about Sign language interpretation in courts that the interpreter should be located in the courtroom, in the line of sight for the deaf person who uses Sign Language. 17. Access to the Courthouse from Public TransitIt is not clear that there is assured to be an accessible path of travel from the nearest subway stations to this courthouse's main entrance, that there will be proper way-finding markings on this route, and that there will be plans in place to ensure it is always kept clear of snow and other obstacles. This is an issue, given the distance from the nearest TTC stations and stops.Concluding ThoughtsIt was important that this recent consultation took place. It revealed substantial accessibility problems with the winning design that your Ministry has selected through the competitive bid process. It was evident that the successful bidder has insufficient knowledge of accessibility needs of people with disabilities. We brought to their attention that accessibility is especially important when designing a criminal court building. Disproportionately, those who are accused of crimes and those who are the victims of crime have some kind of disability. For example, at least 50% of people who receive Legal Aid services in Ontario have mental health issues, addiction issues or both.We re-iterate the pressing need for you to act swiftly to implement all the recommendations included in our still unanswered October 5, 2017 letter. We want to ensure that you will allow no further steps to be taken on this or any other new courthouse project until all these accessibility concerns are resolved. It is more important than ever that all of the accessibility advice and feedback provided by the two accessibility consultant firms on this project, and the feedback from our consultation session, be promptly made public, and that the Government let us know in a timely fashion what it will do in the face of that advice.We wish to re-emphasize that there was no good reason for the Government's having refused to disclose to us and the public the accessibility requirements in this project's "Project Specific Output Specifications" (PSOS) requirements until after the competitive bid process was completed. Presumably, the same accessibility requirements were submitted to all who bid on this project. What was the secret? Making this information public before the competition has started or during the process could not compromise the bid process. The Government's having withheld that information until after that bid process, and indeed up to the present, has only helped result in the Government approving a bid that is replete with accessibility problems. That is inconsistent with the Government's 2014 election promise not to use public money to create or perpetuate disability accessibility barriers.Finally, at this March 14, 2018 disability consultation session, Mr. Bob Topping, from DesignAble Environments (the Project Compliance Team's accessibility consultant), indicated that his firm is now working on creating a new accessibility standard for the Ministry of the Attorney General specifically for courthouses. This came as news. We are eager for you to let us know more details about this important project and of any other organizations, if any, that are involved in this project. We also ask that you ensure that we, the AODA Alliance, and the broader disability community are also consulted on the development of this important new standard. We ask to be given a draft of this new accessibility standard in whatever stage of development it may be, so we can now begin the input process. Indeed, it is hard to understand why the Government did not develop its new courts accessibility standard before embarking on such a major new courthouse project.Minister, you should be very concerned about this entire situation. I have had the privilege for over a decade of representing the AODA Alliance on the Ontario Courts Accessibility Committee. This is a joint committee of the judiciary, the Government, the legal profession and disability representatives. It oversees progress on making Ontario's courts accessible to people with disabilities.Last fall, at that Committee's September 25, 2017 meeting, representatives of the Ministry of the Attorney General and the Project Compliance Team made a detailed presentation on the steps being taken to ensure that the New Toronto Courthouse is truly accessible to people with disabilities. Their presentation was designed to leave the impression that everything is well under control, that all needed accessibility standards are being met or exceeded, and that the results will be good.Our questioning at that meeting revealed that no people with disabilities had ever been consulted in the several years that this New Toronto Courthouse project has been under development. This in turn led to your Ministry commendably convening the March 14, 2018 disability sector consultation that this letter summarizes. That meeting in turn revealed the serious accessibility concerns with this project design, as illustrated in this letter.There is something wrong when a project, especially one of this size and importance, has come so far with so many accessibility problems, improperly addressed. Your immediate attention to this issue would be very much appreciated."Even as of early 2019, the Ontario Government still has no current and up-to-date accessibility standard for courthouse design. This is so even though a joint committee of the judiciary, legal profession and the Government recommended that one be created over a decade ago. See the final report of the Weiler Committee entitled “ MAKING ONTARIO’S COURTS FULLY ACCESSIBLE TO PERSONS WITH DISABILITIES". This echoed a recommendation to the Attorney General of Ontario in 1983 by a judicial inquiry headed by Judge Rosalie Abella, now a justice of the Supreme Court of Canada. One is only now under development. As a result of our interventions described here, our input has belatedly been sought. An architecture firm is in charge of this project. We have no basis for concluding that that architecture firm has any expertise in or commitment to accessibility. An accessibility consultant is on that project. However we don't know the scope of its engagement. Moreover, we understand that the accessibility consultant reports to the architecture firm, and not to the Ontario Government. As such, the public, which is paying for all these advisors, has no way of knowing what accessibility advice the accessibility consultant is rendering, or whether the architecture firm is acting on that advice or rejecting it. Despite our interventions, the Ontario Government has addressed only some of the serious barriers in the new Toronto Courthouse design. We were told that for the others, it is too late in the design process. Yet had the Ontario Government sought our input much earlier, as they should have, these problems could have been averted.6. ReflectionsAn effective use of the Government's lever of power over the use of public money could have a very dramatic impact on the removal and prevention of disability accessibility barriers, at little or no cost to the Ontario Government or the public. Our revelation to the public, via measures like our successful online videos, that new infrastructure is being designed and built using public money, that is replete with accessibility problems, is shocking to the media and the public. This is a tremendous misuse of public money, for which no one has ever been held accountable.Planning for the use of this money goes on behind closed doors. Public officials, such as those from such Government bodies as Metrolinx, Infrastructure Ontario, and the Ministry of the Attorney General, repeatedly profess commitments to accessibility when they are in public. Yet the results of their efforts and of their private contractors behind closed doors demonstrate that their priorities in practice are very different. Once the infrastructure is built, many if not most of those public officials have moved on. The private building contractors are wrongly shielded from public scrutiny. No one will know who was responsible for this misuse of public money. They may well have earned promotions or new contracts in the interim. No one will be held accountable. This must dramatically change.7. Developments Since the June 2018 Election The AODA Alliance's July 19, 2018 letter to Premier Ford recommended, among other things:"III. Ensure Public Money is Never Used to Create or Perpetuate Barriers Against people with Disabilities It is essential that public money never be used to create or perpetuate disability barriers. It is very good that on August 29, 2016, when Ontario's new Minister for Accessibility and Seniors, Raymond Cho, was running in the September 1, 2016 by-election, he made this important commitment on behalf of the PC party:"The Ontario PC Party believes that no new public money should be used to create new barriers against people with disabilities, or to perpetuate existing barriers." The previous Ontario Government did a poor job in this area. You are in a position to bring about real and positive change for Ontarians. For example, the new Commission that you appointed earlier this week to review Ontario Government spending, could make recommendations on how to ensure public money is never used to create or perpetuate disability barriers.We recommend that you:Direct cabinet ministers to develop, implement, enforce and publicize effective across-the-board policies and practices to ensure that the public's money is never used to finance barriers against persons with disabilities, especially in spending on infrastructure, procurement, research, innovation or other business grants or loans. This effort should be led by the Minister of Economic Development, the Minister of Infrastructure, the Minister of Government Services, the Minister for Accessibility and Seniors and the Treasury Board President. The secretary of the Cabinet should be directed to devise an action plan to ensure that this is embedded across the Ontario Public Service."Premier Ford's July 31, 2018 response merely referred us to Minister for Accessibility and Seniors Raymond Cho. However Minister's Cho's only letter to us, dated August 15, 2018, made no specific statements about this issue. Moreover, this issue would require directions from the Premier.Chapter 8. Ensuring that All Ontario Laws Do Not Authorize or Require Disability Barriers1. Introduction The Ontario Government has a special obligation to ensure that the legislation that the Legislature passes and the regulations that the Ontario Cabinet or other provincial bodies pass are barrier-free for people with disabilities. They should not create or permit the creation of disability accessibility barriers. They should be written in a way that ensures that people with disabilities have their disability-related needs accommodated, so that they can fully enjoy the rights, opportunities and responsibilities that our laws afford to all.To that end, it is necessary for the Ontario Government to systematically and comprehensively review all Ontario legislation and regulations, to ensure that they are barrier-free. It also needs to put in place an effective system for ensuring that whenever new laws are passed or old laws are amended, these changes to the law, whether legislation or regulations, are also barrier-free.It is commendable that in the 2007 election, just two years after the AODA was enacted, Premier Dalton McGuinty gave an election pledge to review all Ontario laws for accessibility problems. So did the leaders of Ontario's Progressive Conservative and New Democratic Parties in that election. It is entirely indefensible that 11 years later, that promise remains largely unkept. Only a small percentage of Ontario laws have been reviewed for accessibility. Only a fraction of the required changes to those laws were made. The Ontario Government has had in place no plans for the past four years to complete this project. Part 8 of the June 30, 2018 AODA Alliance brief to Mayo Moran demonstrates that up to 2014, the former Ontario Government had done very little to review all Ontario laws, both statutes and regulations, to ensure that they neither create nor mandate any disability barriers. Part 8 of that brief began as follows:"An important step for Ontario to reach full accessibility by 2025 is to ensure that all Ontario statutes and regulations are themselves barrier-free. The Government needs to ensure that all existing laws and any new laws neither require nor mandate the creation or perpetuation of barriers against persons with disabilities. Among other things, the Government must ensure that Ontario statutes and regulations incorporate active measures to ensure the full accessibility of the programs, policies, rights and opportunities that they address. To achieve this, the Government must do more than simply creating, enacting and enforcing AODA accessibility standards. The Government must conduct a thorough review of all of its statutes and regulations for accessibility barriers. Where any are found, these laws must be amended to ensure they are barrier-free. The Government must also implement new proactive measures to ensure that new statutes or regulations are carefully screened before they are enacted, to ensure that they are entirely barrier-free."This chapter is an addendum to Part 8 of the June 30, 2014 AODA Alliance brief to Mayo Moran. Since 2014, the former Ontario Government took some further action on this front, but far too little. The last time the former Ontario Government reviewed any legislation to look for accessibility barriers was before the end of 2014. As of now, the vast majority of Ontario statutes and regulations have never been reviewed for accessibility. The former Government had only reviewed a scant 50-55 of Ontario's 750 statutes and none of its regulations, as far as we have been told. In the spring of 2016, the former Ontario Government made a number of relatively minor amendments to the 50-55 statues that had been reviewed. This left in place many, if not most of the barriers in those statutes. As is the case with so many other issues addressed in this brief, the AODA Alliance has led the charge for more than a decade to get the Ontario Government to ensure that its legislation and regulations do not mandate or permit disability accessibility barriers. 2. Recommended Findings We urge this AODA Independent Review to find as follows:* The Ontario Government has a special obligation to ensure that Ontario legislation and regulations are barrier-free for people with disabilities. These laws should not create or permit the creation of disability accessibility barriers. * The former Ontario Government promised to review all Ontario laws for accessibility issues in the 2007 election. It repeated that pledge in the 2011 and 2014 elections. * The former Government delayed even starting this review until 2011. That effort was further delayed for another two years after that. * Over eleven years after the initial pledge, the Ontario Government has only reviewed a mere 51 of Ontario's 750 statutes and no Ontario regulations, for accessibility problems. Of the 51 statutes reviewed, the former Ontario Government only amended a mere 11 of them. The former Government rejected further NDP amendments. The former Government did not correct a number of barriers in the 51 statutes it reviewed.* Within the former Government, this issue was shuffled from ministry to ministry over the past 11-12 years, and through a revolving door series of deputy ministers.* After some amendments were made to 11 Ontario statutes in spring 2016, the former Ontario Government in effect did nothing further on this review for its last two years in power. The new Ontario Government has not announced any action or plans on this issue. * It should not take 11 years to complete this review, much less a review of only 51 Ontario statutes. Between 1982 and 1985, the Ontario Government reviewed all laws for compliance with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, including its equality guarantee in section 15.3. Recommendations on the Government's Duty to Review Ontario Statutes and Regulations for Accessibility Barriers We urge this Review to recommend that: The Government should announce, within four months of this Independent Review's report, a detailed plan for completing a comprehensive review of all Ontario statutes and regulations for accessibility problems, and for ensuring that new legislation and regulations will be screened in advance to ensure that they do not authorize, permit, create or perpetuate barriers against people with disabilities.The Government should complete this review of all legislation for accessibility barriers by the end of 2020, and of all regulations by the end of 2021. The Government should introduce into the Legislature, with the intent of passing it, an omnibus bill or bills to amend any legislation as needed a result of this review, along timelines that the Government should announce by the end of March 2019. Cabinet should amend any regulations that the government deems necessary as a result of the accessibility review, by the end of 2022.The Government should appoint the Attorney General of Ontario to lead this review of all Ontario laws for accessibility problems, in coordination with the Secretary of Cabinet.The Government should report to the public by the end of 2018, the end of 2019 and the end of 2020 on its progress toward meeting the deadlines for reviewing all legislation and regulations for accessibility barriers. These reports should give specifics on what the Government has done and plans to do, whether by legislative amendments or other actions, to address accessibility barriers it has discovered in this review. When the Government identifies a potential barrier in an Ontario statute or regulation, it should consult with the public, including with people with disabilities, on options for addressing the barrier, before deciding on the contents of possible amendments to those laws.4. What The report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review SaidThe 2014 report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review included:* "People with disabilities also expressed the hope that accessibility should become part of the Government's DNA. It was suggested that the Premier's Office should direct the Secretary of Cabinet - the head of the public service - to take all steps necessary to keep the Government's accessibility commitments. This goal could be furthered, the Review was told, by ensuring that all forthcoming legislation, regulation and policies undergo analysis through a disability lens to confirm no new barriers are being created or maintained."* "A further concern involving the Government of Ontario itself was the slow pace of the Government’s promised review of provincial laws and regulations to identify and then remove accessibility barriers. Premier McGuinty promised this review during the 2007 election campaign and reiterated the commitment during the 2011 campaign. In 2013 the Government stated that, by the end of 2014, 13 ministries will have reviewed 51 statutes and considered steps to remove any barriers identified. Disability stakeholders pointed out that this leaves about 700 other statutes, as well as 1,500 regulations, still to be examined. The Government was urged to complete the review of all legislation by 2015, and all regulations by 2016."* "I must repeat, as Charles Beer said, that re-establishing the leadership and the commitment of the Government of Ontario to accessibility is critical to the momentum of the AODA. Ontario has the potential to be a leader in this regard but, in order to do so, it must firmly establish accessibility as a government-wide priority. With a new government in place, an extraordinary opportunity exists to renew the momentum behind the AODA.Strong central leadership is critical for a variety of reasons. It would drive accessibility across the range of government programs, services, facilities and workplaces. It would sustain and facilitate initiatives involving different ministries like joint inspections and joint analysis of where new standards are necessary. Similarly, a central commitment and focus on accessibility should also lead to greater linkages to capital and other spending decisions to ensure accessibility objectives are addressed, as well as to the review of proposed policies and legislation through an accessibility lens.It is up to the Premier to ensure that the administrative structure is put in place to make all of this happen. One does not have to be an organizational design expert to see that nothing gets done in government unless someone is held accountable for results. I therefore recommend that the Premier formally charge the Minister of Government and Consumer Services with responsibility for ensuring that the Ontario Public Service becomes a fully accessible employer and service provider. An associate deputy minister position could be created to support the Minister in this role."5. What the Former Ontario Government Did Since 2014 Time and again, year after year, we pressed the former Ontario Government to get on with the promised review of all the other Ontario statutes, and all the Ontario regulations. The former Ontario Government said it had completed its review of 50-55 high-impact statutes by the end of 2014. No further legislation or regulations have been reviewed since then, according to what we have heard from the former Ontario Government. No plan exists within the Government to complete that review. This issue was bounced around the Ontario Public Service. Initially, before 2011, it was assigned to the Ministry of Government Services, even though that ministry had no expertise in constitutional law, or disability accessibility, or legislation more broadly. It there went through the hands of several successive deputy ministers. It was then assigned jointly to the Ministry of Government Services and the Ministry of the Attorney General (where it should have been all along). Partway through 2016, it was re-assigned to the new Minister of Accessibility. However, nothing further happened with it there. The AODA Alliance provided training to that Ministry's staff on this issue, as it had previously done successively for the Ministry of Government Services, the Ministry of the Attorney General and the Office of Legislative Counsel (all on a volunteer basis).In the spring of 2016, the former Ontario Government brought forward an omnibus bill to amend the 50 or so high-impact statutes that it had reviewed for accessibility. Over the entire year from the end of 2014, when that part of this legislative review was completed, and early 2016, when amendments to that legislation were introduced into the Legislature, the former Ontario Government had no discussions with us, or, to our knowledge, with the rest of the disability community, on the barriers that it found in those laws. The AODA Alliance described the events leading up to that bill, and our concerns about it, in our March 15, 2016 letter to Premier Wynne, which included:"On March 21, 2013, then Deputy Minister of Government Services Kevin Costante wrote us about Government action on this. He wrote that the Government was first reviewing around 50 of Ontario's 750 statues. These statutes were selected because they had the greatest impact on people with disabilities. He said that the Ministry of the Attorney General (MAG) would lead this review. He wrote: "Following the review of their legislation, ministries and/or MAG will seek to introduce amending legislation in the Legislative Assembly by December 2014, if necessary. It is important that responses to similar barriers be addressed in a consistent fashion and that is why the review is being coordinated in this way." In your December 23, 2014 letter to us, you wrote:"Lastly, your correspondence refers to my predecessor's commitment to review legislation and regulations to identify and remove accessibility barriers. A review of 51 statutes with the greatest impact on people with disabilities is under way. I expect to receive a recommended approach to address the findings of this review by the end of 2014."Your Government's June 3, 2015 announcement, in response to the final report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review, committed to these actions regarding the review of Ontario laws for accessibility problems:"The Ministry of Government and Consumer Services' Diversity Office recently collaborated with the Ministry of the Attorney General to review legislation that has a high impact on members of the public - and specifically people with disabilities - with a view to identifying barriers to accessibility. The review looked at 51 statutes related to health, education, seniors and social services. The review identified opportunities to address barriers, and we have included these in our action plan."It further stated:"Introduce legislation addressing barriers to accessibility identified through a government-wide review of high-impact legislation, ensuring that government documents and appeals processes are accessible for people with disabilities."Beyond the foregoing, the findings of your Government's review of the 51 high impact statutes have not been made public. We and the disability community were not consulted after the Ministry of the Attorney General completed its review of the 51 high impact statutes, on steps your Government might take to address barriers in those laws, either before or after that June 3, 2015 announcement.We understand that amidst the materials that the Government made public with its February 25, 2016 budget was a package of budget-related legislation, called Bill 173. We also understand that in that package were proposed amendments to several Ontario statutes, along the lines of the Government's June 3, 2015 announcement that I quoted above. On learning of this, we asked the Government to provide us with all of those amendments in one place. We need this so that we and others in the disability community could study them and take part in the legislative process. We appreciate that earlier today, your Government sent us a description of those proposed amendments. We have asked to also receive the actual wording of the amendments, collected in one document. We and the Ontario disability community need that to be able to give the Government and the Legislature full and meaningful input.Because we and our community did not get this information earlier, it is not possible for us, and for a diversity of other individuals and organizations in the disability community, to carefully study them, compare them to the 51 statutes that the Government had reviewed, and offer feedback to the Legislature, along the time lines for public hearings that the Government has established. Hearings are set to take place on three days during the week of March 21, 2016. They require a first come, first served application to appear. We understand that the deadline to appear is 1 pm on March 17, 2016. Accordingly, may we ask you for the following:Could you please indicate if your Government would be open to consider other amendments needed to address accessibility barriers that those 51 high impact statutes authorize, permit or fail to address, outside the time frame of the Budget bill? There are additional areas of barriers that need to be addressed beyond those which the Government's proposed amendments cover. May we have an opportunity to make a presentation to a Standing Committee on this bill in mid to late April, after we receive the text of the actual proposed amendments and after we have the time we need to study them and prepare our feedback?Would your Government be open to consult with us and the disability community on other accessibility barriers that need to be addressed in connection with those 51 high impact statutes, and that the budget bill does not address? If so, can you confirm that it is with the Ministry of the Attorney General with whom we should deal. We commend your Government for dealing with this via omnibus legislation, rather than taking forward each bill to be amended piecemeal. To amend each bill piecemeal would take an extraordinary and excessive amount of legislative time. Is your Government open to again use omnibus legislation to address other accessibility barriers, not addressed in the Budget Bill? AndWhat are your Government's plans and time lines for reviewing the other 700 Ontario statutes for accessibility barriers, and for reviewing all Ontario regulations? It is important for that work to be completed.At an April 4, 2011 training session for public servants who initially were to conduct this legislative accessibility review, at which I was in attendance, a senior Ministry of Government Services official announced that each ministry was requested to complete a review of its own legislation by 2015, and a review of all regulations by 2020. We then voiced a serious concern that those time lines were too long. We have a strong interest in this issue. We led the campaign to get the Government to promise this review in 2007. We have led the campaign since then to get the Government to keep that commitment. We have offered training and support to assist the Government. We are eager for a voice in the legislative process, and to see that the rest of the promised review of statutes and regulations is completed in a timely fashion. We welcome any opportunity to assist you and the Government in conducting this review, and look forward to hearing from you."The Government made public this summary of its intended legislative amendments. These amend only 11 of the 51 statutes that the Government had reviewed:"ACCESSIBILITY FOR ONTARIANS WITH DISABILITIES ACT, 2005In support of The Path to 2025: Ontario’s Accessibility Action Plan, amendments to 11 statutes are proposed in the interests of ensuring that Ontario’s laws do not create barriers for persons with disabilities. These amendments include proposed changes to the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, 2005 to allow for the extension of the various time periods specified in the Act to accommodate a person with a disability or for any other reason that is considered appropriate. In addition, an amendment would provide that a person with a disability who is required under the Act to provide a notice or other document is entitled to do so in a format that is accessible to the PENSATION FOR VICTIMS OF CRIME ACTIn support of The Path to 2025: Ontario’s Accessibility Action Plan, section 10 of the Compensation for Victims of Crime Act would be amended to provide the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board with discretion to extend the 15-day period for requesting a review of a Board decision. In addition, the service provision of the Act would be revised to provide for multiple methods of service delivery and to extend the deemed date of service from three to five days. EDUCATION ACTIn support of The Path to 2025: Ontario’s Accessibility Action Plan, proposed amendments to the Education Act would update terminology relating to persons with disabilities and require that school boards make certain information available to the public in ways other than or in addition to publication in newspapers, such as posting on websites or other appropriate manners. In addition, proposed amendments would permit the extension of certain deadlines in order to accommodate a person’s disability.FREEDOM OF INFORMATION AND PROTECTION OF PRIVACY ACTIn support of The Path to 2025: Ontario’s Accessibility Action Plan, it is proposed that the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act be amended to allow for the extension of certain time periods if they present a barrier as defined in the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, 2005. Similar amendments are proposed in Schedule 17. HIGHWAY TRAFFIC ACTIn addition, in support of The Path to 2025: Ontario’s Accessibility Action Plan, an amendment to section 50 of the Act would permit a judge to extend the time to appeal certain decisions of the Licence Appeal Tribunal.HOMEMAKERS AND NURSES SERVICES ACTIn support of The Path to 2025: Ontario’s Accessibility Action Plan, proposed amendments to the Homemakers and Nurses Services Act would update terminology relating to persons with disabilities. In addition, as a housekeeping measure, the Act’s definition of Minister would be updated to refer to the Minister of Health and Long-Term Care. MUNICIPAL FREEDOM OF INFORMATION AND PROTECTION OF PRIVACY ACTIn support of The Path to 2025: Ontario’s Accessibility Action Plan, it is proposed that the Municipal Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act be amended to allow for the extension of certain time periods if they present a barrier as defined in the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, 2005. ONTARIO GUARANTEED ANNUAL INCOME ACTIn support of The Path to 2025: Ontario’s Accessibility Action Plan, it is proposed that the Ontario Guaranteed Annual Income Act be amended to enable the Minister of Finance to extend the 90-day time period for objecting to a determination, decision or direction made in respect of payment under the Act. PUBLIC HOSPITALS ACTIn support of The Path to 2025: Ontario’s Accessibility Action Plan, the Public Hospitals Act would be amended to provide that notice of a general or special meeting of the members of a hospital corporation is sufficiently given if it is published on the hospital’s website for at least two continuous weeks prior to the date of the meeting.PUBLIC VEHICLES ACTIn support of The Path to 2025: Ontario’s Accessibility Action Plan, proposed amendments to the Public Vehicles Act would update terminology relating to persons with disabilities. Additional amendments are proposed to provide that, where required by regulation, licensed public vehicle companies must provide certain public notices in a medium accessible to persons with disabilities. SUBSTITUTE DECISIONS ACT, 1992In support of The Path to 2025: Ontario’s Accessibility Action Plan, it is proposed that the Substitute Decisions Act, 1992 be amended with respect to the resignation of statutory guardians of property and attorneys under a continuing power of attorney or a power of attorney for personal care. The resigning guardian or attorney would be required to provide an accessible copy of their notice of resignation to any entitled recipient who requests it in an accessible format, or if the guardian or attorney has reason to believe that the recipient needs an accessible copy. The guardian or attorney would also be required to explain their resignation on request or if there is reason to believe that an explanation is necessary."To explain what has been done in recent years on this issue, we quote here extensively from the May 9, 2018 AODA Alliance Update. It described where Ontario had reached regarding this promised legislative review:"What does this mean for our non-partisan campaign to ensure that Ontario reaches full accessibility for all people with disabilities by 2025, the AODA's deadline? Here are several important reflections.1. Three Successive Election Promises to Review All Ontario Laws for Accessibility ProblemsWe have had to repeatedly mount extraordinary pressure on the Ontario Government to act on its 2007 election promise to review all Ontario Laws for accessibility problems.The road to this point for Ontarians with disabilities has been a slow, uphill and frustrating one. Nine years ago, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty made a very commendable written election promise to 1.8 million Ontarians with disabilities, and all other Ontarians who will get a disability later. In response to a request from the AODA Alliance, his Government promised to review all Ontario laws for accessibility problems and to fix those laws. In his September 14, 2007 letter to the AODA Alliance, Premier McGuinty pledged:"Review all Ontario laws to find any disability accessibility barriers that need to be removed.The Ontario Liberal government believes this is the next step toward our goal of a fully accessible Ontario. Building on our work of the past four years, we will continue to be a leader in Canada on accessibility issues. For Ontario to be fully accessible, we must ensure no law directly or indirectly discriminates against those with disabilities. To make that happen, we commit to reviewing all Ontario laws to find any disability barriers that need to be removed."Nine years later, the Ontario Government has only said that it has reviewed 51 of Ontario's statutes. It has not said that it has reviewed any of its many regulations, which are also "laws." When the Legislature passes a law, it is called an "Act" or a "statute." When the Cabinet makes a law, it is called a "regulation." Many statutes give Cabinet power to make specific kinds of regulations to add specifics to a statute.For several years, from 2007 to late 2010, we tried with little or no success to find out who was responsible for conducting this review, and what was being done about it. Eight years ago, in 2008, the Government said it was developing a tool for screening laws for accessibility barriers. By 2010 the Government said it had a screening tool developed.Over five years ago, on April 4, 2011, the Government held a training session for public servants who would, as of that time, be involved in conducting all or part of this accessibility review of Ontario laws. We were happy that AODA Alliance chair David Lepofsky was invited to give a speech as part of that training session. The Government there announced that its target for completing the review of all legislation was 2015, and for the review of all regulations was 2020. We quickly objected that those time lines were far too long. Five years later, the Government has not come even close to meeting them. In his August 19, 2011 letter to us, setting out the Ontario Liberal Party's 2011 disability election commitments, Premier Dalton McGuinty made a second election commitment regarding the review of all Ontario laws for accessibility problems. He promised:"We are committed to completing our review of all legislation for accessibility barriers and, through the work of a central team, we will ask ministries to report on their progress as part of their annual performance plans. We will also pursue strategies to address defined barriers in an efficient and suitable manner."On January 18, 2012, Government Services minister Takhar wrote to the AODA Alliance, stating in part:"The government is also committed to ensuring that no Ontario law creates accessibility barriers to people with disabilities. As such, we have committed to reviewing all of our legislation and regulations to identify and remove any such barriers. In April 2011, all ministries participated in training for multidisciplinary teams on how to use the OPS Inclusion Lens to review laws for accessibility barriers. Ontario has over 750 acts and more than 1500 regulations. We recognize the desire to proceed promptly, and we are committed to conducting a review of all legislation. Currently, the OPS Diversity Office and the Ministry of the Attorney General are working together to support a co-ordinated approach to this legislative review. Timelines for this review will be established early in the new year, following joint meetings of my ministry and the Ministry of the Attorney General."Almost six years after Premier McGuinty's 2007 promise was first made, on March 21, 2013 Deputy Minister of Government Services Kevin Costante wrote us, to provide the most thorough report on progress. He wrote:"I understand that you have concerns about the timelines for this review and that you would like to see progress sooner. We are moving forward with a focused approach that we feel will have the greatest and most immediate impact on the lives of people with disabilities by prioritizing the review of high impact legislation. I have spoken to the Deputy Attorney General, and he, like me, is committed to completing this phase of the review by December 2014.The Ministry of the Attorney General (MAG) has the lead for this phase of the review under the leadership of the Director of the Justice Policy Development Branch. MAG has fine-tuned the tools and will provide training to ministry legal counsel and accessibility leads on the revised tools and process beginning in early April 2013. Following the review of their legislation, ministries and/or MAG will seek to introduce amending legislation in the Legislative Assembly by December 2014, if necessary. It is important that responses to similar barriers be addressed in a consistent fashion and that is why the review is being coordinated in this way." In her May 14, 2014 letter to the AODA Alliance, setting out the Liberal Party's 2014 election's accessibility pledges, Premier Kathleen Wynne addressed this issue for the third election in a row. She wrote in material part:"In addition to the review of the AODA, the government is currently conducting a legislative review with the goal of identifying and considering steps to remove any potential barriers in Ontario statutes. In the current phase of the review, 13 ministries are reviewing 51 high impact statutes. The list of high impact statutes includes statutes that affect persons with disabilities directly, provide for the delivery of services to a large group, provide benefits or protections or affect democratic or civil rights. This phase of the review will be complete by the end of 2014. We commit to addressing the findings of the review and continuing to review additional Ontario statutes to remove any potential barriers. 18. We commit to making amendments to regulations to remove accessibility barriers as required based on the findings of the current review and the review of additional Ontario statutes going forward."2. Far Too Little Government Action over the Past Nine Years on the Liberal Government's Accessible Legislation PledgePremier Dalton McGuinty was absolutely correct when he declared nine years ago that reviewing all Ontario laws for accessibility problems was the next step for progressing to the goal of full accessibility for people with disabilities in Ontario. Kathleen Wynne was similarly right to commit to the AODA Alliance in her December 3, 2012 letter, while she was running for the Ontario Liberal Party leadership, that she would keep all the McGuinty Government's earlier accessibility promises, and that she would ensure that Ontario is on schedule for full accessibility by 2025. The Government has now had fully nine years to work on its promised accessibility review of all Ontario laws. Yet the Ontario Government has only reviewed 51 of Ontario's 750 statutes in the past nine years. It has only made accessibility amendments to 11 of those 51 statutes. This shows that the Government has not given its promised accessibility review of all Ontario laws the priority and attention it deserves.This is one of many examples that show why Ontario lags so far behind schedule for reaching full accessibility by 2025. At this rate, it could take the Ontario Government at least a century to review all of the remaining 695 Ontario statutes, and all the many Ontario regulations, for accessibility issues. Yet less than nine years remain before the 2025 deadline for full accessibility. Ontarians need Premier Wynne to take charge of this issue, show strong leadership, and pull her Government out of the ditch where it has been languishing on this issue. 3. Insufficient Care in Looking for Accessibility Barriers in the Laws the Wynne Government did Examine It is good that the Wynne Government fixed some accessibility barriers in the eleven statutes it has amended. Yet its accessibility review of the 51 statutes was clearly inadequate. It was insufficiently careful and thorough. Readily available to the Wynne Government were good resources to assist. In the Ministry of the Attorney General is a Constitutional Law Branch. It has recognized expertise in constitutional rights, including equality rights. The Government also had an article on rooting out accessibility barriers in legislation, co-authored by AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky and University of Western Ontario law professor Dr. Randal Graham, entitled "Universal Design in Legislative Drafting - How to Ensure Legislation is Barrier-Free for People with Disabilities." It is published in the National Journal of Constitutional Law.Adding to those resources, on September 8, 2015, the ARCH Disability Law Centre sent the Wynne Government an excellent, detailed 19 page legal analysis of the laws that had been under Government review. ARCH identified a number of troubling accessibility barriers in the statutes that the Government had been studying, and which the Government's review appears to have missed. Despite this, the Government's limited amendments left many important accessibility problems intact. The Wynne Government has given no reason for rejecting ARCH's call for those legislated accessibility problems to be fixed. It is informative to read ARCH's September 8, 2015 letter to the Wynne Government.4. Wynne Government Blocked Eleven NDP Proposals to Address Accessibility Barriers that the Government Had Missed During legislative debates over the Government's 2016 Budget bill, the Wynne Government blocked commendable NDP efforts to fix more accessibility barriers in the legislation that the Government had reviewed. During clause-by-clause debate on the Government's 2016 Budget bill at the Legislature's Standing Committee on Finance and Economic Affairs, the NDP proposed further amendments to the 11 Ontario statutes that the Government addressed in that bill. The NDP proposals would fix accessibility barriers that the Government's amendments did not fix. The Ontario Conservatives commendably supported the NDP's proposed amendments.The Wynne Government opposed and defeated every one of the NDP's proposed amendments. The NDP proposals included obvious helpful measures - measures to which no one could credibly take exception. Thus, the Wynne Liberals, who publicly applaud themselves as global leaders on accessibility, stood alone as the opponents to further progress here. The Wynne Government gave troubling and meritless reasons at the Standing Committee for opposing these amendments. Its bureaucratic reasons cast about for excuses for a lack of boldness on accessibility. It is disturbing to read the passages of the clause-by-clause debates on April 6, 2016 at the Legislature's Standing Committee on Finance and Economic Affairs, where these amendments were discussed. The NDP proposed amendments to eleven laws, the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, the Education Act, the Compensation for Victims of Crime Act, the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, the Municipal Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, the Homemakers and Nurses Services Act, the Ontario Guaranteed Annual Income Act, the Public Hospitals Act, the Public Vehicles Act and the Substitute Decisions Act. In each case, the NDP proposed an amendment that would provide:"All documents available on a website for the information and use of the public under this act, including information directives and forms, must be available in a format that can be made accessible by any person and, as a minimum requirement, in a format that can be read by a screen text reader or can be modified by any person so that it can be read by a screen text reader." The proposed NDP amendments also provided that "…a document in portable document format does not satisfy subsection (1).'"The Ontario Government has a poor record on ensuring full accessibility of its websites. Improvements have been too slow. For example, in 2015, the inaccessibility of the Government's website for the Pan/ParaPan American Games, including its iPhone app, was a top news story. As well, too many important documents are still posted on the Government's websites in inaccessible PDF format, without also having them posted in an accessible alternate format. Stunning examples until we objected, included the 2014 Final Report of the Mayo Moran Independent Review of the AODA, the 2012 final report of the Andrew Pinto Independent Review of Ontario's human rights enforcement system, and the much-publicized 2008 Ontario Government anti-poverty strategy. Of the many important NDP amendments, one that sticks out was its proposed amendment to the Education Act. The Ministry of Education has a long practice of not ensuring equal access to important online documents in an accessible format. Liberal MPP Yvan Baker was the Government's lead spokesperson on the Standing Committee. No doubt he was reading instructions that the Government gave him, as is the standard practice at Standing Committees of the Legislature, no matter which party is in power. Mr. Baker gave the Government's reasons for voting down all of these proposed amendments. He gave this reason for opposing the first NDP motion on document accessibility, and the subsequent NDP motions to the same effect:"Okay. As far as the motion goes, I think it creates an unneeded section in the AODA, because the AODA already grants regulation-making authority for the government to set accessibility standards regarding web content.Through the AODA, the government has shown leadership in developing these standards as regulations and already includes detailed rules and timelines for the accessibility of web content. These standards are actually reviewed every five years by a standards development committee, as required by the AODA. So……That review is coming up in the coming year. In my view, updates and revisions are best made through this process."Speaking against a similar amendment later, MPP Baker said:"Again, I recommend voting against this motion. It creates an unnecessary section in the Compensation for Victims of Crime Act. Per earlier discussion, the AODA already grants the government the regulation-making authority to set accessibility standards regarding web content. These standards, like I said earlier, are reviewed every five years. That next review is due this coming year, and that allows the government to review the latest technologies on an ongoing basis and make sure it is taking the appropriate steps.I understand the policy intent and we are supportive of the intent. My disagreement with this is really based around the fact that I do not think this is the right mechanism to do that."When speaking against the website accessibility amendment that the NDP proposed to the Education Act, Liberal MPP Yvan Baker argued:"Again, I think this creates an unneeded section in the Education Act. We already have the regulation-making authority to set accessibility standards regarding government web content. These standards are reviewed every five years. That review is coming up this year. That's required by the AODA, so that review is enshrined in legislation already. My view is that updates or revisions are best made through that ongoing process. It allows us to be flexible.It also allows us to be consistent. Each of the motions that you've brought forward touches on different acts. What the review allows government to do is to look across government at all applications and make sure that there's a consistent approach across as well. Doing this selectively is also not the right approach."Liberal MPP Yvan Baker later added:"The other thing I would clarify is that the information and communication standard under the AODA does not specify specific formats or software, like those offered by Microsoft or Adobe. Instead, it requires organizations, upon request, to provide accessible formats in a timely manner that takes into account the person's accessibility needs due to disability and to consult with them. It doesn't say that one format is more or less accessible than another, but instead enables flexibility in format depending on the needs of the person with the disability. What is considered accessible for a person is dependent on what that person requires.The current regulation is set up in such a way that it be flexible and adaptive to people's needs. That's the way it's currently set up. But again, that could be reviewed, and it's part of this ongoing review that's the purpose of that ongoing review which is required by the AODA as well. I think what we're debating is not the policy intent; what we're debating is: What's the right mechanism to consider such a change and implement such a change? What I'm saying is that the review, which includes the appropriate stakeholders, we believe is the right way to approach something like this."Liberal MPP Baker's arguments will read to many as insensitive, evasive and bureaucratic. They reflect an impoverished approach to disability accessibility and equality. The Government had commendably agreed in 2007 to fix accessibility problems in legislation. The Government far too often posts information in PDF format. The AODA's accessibility standards have not stopped the Government from doing this. Whether those standards name a particular format or not does not take away from these Government-created barriers.Later Liberal MPP Baker added: "The first thing I'll say is that, under the existing regulation that is already in place under the information and communication standards under the AODA, again, it doesn't specify specific formats or software such as Microsoft or Adobe or PDF, but it does require organizations, upon request, to provide accessible formats in a timely manner that takes into account a person's accessibility needs due to disability and to consult with them. This enables flexibility in format depending on what the needs are of the person with the disability. Of course, what is considered accessible for one person may be different for another person. For example, Adobe Reader PDFs might be perfectly accessible for someone with low vision whereas Word might be the preferred format for a person whose screen reader can't read PDFs. Persons who don't prefer screen readers may prefer non-electronic Braille documents, etc. Additionally, accessibility often depends on the way information is structured in a document.The current regulation also refers to WCAG 2.0, which is an international standard for the accessibility of web-based content. I think that's important to note, and that's, again, in section 14 of the existing reg. The current process that the government has in place under the AODA grants the government regulation-setting authority to address these kinds of issues. These standards are reviewed every five years by a standards development committee required by the AODA. Half of the people on this committee are persons with disabilities.The NDP amendment, first of all, doesn't belong in legislation; this is something that belongs in regulation. At best, it would be a Band-Aid. Also, I don't think we should presuppose the outcome of a review done by the standards development committee, which, again, is composed of persons with disabilities. They are the folks, I think, who are best equipped to consult and advise and address these standards and develop these standards, not those of us sitting here as MPPs without consultation from them."Liberal MPP Yvan Baker's arguments let bureaucracy triumph over accessibility. There is no reason why this amendment should not be enshrined in legislation. As well, whether a PDF is accessible for some does not take away from the fact that a number of Government-created PDFS on its websites were not. Moreover, it is no defense to argue that people with disabilities can always ask for an accessible format document. Why should they have to, when the Government can easily post a document on its website in both a PDF and in a fully accessible alternate format. That would let people with disabilities have as quick access to these documents as do all others. NDP MPP Catherine Fife commendably argued that people with disabilities should not have to wait until the accessibility standards are reviewed, for the Government to fix this problem."We have the ability; we have the capacity, to at least ensure that accessibility is at the heart of a proceeding that would relate to compensation for victims of crimes. I do not understand, genuinely so, why the government would not use the tools that are at your disposal to make a piece of legislation and take an opportunity to at least signal to those people in the province of Ontario with disabilities that we are willing to be more flexible, because we're asking them to be flexible every single day."Further explaining why Ontario needs the website accessibility amendments that the NDP was proposing, NDP MPP Catherine fife quoted an AODA Alliance Update, which stated:"Several amendments propose to require an organization to post a notice on the organization's website, in order to ensure that the notice is accessible to people with disabilities. However, this summary does not show that the amendments require that the website itself be accessible, and that the notice be posted in an accessible format. Too many organizations, including the ... government itself, have failed to ensure full accessibility of their websites. Moreover, the timelines for website accessibility are too long, while exceptions and exemptions are too broad."NDP MPP Fife further argued:"Just to be clear, there's no cost. It's just a shift in policy, that the government not post important pieces of legislation in PDF form, so that those at home who are trying to access the information can use those screen text readers.There may be people who don't have that technology. People obviously should have it. But for the member opposite to say that they agree with the intent is quite frustrating. If you go back to 2007, the Liberals then promised that the government would review all of Ontario's laws for accessibility barriers. This is 2016; it's nine years later. And this included the 750 statutes and a number of regulations. Nine years later, the government has only reviewed 51 of the 750 Ontario statutes. I don't think the citizens of this province who can't read through PDF form should have to wait for the AODA review to say to the government, "You should have been doing this back in 2007." We could do this now. It's a simple amendment that the government can support."The Liberal Standing Committee chair ruled three of the proposed NDP amendments out of order. Even though the NDP and Conservatives were supportive, the NDP could not get unanimous consent to debate and consider the three proposals which the chair ruled out of order.Two of the proposed amendments were to the Compensation for Victims of Crime Act. First, the NDP proposed that it be revised to require that the board that decides on requests for compensation for crime victims be required to take specified accessibility training within six months, as follows:"Every member of the board, including the chair, upon their appointment, shall undergo training, as specified by the chair, in capacity law and autonomy rights, including training in the Substitute Decisions Act, 1992, the Mental Health Act, the Human Rights Code, the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, 2005 and article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities."NDP MPP Catherin Fife explained: "This amendment minimizes arbitrary findings of incapacity."Second, the Committee chair ruled out of order the NDP's proposed amendment to alter the range of persons to whom a compensation payment can be paid if the crime victim is incapable under the Substitute Decisions Act.The third proposal that was ruled out of order related to website accessibility.5. AODA Alliance Was Left Out of Any Government Discussions over What Amendments to the 51 Reviewed Laws Pass The Wynne Government chose not to seriously engage the AODA Alliance in important recent discussions of which barriers need to be fixed in the 51 laws it first reviewed. Early on, the Government commendably invited AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky to make a presentation in April 2011 (five years ago) to a meeting of public officials, who were then tasked with working on this accessibility legislative review. After nothing appeared to come from that effort in the way of changes to any laws, the Government accepted AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky's offer to give training on this issue to Ontario's Office of Legislative Counsel (the Government lawyers who actually compose Ontario's statutes and regulations). It was evident that they had never before received any training on this topic. In 2013, the Government also commendably accepted his offer to give this training to a new team of officials from the Ministry of the Attorney General and the Ministry of Government Services, who would review the 51 statutes that the Government decided in 2013 to first examine. It seems that the Government had re-started this whole process from scratch when it embarked on its review of the first 51 statutes. We appreciated these chances for early input.However, that willingness to engage in direct discussions over the substance of this review, including over what barriers to fix, petered out after this. The Government said it was to complete its review of those 51 statutes by the end of 2014. Since then, the Government did not sit down with the AODA Alliance, or to our knowledge, with any other disability community representatives, to discuss which barriers needed legislative amendments to effectively fix. As part of the Government's June 3, 2015 announcements to mark the AODA's 10th anniversary, the Government announced its intention to make a very limited range of amendments to Ontario legislation. Its June 3, 2015 announcement included:"Introduce legislation addressing barriers to accessibility identified through a government-wide review of high-impact legislation, ensuring that government documents and appeals processes are accessible for people with disabilities."Our June 3, 2015 AODA Alliance Update responded to this announcement as follows:"It is good that the Government plans to introduce legislation to fix barriers it discovered. However, if those amendments are limited to "…ensuring that government documents, and appeals processes are accessible for people with disabilities," that will disregard the vast majority of potential barriers in those laws.Moreover, this Plan says nothing about reviewing the other 700 Ontario statutes and all of Ontario's regulations for accessibility barriers. A Plan to ensure full accessibility by 2025 requires prompt and effective action on all barriers in Ontario laws."It was after that Government announcement that the ARCH Disability Law Centre sent the Government its September 8, 2015 submission, referred to above. It showed that the 51 statutes that the Government had reviewed, had far more barriers needing legislative fixes than the ones the Government's June 3, 2015 announcement addressed. After that, the Wynne Government again did not sit down with the AODA Alliance, or to our knowledge, with anyone else from the disability community, to see whether it should expand the range of legislative barriers it would fix in those 51 laws.Since it took office in 2003, Ontario's Liberal Government has for the most part, been far more willing than this to include us in serious and substantive discussions leading to the introduction of legislation that bears on disability accessibility. There have been some troubling exceptions, such as the Ontario Government's 2010 amendments to Ontario's elections legislation. However, quite often the Government reached out to us, and included us in such discussions before it brought a measure forward that bore on disability accessibility. As a result, Premier Dalton McGuinty wrote this about the AODA Alliance in his August 19, 2011 letter, his letter setting out his Government's 2011 election promises on accessibility:"Mr. Lepofsky, I want to once again thank you for your work and advocacy. Your ongoing advice has made a tremendous contribution to helping us make Ontario more accessible."Similarly, in her December 3, 2012 letter to the AODA Alliance, setting out her accessibility pledges as she ran for leadership of the Ontario Liberal Party, Kathleen Wynne wrote:"I look forward to continuing to build and strengthen our relationship with the AODA Alliance. I welcome the opportunity to maintain an open dialogue and meet with you to continue to move accessibility issues forward."As well, in her May 14, 2016 letter to the AODA Alliance, setting out her Government's 2014 accessibility election pledges for the 2014 election, Premier Wynne wrote:"Our government regards our current relationship with you as one of great importance and sees our partnership as a step towards fostering a more accessible and inclusive province. The Ontario Liberal Party will continue to safeguard the interests of Ontarians with disabilities and ultimately achieve our goal of full accessibility by the year 2025. We see the AODA Alliance as a principal partner in achieving this goal. My office is always happy to meet with you."Despite these encouraging words from two successive Ontario Premiers, which we very much appreciate, the Government did not engage us in a discussion of the specifics of which barriers in those 51 laws should be amended. Making this worse, we did not get a realistic chance to take part in the Legislature's Standing Committee hearings on the bill. The Wynne Government only set three days for anyone to make a deputation to the Standing Committee on the bill. AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky, who has had lead responsibility on this specific issue for the past nine years, was out of town, and could not arrange an alternate date to appear. To prepare for these hearings, it was not realistic to simply read the entire Budget bill. It contained many, many provisions. The disability accessibility clauses were buried in that omnibus bill.We appreciate that at our request, the Government prepared for the AODA Alliance a document that sets out each of the amendments it proposed to make to deal with these accessibility issues. However the Government only gave us a plain language summary of those amendments on March 15, 2016. It only sent us the actual provisions on March 21, 2016, the day before the Standing Committee's three hearing days. We understand that it took the Government some time to prepare these documents. However, after the Government took nine years to get to this point, it is unfair to expect us to prepare and present a detailed response to proposed changes to eleven laws within a matter of days or hours. As our March 16, 2016 AODA Alliance Update stated:"However, we are not now able to take part in the legislative hearings on this bill. We don't have all the information we need from the Wynne Government. Until we see the actual amendments' wording, we are quite limited in what we can do. Only yesterday did we receive the information set out below, including the list of the statutes the Government proposes to amend, and a plain language summary of the proposed amendments." The AODA Alliance wanted very much to take part in extensive discussions with the Government over what to include in its legislation to address accessibility barriers in these 51 statutes. We would have wanted to make a detailed presentation to the Legislature's Standing Committee, after having appropriate time to read and analyze them. The Government's ill-informed reasons, given at the Standing Committee, for rejecting the commendable NDP proposed amendments, showed that the Government would have benefitted from hearing from us.We led the campaign to get the Government to make its election pledge nine years ago to conduct this review of Ontario laws for accessibility. We have led the nine year campaign to get the Government to act on this pledge. We have offered constructive ideas on how to conduct the review. Our being denied a meaningful chance to take part in this most critical stage in the review is deeply troubling. It is not consistent with the kind and encouraging words that premiers McGuinty and Wynne expressed about the AODA Alliance, quoted above.6. The Wynne Government Has Announced No Plans on How and When It Will Complete Its Promised Accessibility Review of All Other Ontario LawsIt is important for the Wynne Government to now make clear its plans for reviewing the remaining 695 Ontario statutes for accessibility issues, as well as all of Ontario's many regulations. Premier McGuinty promised nine years ago that all these laws would be reviewed. In his August 19, 2011 letter to the AODA Alliance, setting out his Government's 2011 disability accessibility legislation, he reaffirmed to review "all" legislation. Premier Wynne echoed this in her May 14, 2014 letter to the AODA Alliance, where she set out her 2014 disability accessibility election commitments. She referred to the fact that the Government was then reviewing the first 51 statutes for accessibility issues. She then committed:"In addition to the review of the AODA, the government is currently conducting a legislative review with the goal of identifying and considering steps to remove any potential barriers in Ontario statutes. In the current phase of the review, 13 ministries are reviewing 51 high impact statutes. The list of high impact statutes includes statutes that affect persons with disabilities directly, provide for the delivery of services to a large group, provide benefits or protections or affect democratic or civil rights. This phase of the review will be complete by the end of 2014. We commit to addressing the findings of the review and continuing to review additional Ontario statutes to remove any potential barriers. 18. We commit to making amendments to regulations to remove accessibility barriers as required based on the findings of the current review and the review of additional Ontario statutes going forward."The 2014 final report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review echoed feedback it received, signaling concern at that time about the Government's slow pace in carrying out this promised disability accessibility review of all Ontario laws. That report included:"A further concern involving the Government of Ontario itself was the slow pace of the Government's promised review of provincial laws and regulations to identify and then remove accessibility barriers. Premier McGuinty promised this review during the 2007 election campaign and reiterated the commitment during the 2011 campaign. In 2013 the Government stated that, by the end of 2014, 13 ministries will have reviewed 51 statutes and considered steps to remove any barriers identified. Disability stakeholders pointed out that this leaves about 700 other statutes, as well as 1,500 regulations, still to be examined. The Government was urged to complete the review of all legislation by 2015, and all regulations by 2016."We recently wrote Premier Wynne to find out her future plans. Premier Wynne has not answered our March 15, 2016 letter about this issue. She has had almost two months to do so. Our letter reached out to her in a constructive way to seek a way forward on the promised accessibility legislative review. In that letter, AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky asked:"Could you please indicate if your Government would be open to consider other amendments needed to address accessibility barriers that those 51 high impact statutes authorize, permit or fail to address, outside the time frame of the Budget bill? There are additional areas of barriers that need to be addressed beyond those which the Government's proposed amendments cover. May we have an opportunity to make a presentation to a Standing Committee on this bill in mid to late April, after we receive the text of the actual proposed amendments and after we have the time we need to study them and prepare our feedback?Would your Government be open to consult with us and the disability community on other accessibility barriers that need to be addressed in connection with those 51 high impact statutes, and that the budget bill does not address? If so, can you confirm that it is with the Ministry of the Attorney General with whom we should deal. We commend your Government for dealing with this via omnibus legislation, rather than taking forward each bill to be amended piecemeal. To amend each bill piecemeal would take an extraordinary and excessive amount of legislative time. Is your Government open to again use omnibus legislation to address other accessibility barriers, not addressed in the Budget Bill? AndWhat are your Government's plans and time lines for reviewing the other 700 Ontario statutes for accessibility barriers, and for reviewing all Ontario regulations? It is important for that work to be completed.At an April 4, 2011 training session for public servants who initially were to conduct this legislative accessibility review, at which I was in attendance, a senior Ministry of Government Services official announced that each ministry was requested to complete a review of its own legislation by 2015, and a review of all regulations by 2020. We then voiced a serious concern that those time lines were too long."Less than 9 years remain until the AODA's 2025 mandatory deadline for reaching full accessibility in Ontario. We need Premier Wynne to make sure things dramatically speed up on this promised review of all Ontario laws. This is part of the strong leadership on accessibility that the final report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review urged Premier Wynne to show. We strongly support that recommendation. The 'Governments snail's pace in acting on its promise to review all Ontario laws for accessibility barriers is a clear and strong example of a broader and troubling trend that the final report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review identified. It observed that "(t)he pace of change is seen as agonizingly slow by persons with disabilities…""Over a half a year earlier, the ARCH Disability Law Centre had submitted to the former Ontario Government a detailed review of the legislation that was then undergoing this legislative review. It identified a wide range of disability barriers in that legislation. The former Ontario Government's omnibus bill did not act on many if not most of those disability accessibility barriers. the ARCH Disability Law Centre’s excellent September 8, 2015 submission to the Wynne Government, presenting additional accessibility barriers that need to be fixed in the 51 Ontario statutes that the Wynne Government has reviewed to date. Read the ARCH Disability Law Centre’s excellent September 8, 2015 submission to the Wynne Government, presenting additional accessibility barriers that need to be fixed in the 51 Ontario statutes that the Wynne Government has reviewed to date.Over the next two years, from April 2016 up to the June 2018 election, the former Ontario Government did nothing to review any further legislation or regulations for disability accessibility barriers, despite our pressing the Government to take further action. In the 2018 Ontario election, the former Ontario Government merely proposed to get this Independent Review's advice on how to proceed. The May 14, 2018 letter to the AODA Alliance from Premier Wynne included:" Earlier this year, the government appointed the Honourable David C. Onley to lead the next review of the AODA. As part of this review, we are asking Mr. Onley to include in his advice the best way forward to both complete the review and provide solutions to accessibility barriers in legislation in a practical and responsible way."The foregoing is sufficiently troubling. The protracted inaction on this issue is even more troubling, in light of the following: The September 23, 2016 Mandate Letter that Premier Wynne sent to Accessibility Minister Tracy MacCharles included this as a priority assignment:"Building on work with the Attorney General and the Minister of Government and Consumer Services, lead the ongoing review of legislation and regulations across government with the goal of eliminating barriers for persons with disabilities and update government on your progress in 2017."That did not lead to a single additional statute or regulation being reviewed for accessibility problems as far as we have learned, over the next period of almost two years. It was unjustified for the former Ontario Government to dither for years on this election commitment, and then, in its last days, to decide to leave it to the current AODA Independent Review to advise it on how to proceed. the Ontario Government has ample centres of expertise. At the Ministry of the Attorney General is the Constitutional Law Branch. At the Legislature is the Office of Legislative Counsel. At no time in the past 11 years had the Ontario Government told us that they needed outside advice on how to proceed with this promise. Two earlier AODA Independent Reviews were conducted, after this promise was made. The former Government asked neither of the two previous AODA Independent Reviews to advise it on this question.6. Developments Since the 2018 Ontario Election We asked Premier Ford to take action on the review of Ontario laws for accessibility. Our July 19, 2018 letter to Premier Ford included:"VI. Accelerate the Sluggish and Long-Overdue Review of All Ontario Laws for Accessibility BarriersIn the 2007 election, all parties promised that the Ontario Government would review all Ontario laws for accessibility barriers. Yet fully eleven years later, only a tiny fraction of Ontario statutes are under review. Most have not yet been examined at all. No Ontario regulations have been reviewed. Of the disability barriers in the few statutes that the previous Government reviews, many were never fixed by legislative amendments. When the previous Government left office, it had no plans for reviewing the rest of Ontario's laws for accessibility problems. Your Government can bring a new, faster and better approach to this issue.We recommend that you:9. Direct the Attorney General to lead a comprehensive review of all Ontario laws for accessibility barriers, and to complete it in the next two and a half years, in consultation with the disability community, with a view to bringing an omnibus bill before the Legislature to fix any disability accessibility barriers found."On July 31, 2018, Premier Ford responded to our letter's various recommendations for action on accessibility, writing in material part:"I note that you've sent a copy of your email to the Honourable Raymond Cho, Minister for Seniors and Accessibility. As this issue falls in his area of responsibility, I've asked that Minister Cho or a ministry staff member respond to you as soon as possible."The Minister for Accessibility and Seniors wrote us on August 15, 2018, we received an email from Accessibility Minister Cho. He did not indicate that he had taken any action on this issue, or intended to do so. The substance of his response is set out in these two paragraphs:"Through the development of policies and programs across government, we are committed to meeting the needs of seniors and people with disabilities to improve their quality of life and help them lead safe, engaged, active and healthy lives.Delivering on the province's goal of achieving accessibility in Ontario by 2025 remains a key component of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA). We will continue to work towards supporting people with disabilities in obtaining meaningful employment so they can fully participate in the Ontario economy. I appreciate the insights and views you have shared. I look forward to continuing to work with all our partners, to ensure that seniors in our province receive the best care and support we can provide, and to promote and improve accessibility across Ontario."It is the premier and not the Minister for Accessibility and Seniors, who needs to initiate action on this issue for the new Government.The review of all Ontario laws for accessibility barriers is within the traditional platform of Ontario's Progressive Conservative Party. We first raised this need in the 2007 Ontario election. In that election, the PC Party's September 7, 2007 election pledges to the AODA Alliance included:"I support your request that the government show leadership by reviewing its own legislation to remove barriers against persons with disabilities and by developing an action plan for provincial and municipal elections to be fully accessible to voters with disabilities." Chapter 9 Making Ontario and Municipal Elections Accessible to Voters and Candidates with Disabilities1. Introduction Many find it hard to believe that in 2018, voters and candidates with disabilities in Ontario still encounter disability barriers in provincial and municipal elections. Yet over 13 years since the AODA was passed, provincial and municipal elections in Ontario are still not fully accessible to voters and candidates with disabilities. There is no justification for this. The former Ontario Government did not act sufficiently to address this. It did not keep key election promises on this. The new Ontario Government has announced no specific plans to address this.Part 9 of the June 30 AODA Alliance brief to Mayo Moran documented the history of this problem in detail up to the middle of 2014. This chapter is an addendum to that Part of our 2014 brief to Mayo Moran.2. Recommended Findings We urge this AODA Independent Review to find as follows:* In 2018, voters and candidates with disabilities in Ontario provincial and municipal elections continue to face too many disability barriers. This is unjustified and unacceptable.* The same disability barriers can present themselves in provincial and municipal elections. It is inappropriate to have to reinvent the accessibility wheel in the election context at both the provincial and municipal levels, and then again, from one municipality to the next. This slows progress on accessibility while wastefully costing the taxpayer more.* Elections Ontario has not solved this problem at the provincial level, even though this issue has been within its mandate for many years.* A comprehensive new strategy is needed to ensure elections accessibility for voters and candidates with disabilities, which can be expected to require legislative and non-legislative reforms.3. Recommendations on Ensuring Municipal and Provincial Elections are Barrier-free for Voters and Candidates with DisabilitiesWe urge this Independent Review to make these recommendations:By June 2019, the Government should appoint an independent person to conduct a three month independent review of barriers facing voters and candidates with disabilities in provincial and municipal elections, including both in the campaign process and the voting process. This Review, should, among other things, gather information on the use of telephone and internet voting in municipal elections in Ontario. This Review should hold an open, accessible and province-wide public consultation, and report to the public within six months of its appointment. Its report should be made public immediately on its being submitted to the Government. Within six months after the report of the Disability Elections Accessibility Independent Review, the Government should introduce into the Legislature omnibus elections accessibility reforms for both municipal and provincial elections, to remove and prevent barriers impeding voters and candidates with disabilities in the voting process, and in participating in election campaigns, to ensure that:all voters with disabilities can independently mark their own ballot in private and verify their choice. This bill should, among other things, open up the option of telephone and/or internet voting in Ontario elections and by-elections.all voters with disabilities have full physical accessibility to all polling stations and all public areas in polling stations, including sharing at the provincial and municipal levels information on accessible polling station venues, so each does not have to reinvent the same accessibility wheel.Ensure that election campaign information is immediately and readily available in accessible formats, and that campaign websites are designed to be fully accessible.ensure that all-candidates debates are accessible.4. What the 2014 Mayo Moran Report FoundThe final report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review included the following:"ELECTIONSWhile some participants called for an elections standard under the AODA, the wider view was that accessible elections should be achieved through amendments to the existing provincial and municipal election laws. Disability stakeholders called on the Government to appoint an independent person to conduct a review of barriers impeding voters and candidates with disabilities. The idea was that this review could propose reforms to ensure that voters would be able to independently mark their own ballot in private and verify their choice - including telephone and internet voting. The review would also serve as a means to guarantee full physical accessibility to all polling stations and all-candidates debates."5. Ontario Government Action or Inaction on Accessible Elections since the 2014 report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent ReviewIn the 2014 Ontario election, the former Ontario Government promised as follows in Premier Wynne's May 14, 2014 letter to the AODA Alliance:"13. Ensuring the proper accessibility of the provincial and municipal elections falls in line is a top priority for us to safeguard the interests of Ontarians with disabilities through ease of access to the provincial and municipal elections as does every citizen of Ontario. We will ensure that the Ministry of the Attorney General, Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing and Elections Ontario are committed to providing the best possible services to ensure accessible elections."The AODA Alliance's January 19, 2015 analysis of the December 23, 2014 letter to the AODA Alliance from Premier Wynne included this:" In our September 19, 2014 letter to Premier Wynne, we asked her to direct the Attorney General and Municipal Affairs and Housing Minister to prepare and introduce an omnibus bill to address barriers impeding voters and candidates with disabilities in both provincial and municipal elections, after designating one of those ministers with responsibility to lead this project. In our September 16, 2014 letter to Attorney General Madeleine Meilleur, we asked the Minister to ensure Ontario elections are fully accessible to voters and candidates with disabilities. In our September 16, 2014 letter to the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing, Ted McMeekin, we asked the Minister to implement effective measures to ensure accessibility of municipal elections to voters and candidates with disabilities.By the Premier's approach, we have no assurance that provincial or municipal elections will become accessible to voters and candidates with disabilities now, by 2025, or ever. The Premier's December 23, 2014 letter commits to virtually nothing new on this. We need far more concerted and proactive Government leadership. Premier Wynne's December 23, 2014 letter states:"I understand that you feel there are further improvements that could be made to accessibility in municipal elections. As you are aware, the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing reviews the Municipal Elections Act following each municipal election. You can be assured that your input will be considered as part of the review. I urge you to work with that ministry to address your concerns.With respect to provincial elections, the Ministry of Intergovernmental Affairs has completed a review of potential barriers in Ontario's provincial election legislation. Our government has taken important legislative steps to make the provincial election system more accessible to people with disabilities. These include requiring that all polling stations be accessible, mandating that voters have the opportunity to comment on proposed polling locations before they are selected, requiring that accessible equipment which allows people to vote privately and independently be provided for use at returning office advance polls during provincial elections, and allowing voters to vote by special ballot, including permitting voters with a disability who need help with special ballots to request a home visit from an Elections Ontario official.Ontario's Chief Electoral Officer is able to approve the future use of alternative voting methods that make voting easier, provided that they are successfully tested at a byelection, meet security and integrity standards, and are approved by a legislative committee. The Chief Electoral Officer has completed the study of alternative voting technology mandated under the Election Act. His report concluded that there is no viable method for networked voting at this time, including Internet and telephone, that would meet integrity and security standards for use in Ontario elections. This conclusion is shared by Elections Canada and Elections BC after conducting separate studies that considered the integrity and security of Internet voting. Our government will continue to examine and assess legislative opportunities to enhance the accessibility of Ontario's provincial elections."We were shocked to learn from the Premier's letter that the Ministry of Intergovernmental Affairs has completed a review of potential barriers in Ontario's provincial election legislation. This is the first we had heard of that Ministry's review. We have no idea when it was conducted, who led it, who took part in it, who was consulted, what options were considered or what conclusions it reached. We were never invited to take part in it. The Government has known since it first took office in 2003 that we have led the campaign across Ontario to make elections accessible to voters with disabilities. In 2009-2010, we very publicly led this campaign during debates in the Legislature in 2010 over Bill 231, the Government's last and demonstrably insufficient effort at reforming provincial election legislation. We have asked the Government over and over at all levels, for several years to engage us in just such a review, and to appoint a minister with lead responsibility. To exclude us from such a review flies in the face of the Government's oft-repeated desire to work together with us on such issues.The Premier in no small part leaves us to Elections Ontario on new accessibility options like telephone and internet voting. The Legislature has banned telephone and internet voting in provincial elections, over our objection. Elections Ontario has power to test it in a by-election but has refused to do so. Yet it is permitted in municipal elections, and has been used in at least 44 Ontario municipalities. In referring us back to Elections Ontario, Premier Wynne knows that Elections Ontario has been adamantly opposed to telephone and internet voting, and has put them off for the indefinite future. For a thorough critique of Elections Ontario's fundamentally flawed approach to this issue, visit We have no confidence in Elections Ontario's handling of this issue. It has studied and studied telephone and internet voting. Despite its successful deployment in at least 44 Ontario municipalities, all Elections Ontario offers is more study into the unforeseeable future. It created a disability advisory group, and later abolished it. Elections Ontario has identified no other effective voting option for overcoming the recurring barriers to voting that voters with disabilities continued to face in the 2014 Ontario election. Voters with disabilities deserve better treatment. If Elections Ontario is to continue slamming the door on telephone and internet voting for the foreseeable future, it has a duty to find other effective accessible voting options. The Premier committed to no new concrete action to remove or prevent barriers to voters and candidates with disabilities in provincial elections, even though it is beyond dispute that the Government' 2010 election reforms did not ensure the elimination of those barriers. The Premier's letter offered no detail, no time line for action and no public official to contact, when it vaguely stated: "Our government will continue to examine and assess legislative opportunities to enhance the accessibility of Ontario's provincial elections." On the topic of accessibility barriers in municipal elections, Premier Wynne did nothing more than tell us to speak with the Municipal Affairs Ministry. Yet over the past five years, we have tried to raise this several times with that Ministry, without any progress on the issue.Premier Wynne did not direct the Attorney General (whom she previously made responsible for provincial elections legislation) and the Municipal Affairs Minister (responsible for municipal elections) to jointly develop an omnibus bill to fix the identical barriers that recur in both provincial and municipal elections. It wastes public money and delays progress towards a barrier-free Ontario for the Government to force us to have to lobby one municipality at a time, and again provincially, to get solutions duplicated at both levels and all over Ontario. It would be far faster and more economical for an omnibus bill to implement solutions to the same barriers at each level of government. Premier Wynne's treatment of this issue is hard to square with her written pledge in her May 16, 2014 letter to us during last spring's Ontario election, as follows:"Ensuring the proper accessibility of the provincial and municipal elections falls in line is a top priority for us to safeguard the interests of Ontarians with disabilities through ease of access to the provincial and municipal elections as does every citizen of Ontario. We will ensure that the Ministry of the Attorney General, Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing and Elections Ontario are committed to providing the best possible services to ensure accessible elections.""Since the 2014 election, neither the Ministry of the Attorney General nor the Ministry of Municipal Affairs ever reached out to the AODA Alliance to discuss taking action on accessible municipal or provincial elections. Both ministries are well aware of the AODA Alliance and its long leading role in advocacy on this issue. Neither, to our knowledge, brought forward any legislation on this issue. From their perspectives, it has entirely been up to Elections Ontario at the provincial level and each municipality at the municipal level to re-invent the voting accessibility wheel, one at a time.In the meantime, the 2018 election gave proof positive that Elections Ontario has not solved the accessible voting issue. It continues to use the same so-called "accessible voting machine" that it used in the past elections dating back to 2011. It did so despite reports of problems with that machine for some voters with disabilities.In the 2018 election, AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky went public with a deeply troubling violation by Elections Ontario of his voting privacy. The June 1, 2018 AODA Alliance news release bore this headline:"Blind Disability Rights Advocate Has His Right to Mark His Ballot in Private Violated at His Riding's Returning Office - Elections Ontario Again Fails to Ensure Accessible, Private Voting for All Voters with Disabilities."That news release set out the following statement by AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky --- a statement whose accuracy Elections Ontario has not contested:""The fundamental democratic right that is in issue is the right to independently and privately mark my own ballot, and then to be able to myself verify my choice, before I cast my ballot. Two hours ago, on June 1, 2018, just after 4 pm, I went to vote at the Returning Office in my riding, Eglinton Lawrence. I encountered the following inexcusable three disability barriers in the voting process. Elections Ontario is fully and solely responsible for these barriers.On arriving, my wife (who is sighted) and I lined up to begin the process for each of us to vote. The pleasant gentleman who served us at the sign-in desk told us that we each had to sign a statement. I then ran into the first of the three barriers I was to face.I asked if the affirmation document was available in Braille. The officials behind the desk said that it was not. We were told that a Braille document was available for the ballot, but not for this statement that I must sign. My wife read it to me. It was an affirmation that I am entitled to vote now e.g. affirming that I have not previously voted in this election. There is no good reason in 2018 why Elections Ontario does not have such a mandatory document in alternative accessible formats like Braille. This raises serious issues under the Ontario Human Rights Code and the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act. I was told about options for me to vote. It was obvious that I am blind. I carry a white cane. I was told about the accessible voting machine. I am very familiar with this kind of technology. I have used it in the 2011 and 2014 Ontario elections. In the past two elections, the voting machine that was provided at a returning office let me put on headphones and hear instructions. By pressing a series of buttons, I was told of my choices of candidate. I could mark it and confirm my choice. The ballot was printed. In the 2011 and 2014 elections, I was then afforded a chance to myself verify that the ballot was marked as I wished. The ballot was scanned by a machine, and the machine told me for whom I had voted. I could then have the ballot confirmed, so I could cast it.When voting today, the machine verbally gave me my voting choices over headphones. I selected my candidate of choice, and confirmed it. If memory serves, it did not give me the option of spoiling my ballot. The machine then printed my ballot. I then encountered the second barrier I was to face. Neither the machine nor the Elections Ontario poll official who stood there to assist me throughout had told me that there was any option to use the machine to verify my choice of candidate on the ballot. I knew there had been such an option in the 2011 and 2014 elections.I asked the official (who was very pleasant and clearly was trying to do a good job) if there is an option to verify my choice. He told me there was. Then I encountered the third, and clearly the most intrusive barrier. My ballot came out of the voting machine. I heard the poll worker go over to the machine and do something. He then told me my ballot had fallen to the floor. I was shocked. I asked if he saw whom I had voted for. He said he had seen whom I voted for. His tone of voice was anxious. He obviously understood that he is not supposed to see the candidate for whom I voted. I am not suggesting in any way that he was trying to intentionally get a look at my choice of candidate.I was very upset, but made a real effort to keep my voice calm. He then had to feed the ballot back into a machine to verify my choice. I do not know if it was the same machine or a different one. I put on the headphones. The instructions came on and guided me through the steps so I could have the ballot scanned. It scanned the ballot and told me over the headphones which candidate had been marked. It had indeed been marked as I had chosen.The polling official then took the ballot away to do whatever they do to submit it. I have no idea what exactly he did with the ballot from the moment it came out of that machine until it was deposited wherever ballots eventually go to be tabulated. I do not know if my choice of candidate was exposed to public view at any time during that process. Elections Ontario appears to expect me to simply take it on faith that my privacy won't be violated.I am very upset that my fundamental right to privacy in the voting process has been violated. No one should know for whom I voted. The whole purpose for this technology was to enable me to independently mark my ballot in private and to verify my choice. I don't believe that voters who have no disabilities would be expected to tolerate such intrusions and risks. It is absurd that this remains a problem in Ontario in the year 2018. That Elections Ontario cannot get this right eight years after the Ontario Legislature passed amendments to ensure the accessibility of the vote for voters with disabilities shows a serious failure on its part. This is made worse by Elections Ontario's inflexible multi-year opposition to other new accessible voting options, like telephone voting, and Elections Ontario's failure to come up with any other more effective alternatives.I certainly don't want Elections Ontario taking this incident out on that poll worker. Responsibility for this systemic problem lies with the leadership at Elections Ontario that has failed to find a more reliable solution for voters with disabilities, and that has not treated accessibility for voters with disabilities as a sufficient priority.That this incident was inadvertent does not excuse it. Voters with disabilities and all voters deserve to know what Elections Ontario will now do to ensure that such incidents will never happen again." Elections Ontario subsequently apologized to David Lepofsky for this incident. Elections Ontario has not disputed that this incident occurred as he described it.The AODA Alliance also forwarded to Elections Ontario a number of complaints about accessibility problems that other voters with disabilities had sent to the AODA Alliance over the last days of the election, with the permission of the people who sent us those complaints. Elections Ontario agreed that it would investigate those incidents. A June 6, 2018 article by Canadian Press included serious voting accessibility issues. It included:"Some voters report issues with accessible voting machines in OntarioTim Nolan, who is legally blind, and his wife, Kim Nolan, who requires the use of a wheelchair, are photographed together in Hamilton, on Wednesday, June 6, 2018. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Peter Power)Michelle McQuigge, The Canadian Press Published Wednesday, June 6, 2018 3:28PM EDT TORONTO -- As Ontario gets set to elect a new government, some disabled voters say accommodations put in place to allow them to cast their ballots independently and privately are not working as intended.People with visual, mobility and hearing impairments in at least five different ridings said they had issues with Elections Ontario's accessibility measures at returning offices, where they can vote until 6 p.m. Wednesday.They say elections workers were helpful and respectful, but not always trained on accessible voting options and sometimes did not offer them or didn't readily know how to make them available.In some cases, they also say accessible voting machines designed to help them vote did not work as advertised and they were unable to keep their ballots private.Elections Ontario is apologizing to anyone who encountered a systemic barrier while voting and urges anyone affected to share their experience so improvements can be made.Spokeswoman Jessica Pellerin says Elections Ontario has taken steps to improve accessibility since accessible voting machines first became available in 2011, and now also pays for deaf or hard-of-hearing voters to have a sign language interpreter. Home visits can also be arranged for those who cannot get to the polls.Tim Nolan, who is legally blind, wasn't aware of the accessible voting machines or offered an opportunity to use them. He said the issues experienced by some disabled voters show they cannot count on the same access to secure, independent voting their able-bodied peers enjoy."That's the gap in the whole democratic system," he said. "While everybody else who doesn't have a disability has both the right and privilege, persons with disabilities do not get the privilege."Accessible voting machines are located at each returning office, plus 51 satellite offices until the day before the election, but will not be available at polling stations on election day. Elections Ontario says other forms of accommodations will be available at general polling stations, such as paper templates to guide visually impaired voters in casting ballots.The province's 175 accessible voting machines use three distinct interfaces.An audio tactile controller helps visually impaired voters by reading the names of candidates aloud and permitting voters to press buttons to make selections. Voters with mobility limitations can use paddles they manipulate with hands, feet or elbows, or use a sip-and-puff interface that sends signals when a voter inhales or exhales through a straw.Nolan and his wife Kim, who has multiple sclerosis and uses a wheelchair, said they had to rely on assistance from election workers to vote.Nolan said an employee read him the list of candidates and helped insert his ballot in a paper template containing holes where voters mark their choices. He said he made his selection by memorizing the candidate list, then counting down the appropriate number of lines and marking an X, adding that the elections worker ultimately saw his ballot. His wife said she verbally communicated her choice to a staff member.One wheelchair user in the Greater Toronto Area said neither the paddle nor the sip-and-puff interface were working when she went to vote, adding she had a companion input her choices for her using the audio tactile option. She said staff did their best to address problems, but said they told her they only received a brief demonstration of how the machine worked.Pellerin said Elections Ontario has a 30-minute video on assistive voting technology and requires a designated staff person from the 124 returning offices to attend a mandatory training session. That person then schedules training with their staff and keeps a manual on hand for reference.Elections Ontario wants to hear from those who encountered issues, Pellerin said."The integrity and accessibility of the voting process is very important," she said. "We welcome any and all feedback that electors are able to provide, as this does inform how we either maintain or change our processes."David Lepofsky reached out after voting in Toronto and encountering problems.The totally blind disability rights advocate said his polling station didn't have braille versions of some forms he was asked to sign and said there were problems verifying the accuracy of his ballot before it was cast. While he was ultimately able to complete this step, he said he knows of other instances where blind voters had to cast votes without being able to check their ballot was marked properly.In North Bay, Ont., Penny Leclair, who is deaf-blind and uses a hearing implant, said she tried unsuccessfully to use the audio-tactile interface.She said brief blocks of text read out by the machines do not allow users like her enough time to position headphones appropriately and make adjustments to reading speed and volume levels. She called on Elections Ontario to implement an option that would see machines read out an uninterrupted block of text that deaf people could use as a test before beginning the voting process."Over the years we've advocated for independent voting," Leclair said of the disabled community. "We still don't have it completely.""The June 8, 2018 Kingston Whig Standard included this article:"Kingston Whig-Standard June 8, 2018Originally posted at: Accessibility issues persist at polls Nick PearceFor The Whig-StandardThe Returning Office in the old Sears store on Gardners Road is the only voting centre in Kingston that is offering assistive voting technology, from May 26, 2018 until June 6, 2018. Julia McKay/The Whig-Standard/Postmedia NetworkSteve Cutway is totally blind and unsurprised.Four years ago, he told the Whig-Standard about his challenges voting in the last provincial election. The accessible voting machine was difficult to use and he said he received little help from staff as he attempted to cast his ballot. Eventually, his wife marked it for him.He complained to Elections Ontario and received an apology promising to better train staff in the future.Four years later, he says his experience was similar enough that story could be reprinted today."The process took an hour," he said. "And it took an hour in 2014."On Monday, he walked into the riding's returning office in the old Sears store in the Cataraqui Centre. When he asked for assistive voting technology, the Elections Ontario staff weren't sure -- only one locally trained staff member was trained with the equipment and that person was off sick.The voting machine's audio instructions were equally difficult for Cutway."They kept referring to coloured buttons and although each button had a braille label, they weren't mentioned," he said. "I raised that concern in 2014. Like everything else, it appears to have fallen on deaf ears."Afterward, they had to confirm with Cutway's wife that the information had printed correctly.When asked for comment, Jessica Pellerin, an Elections Ontario communications officer, stated that all staff members are trained to offer the appropriate amount of support to voters."Our mission at Elections Ontario includes upholding the integrity and accessibility of the electoral process. To this end, we educate all of our staff on respect in the workplace and how to provide all electors with appropriate support and assistance in the process of voting," she wrote over email.However, Cutway said the staff's "lack of knowledge was more than a little concerning," despite being friendly overall. To be fair, he added, they also informed him he was the first voter to request the assistive voting machine at the office.According to him, this leads to another question of how aware people living with disabilities are of assistive voting methods."Either the message isn't getting out or it means it's just too hard "? for people to find their way to the [office]," he said about the lack of assistive voting traffic the office saw.On top of that, Elections Ontario doesn't offer assistive voting technology on polling day and it's only held at one place -- the returning office. If a voter who needs the technology wants to wait until the last day or can't make it to the office, it's not officially accessible.Elections Ontario didn't comment on why the technology isn't offered on election day, instead directing the Whig-Standard to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario.After voting, Cutway debated contacting David Lepofsky, chair of Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance, like he did in 2014. Lepofsky is a lawyer and disability advocate who Elections Ontario also assured would see better disability training after the last provincial election.But Cutway thought, "Ah, what the hell. It's just the same old, same old."Lepofsky feels similar annoyance."It is enormously frustrating," Lepofsky said. "There is a real sense that Elections Ontario is not doing their job properly."Lepofsky had his own issues at the polls, including an Elections Ontario staff member seeing his filled ballot when it was dropped to the ground."My right to a private ballot -- to a secret ballot -- was violated by Elections Ontario the day I voted," he said about the divulged voting information. As a caveat, he added that the staff member didn't intend to see Lepofsky's choice.Lepofsky hopes these issues will be resolved through telephone or internet voting, but the proposals have gained limited transaction.For one, Elections Ontario says it hasn't found online or telephone voting technology that would protect the integrity of an anonymous voting systems.In June 2013, it released a report on telephone or internet voting and concluded more research was needed. According to Lepofsky, 44 municipalities were using these alternative methods by that date.Elections Ontario still hasn't pursued the alternative voting methods since the report.For Karoline Bourdeau, the lack of an alternative feels unfair.When she went to the polls with her husband and guide dog in tow, the two staff at the table were surprised she wanted an assistive voting machine and assumed she wanted braille.She waited for 20 minutes as the staff "fiddled" and set up the machine. Bourdeau said her experience with the technology was fine beyond the wait."I don't think anyone else has to wait that long to vote," she said. "It should be done with the same amount of time and speed and convenience as everyone else."I shouldn't have to look around for the machine to do that when my husband can just go up to them with a piece of paper.""6. Developments Since the June 2018 Ontario ElectionIn the 2010 spring, when the former Ontario Government brought Bill 231 before the Legislature to modernize Ontario elections, the Conservative opposition moved various amendments at the AODA Alliance's request to strengthen that bill. The former Ontario Government voted down those amendments.In his May 15, 2018 letter to the AODA Alliance setting out his party's 2018 election pledges on accessibility, Doug Ford wrote:"There’s no good reason why a person with a disability should not be able to cast a vote in an election."The AODA Alliance's July 19, 2018letter to Premier Ford, listing proposed accessibility priorities for him as premier, included:"V. Introduce an Omnibus Bill to Reform Provincial and Municipal Election Legislation to Remove the Accessibility Barriers Facing Voters and Candidates with DisabilitiesVoters with disabilities in provincial and municipal elections in Ontario continue to face too many barriers. In your May 15, 2018 letter to the AODA Alliance, setting out your party's election promises on accessibility, it was great that you said:"There's no good reason why a person with a disability should not be able to cast a vote in an election."We agree. Yet even in 2018, the same disability barriers persist in both provincial and municipal elections. The solutions are the same. It is far more efficient to introduce an omnibus bill to tackle all these barriers at the same time. We recommend that you:8. Direct the Attorney General and Municipal Affairs Minister to prepare and introduce an omnibus bill to address barriers impeding voters and candidates with disabilities in provincial and municipal elections, after designating one of those ministers with responsibility to lead this project."Premier Ford's July 31, 2018 response to the AODA Alliance in substance referred us to the Minister for Accessibility and Seniors. Yet the Minister for Accessibility and Seniors has no authority to assign this to other ministers. The August 15, 2018 letter from Minister for Accessibility and Seniors Cho to us did not specifically address this issue.Since then, The Ford Government has not announced any actions or plans on this issue.Chapter 10 Ontario Government - Leading by Example, But by What Example is it Leading?1. Introduction Every party in power since Ontario's grass roots accessibility campaign began in 1994 has said that the Government of Ontario would lead by example, when it comes to accessibility for people with disabilities. By what kind of example has the Ontario Government been leading? Too often, it has led by a poor example.This chapter serves as an addendum to Part 10 of our June 30, 2014 brief to Mayo Moran, which began as follows:"For Ontario to reach full accessibility by 2025, it is important for the Ontario Government to lead on accessibility by example. The Ontario Public Service is by far Ontario's largest employer and provider of services to the public. Other obligated organizations will look to see how seriously the Government takes the AODA. If the Government does not take its AODA duties seriously, obligated organizations will be incentivized to think that they can and should do the same. Moreover, if the Government does not hold itself to full and strict compliance with the AODA, obligated organization won't expect the Government to expect any more of them."Part 10 of our brief to Mayo Moran revealed however that far too often, the Ontario Government was leading by a poor example. This included:* Failing to put in place an effective front-line internal system within the Government for embedding accessibility across the Ontario Public Service.* Examples of the Ontario Government violating or attempting to violate its own disability accessibility laws.* More recent Government initiatives before the final report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review to improve its implementation of the AODA did not make a significant difference. * The Government's failing to consistently provide a simple, cost-free accommodation - the case study of Government documents in PDF format.The 2014 Mayo Moran Report in substance agreed that improvement was needed. Sadly however, the former Ontario Government did little that was at all effective at changing this since June 2014. As such, strong action is needed now, more than ever. 2. Recommended Findings We urge this AODA Independent Review to find as follows:* The Ontario Government and Ontario Public Service has not led and is now not leading by a good example, in the area of accessibility. That is not to say it has done nothing on accessibility. Rather it has done far too little, and has not lived up to its stated intention to lead Ontario by example. * The former Government did not keep Premier Wynne's commitment to instruct all ministers on their accessibility commitments. This contributed to slower progress on accessibility.* The fact that the new Ontario Government has not made its Mandate Letters public makes it impossible for the public, including people with disabilities, to know what the Premier has instructed his ministers to do on accessibility for people with disabilities.* The transfer from 2013 to 2016 of the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario to the Ministry of Economic Development was well-intentioned and held great promise. However it turned out to be a failure. * It is important for the Ontario Government to have a full-time Minister of Accessibility, to lead the AODA's implementation. It was inappropriate for the former Ontario Government to assign to the same minister both the responsibility as Minister for Accessibility and the conflicting role of Minister of Government Services.* There is a pressing need for the Ontario Government to re-engineered the way the Government delivers and oversees the delivery of accessibility within the Ontario Public Service, as an employer and service-provider.* The Ontario Government's efforts at becoming an accessible employer and service-provider were slowed and hampered by virtue of the fact that the Government has no Chief Accessibility Officer, at the level of a deputy minister or associate deputy minister, with lead responsibility and authority for ensuring that the Ontario Public Service becomes accessible as an employer and service-provider.* The Ontario Government missed an extraordinary opportunity to achieve advances on accessibility in the tourism and hospitality sector, when Ontario hosted the 2015 Toronto Pan/Parapan American Games. Despite our repeated efforts over two years, the former Ontario Government did not undertake a strategy to use the Games to leverage an increase of accessibility in the tourism and hospitality sector, such as in hotels, restaurants and tourism sites.* The Minister of International Trade did not incorporate disability accessibility as a prominent part of the International Trade Ministry's strategy for economic development and innovation.* The Minister of Research and Innovation did not ensure disability accessibility is a key focus of research and innovation programs and projects that the Government operates or finances.3. Recommendations on the Ontario Government Leading By Example on Accessibility The Government should designate a single minister to be responsible for ensuring that the Ontario Public Service becomes a fully accessible employer and service provider, and to ensure that the Government keeps all its accessibility commitments and duties, other than those for which the Minister for Accessibility and Seniors is responsible. The Government should establish a full-time Deputy Minister or associate deputy minister responsible for ensuring the accessibility of the Ontario Government's services, facilities and workplaces, to be called the Chief Accessibility Officer.The Premier should include in the mandate letter that his office issues to each cabinet minister, specific directions to fulfil the Government's commitments and duties on disability accessibility which fall in whole or in part in that ministry's purview. The Premier's instructions to cabinet ministers on accessibility should be made public.The Premier's office should direct the Secretary of Cabinet to ensure that the Government's disability accessibility commitments and duties are kept, and direct the Secretary to Cabinet to take all needed steps to implement them.The Government should announce and implement a plan to re-engineer how the Ontario Public Service discharges its duty to ensure that its own services, facilities and workplaces are fully accessible. The Government should ensure that there remains an Accessibility Lead position in each ministry, and should ensure that it is or becomes a full time position, which reports directly to the deputy minister of that minister, with an option for a dual report as well to the ministry's Chief Administrative Officer.The Government should promptly implement and widely publicize within the Ontario Public Service a comprehensive permanent periodic program for auditing and monitoring its workplaces and public services and facilities for disability accessibility and barriers. This program should include, among other things, on-site audits and inspections, and not merely paper trail audits. The results of this monitoring should annually be made public. The Government should promptly implement a constructive program for ensuring accountability of public servants in the Ontario Public Service for efforts on disability accessibility. Among other things, the Ontario Public Service should require that every employee include in his or her annual performance review, performance goals on disability accessibility within the scope of their duties. Performance on this criterion should be assessed for performance, pay and promotion decisions. The Government should not solely or predominantly rely on on-line programs to train the Ontario Public Service on accessibility. It should implement live, interactive programming where possible that involves face-to-face interaction with persons with disabilities.The Minister responsible for International Trade should incorporate disability accessibility as a prominent part of Ontario's international trade strategy for economic development and innovation.The Minister who is responsible for research and innovation should ensure disability accessibility is a key focus of research and innovation programs and projects that the Government operates or finances.4. What the 2014 report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review Said The final report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review included, among other things:* "ACCESSIBILITY WITHIN GOVERNMENTOne of the prominent themes that emerged from the consultations was the belief of the disability community that the Government of Ontario has not succeeded in embedding accessibility into its internal operations. Stakeholders urged the appointment of a single minister - and a full-time deputy minister - to be responsible for ensuring that the Ontario Public Service (OPS) becomes a fully accessible employer and service provider. This new Cabinet post would focus on internal government operations, while the MEDEI minister would remain responsible for the development and enforcement of accessibility standards. To an extent, this thinking echoes the recommendation in the Beer Report to elevate the role of the assistant deputy minister in the ADO to the rank of deputy minister to lead a change management strategy within government. Many believe that there is an important opportunity for the Government to be seen as an accessibility champion, setting an example for other organizations. The disability community believes that the Government of Ontario has not succeeded in embedding accessibility into its internal operations.A particular concern with the Government, the Review heard, arose where public funds were actually used to create new barriers. Examples given include the Presto smart card, where the cash balance is shown on a screen that cannot be read by people with vision loss or dyslexia; and the absence of accessibility requirements for information technology and electronic kiosks in the Government's 10-Year Infrastructure Plan. These cases sparked some groups to recommend a comprehensive strategy to ensure public money is never used to create, maintain or worsen barriers against people with disabilities. It was also suggested that establishing compliance with the Human Rights Code, as well as the AODA, should be a precondition to obtaining public funds through procurement, grants or loans. Disability stakeholders welcomed the merger of Infrastructure with the Ministry of Economic Development, Trade and Employment to the form the new Ministry of Economic Development, Employment and Infrastructure. This is seen as an opportunity to kick-start the effort to insert accessibility criteria into capital and infrastructure spending. People with disabilities also expressed the hope that accessibility should become part of the Government's DNA. It was suggested that the Premier's Office should direct the Secretary of Cabinet - the head of the public service - to take all steps necessary to keep the Government's accessibility commitments. This goal could be furthered, the Review was told, by ensuring that all forthcoming legislation, regulation and policies undergo analysis through a disability lens to confirm no new barriers are being created or maintained. The accessibility of OPS workplaces, facilities and services should be monitored through on-site audits and inspections. As well, obligated organizations stressed that ministries should coordinate their efforts and align, support and fund accessibility priorities across the various public sectors. A further concern involving the Government of Ontario itself was the slow pace of the Government's promised review of provincial laws and regulations to identify and then remove accessibility barriers. Premier McGuinty promised this review during the 2007 election campaign and reiterated the commitment during the 2011 campaign. In 2013 the Government stated that, by the end of 2014, 13 ministries will have reviewed 51 statutes and considered steps to remove any barriers identified. Disability stakeholders pointed out that this leaves about 700 other statutes, as well as 1,500 regulations, still to be examined. The Government was urged to complete the review of all legislation by 2015, and all regulations by 2016.The upcoming Pan Am/Parapan Am Games were repeatedly cited as an opportunity for the Province of Ontario to show leadership and move accessibility forward. Participants in the consultations stressed that the Government should ensure that all venues for Games-related activities are fully accessible. In addition, it was suggested that the Government should prepare a comprehensive plan to ensure the Games leave a legacy of accessibility, such as accessible housing units and investment in Ontario's parasports system.People with disabilities expressed the hope that accessibility would become part of the Government's DNA.The Review also heard calls for Ontario to press the federal government to do more on accessibility. The suggestion was that a national strategy could help raise the profile of the issue. Moreover, with other provinces bringing in their own accessibility measures, the lack of nationwide harmonization is emerging as a concern for businesses operating in more than one jurisdiction. As well, it should be remarked that people with disabilities emphasized that their criticism of the Government was not a reflection on the dedicated public servants who are working hard to improve accessibility despite the lack of leadership. Indeed, many voiced appreciation for the individuals involved and their commitment. The target of the criticism was higher up, the Review was told, aiming at the leadership and hoping to "put wind at their backs", as one stakeholder put it."* "Renewing Government LeadershipClosely related to the themes of enforcement, compliance support and OPS accessibility that emerged during the consultations, was the refrain of the need to revive government leadership. Participants often mentioned the recommendation in the Beer Report for the Government to revitalize the implementation of the AODA. Mr. Beer urged the Government to “breathe new life” into the AODA by building momentum for change internally, across the obligated sectors and among the public at large. However, the general impression conveyed to the Review is that, despite the progress that has been made and the considerable learning that has taken place, the momentum seems to have stalled. The overall perception is that the pace of change is extremely slow and much remains to be done to achieve the goals under the AODA. In the words of a participant in an online session, “We need to get the momentum started again so that accessibility will go forward until 2025 and onward from there”.A number of reasons were cited to explain why AODA implementation has not delivered the expected results. Among these, commentators from all sectors stressed the lack of awareness of the legislation and the lack of enforcement – the result, some said, of an absence of government leadership. The Government was also said to be neglecting its responsibilities to get its own house in order and to develop all standards necessary to reach an accessible Ontario. To reassert provincial leadership, disability stakeholders called on the Government to establish a three-year action plan describing the steps it will take, with timelines, to ensure Ontario becomes fully accessible by 2025. “We need to get the momentum started again so that accessibility will go forward until 2025 and onward from there”. – A participant in an online sessionOn the positive side, stakeholders from both obligated sectors and the disability community generally applauded the move of the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario to the Ministry of Economic Development, Trade and Employment (now the Ministry of Economic Development, Employment and Infrastructure). The ministry that deals with business and industry seems a logical home for efforts to bring the private sector on side with accessibility. The move fits in with the message that accessibility makes good business sense and generates economic benefits. The Ministry’s employment mandate was also welcome, as a recent survey showed that employment is the most important issue for people with disabilities. On the other hand, some felt the Ministry was moving too slowly on its promised strategy to increase private sector employment of people with disabilities."* "Before I begin outlining my recommendations, I would like to offer some overarching observations. As noted earlier in the Report, the commitment to accessibility is strong and a sense of the importance of building an inclusive Ontario is widely shared. The foundations that underlie the AODA are therefore extremely solid. At the same time, given the timing of this Review halfway through the implementation period for the AODA, the slow and challenging implementation to date, the imminent Pan Am/Parapan Am Games and new government leadership, this is an extremely key opportunity for Ontario to show a strong commitment to accessibility."* "Recommendation 1: Renew Government Leadership. The philosophy of the AODA is that the Government of Ontario leads the way. This is why the Government itself is the first to come under most of the various obligations. In addition to having the practical benefit of enabling the sharing of information, learning and best practices from government, this leadership also has a moral dimension. I must repeat, as Charles Beer said, that re-establishing the leadership and the commitment of the Government of Ontario to accessibility is critical to the momentum of the AODA. Ontario has the potential to be a leader in this regard but, in order to do so, it must firmly establish accessibility as a government-wide priority. With a new government in place, an extraordinary opportunity exists to renew the momentum behind the AODA.Strong central leadership is critical for a variety of reasons. It would drive accessibility across the range of government programs, services, facilities and workplaces. It would sustain and facilitate initiatives involving different ministries like joint inspections and joint analysis of where new standards are necessary. Similarly, a central commitment and focus on accessibility should also lead to greater linkages to capital and other spending decisions to ensure accessibility objectives are addressed, as well as to the review of proposed policies and legislation through an accessibility lens. It is up to the Premier to ensure that the administrative structure is put in place to make all of this happen. One does not have to be an organizational design expert to see that nothing gets done in government unless someone is held accountable for results. I therefore recommend that the Premier formally charge the Minister of Government and Consumer Services with responsibility for ensuring that the Ontario Public Service becomes a fully accessible employer and service provider. An associate deputy minister position could be created to support the Minister in this role. Of course, the Minister of Economic Development, Employment and Infrastructure would remain responsible for the administration of the AODA, including the development and enforcement of standards. Following another of Charles Beer’s recommendations, I believe the Minister of Economic Development, Employment and Infrastructure should be given the additional title of Minister Responsible for Accessibility and use it when performing his accessibility-related duties. This would help to raise the public profile of the AODA. The Government recently took a major step to enhance its leadership on accessibility when it appointed David C. Onley, Ontario’s 28th Lieutenant Governor – who made accessibility the theme of his term – as a Special Advisor to champion accessibility in Ontario. To support this appointment and the efforts to make the Government itself a leader in accessibility, the Premier should explicitly and prominently direct all ministries to treat accessibility as a key government-wide priority. With strong government leadership by example and a renewed commitment to progress, Ontario can lead the way in creating an inclusive society." 5. Action by the Former Ontario Government since 2014a) The Need for Strong Leadership from the Premier of OntarioAs Mayo Moran's report correctly recognized, if Ontario is to lead the public and private sectors by example on accessibility, this needs to start with leadership from the top. As noted earlier in this chapter, the 2014 report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review both recognized the pressing need for new leadership on accessibility from Ontario's premier, then Kathleen Wynne. We regret that after the Mayo Moran report, this needed renewed leadership was not forthcoming. This is not to state or imply that Premier Wynne did not care about accessibility for people with disabilities. Rather it is to indicate that her personal commitment to it was not sufficiently translated into the strong action that was needed.We became aware over the 2000s that a key way a premier can show needed leadership on accessibility was by ensuring that his or her ministers are all given clear directions on the actions that the premier wants them to take on accessibility. Every premier sends each minister a Mandate Letter. The Mandate Letter is where the premier identifies the priorities for action for that minister. The public is given to understand that these Mandate Letters lead to ministers being held accountable from the top. As well, Ontario Public Service officials have told us that the Mandate Letter is where election promises are turned into actual directions to a minister and ministry. Until the premier gives such directions to a ministry, e.g. in a Mandate Letter, the Ontario Public Service can treat an election pledge as political rhetoric, not an actual Government policy. We cannot attest to whether that is always the case. However, we have been very concerned that this is so, in the case of disability accessibility.For that reason, in the 2014 Ontario election, we sought specific election pledges in this area of all the party leaders. Our March 3, 2014 letter to the party leaders asked them to commit to:"ensure that the Premier and Premier's Office promptly directs the appropriate cabinet ministers and senior public officials to implement the Government's accessibility obligations and commitments, and to make this direction public, once given." In response, Premier Wynne commendably made a specific election promise to this effect. In her May 14, 2014 letter to the AODA Alliance, setting out her party's 2014 election pledges on accessibility, she wrote:"15. If we win the honour of re-election, our government will continue to implement our accessibility obligations and commitments. This includes directing Cabinet Ministers and senior public officials to implement accessibility obligations and commitments."The former Government broke that promise. Premier Wynne commendably made public her 2014 and 2016 Mandate Letters to her ministers. When Premier Wynne made her September 2014 Mandate Letters to each minister public, we studied them, to see if Premier Wynne had kept her word. We issued a news release and detailed analysis to support it. Our October 7, 2014 news release stated in part:"Premier Kathleen Wynne has failed to keep an important 2014 election written promise to 1.8 million Ontarians with disabilities, according to the AODA Alliance, a widely-recognized non-partisan disability coalition that leads the campaign for a fully accessible Ontario for over 1.8 million Ontarians with disabilities. When she wrote each cabinet minister a “Mandate Letter on September 25, 2014,” giving marching orders on their action priorities, her instructions systematically leave out many if not most Government promises on disability accessibility.“Premier Wynne made her Mandate Letters public for the first time in history due to her promise to make Ontario the most open government in Canada. She has revealed a clear implicit message to her Cabinet that disability accessibility is miles from the top priority that the Wynne Government has claimed it would be,” said David Lepofsky, chair of the non-partisan AODA Alliance, the very coalition to which the Ontario Liberal Government has made its disability accessibility pledges in the last three elections. "This tells us that the Government makes big election promises to Ontarians with disabilities, but then largely sets them aside once all votes are counted. People with disabilities deserve better than systematic second-class treatment.”The AODA Alliance calls on Premier Wynne to now keep her word. It asks her to issue and make public letters to her Cabinet, giving specific assignments to ensure that the Government’s disability accessibility duties and promises are all kept. These directions should stand on the same footing as the September 25, 2014 Mandate Letters that the Premier sent to each Minister."Our 32 page October 7, 2014 analysis of Premier Wynne's 2014 Mandate Letters to her ministers was entitled: "A Premier's Promise to Ontarians with Disabilities Not Kept - A Disability Accessibility Analysis of Premier Wynne's September 25, 2014 "Mandate Letters" to Each Ontario Cabinet Minister". It included this overview:"1. The Frustrating Problem Facing Ontarians with Disabilities For years, Ontarians with disabilities, numbering over 1.8 million, have faced enormously frustrating problems with the Ontario Government, especially since 2005. It has often been very difficult getting the Government to consistently and reliably keep its commitments to us and its legal responsibilities on disability accessibility. Some of the Government's duties and commitments on disability accessibility have been commendably honoured, and in a timely fashion. Yet far too many have not been kept at all, even years after they were made. For others, action on them has been hugely delayed. Especially since 2011, we have had to fight battle after battle to secure any progress. This is documented in exquisite detail in the AODA Alliance's 368-page June 30, 2014 Brief to the Independent Review of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, which the Government appointed University of Toronto Dean Mayo Moran to conduct. ……As our brief to the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review shows, we have been concerned for years that Ontario's Premier has not consistently directed his or her Cabinet Ministers to keep all the Government's promises on disability accessibility. If this direction is not given, there is a high risk that Cabinet Ministers will not keep those promises. They will get busy with other priorities that they consider more pressing……3. Promise Not Kept – The Premier’s September 25, 2014 "Mandate Letters to Each Ontario Cabinet MinisterOn September 25, 2014, Premier Wynne sent a "Mandate Letter" to each Minister in her Cabinet. In a Mandate Letter the Premier instructs a Cabinet Minister on which actions and issues are priorities for that Minister. The Mandate Letter is the top marching orders for that Minister and his or her Ministry. A busy Minister and Ministry can easily become absorbed in and distracted by a blizzard of tasks and issues. The Mandate Letter lets them know what issues and action must secure their top attention.The Premier's September 25, 2014 Mandate Letters, taken together, fill fully 100 pages of text. …It is commendable that for the first time, Premier Wynne made these newest September 25, 2014 Mandate Letters public. This lets one and all see what the Government plans to do. These Mandate Letters are chock full of detailed specifics, not mere vague platitudes. Taken together, they reveal the Government's core agenda for the next months, if not years. To assist the Government, we recently wrote the Premier and ten Cabinet Ministers in charge of the key Ministries responsible for the Government's duties and promises on disability accessibility. For each of them, we set out a manageable clear list of priority actions for them on disability accessibility. We tried wherever possible to link these specific priorities to the requirements in the AODA, and to Government disability accessibility promises. We sent copies of these letters to Premier Wynne, so she would have the full picture. Links to each of these letters are set out at the end of this Analysis. These letters were intended to help Premier Wynne formulate her Mandate Letters. Premier Wynne's Government has said over and over that disability accessibility is a "top priority" for it. For example, her lead Minister responsible for implementing and enforcing the AODA solemnly declared this in the Ontario Legislature on May 28, 2013, to honour National Access Awareness Week. … This makes it especially important to take a close look at Premier Wynne's September 25, 2014 Mandate Letters to her Cabinet Ministers. Here is what we found:a) Premier’s Mandate Letters Systematically Leave out Many if not Most of the Government's Disability Accessibility Duties and Promises As detailed below letter-by-letter, Premier Wynne's Mandate Letter to each Cabinet Minister, systematically leave out many if not most of the Government’s duties and pledges on disability accessibility. The most substantive directions on point she gives are to the Minister of Economic Development, Employment and Infrastructure regarding the development of new accessibility standards under the AODA (addressed further below), and her direction to the Minister Responsible for the 2015 Toronto Pan/ParaPan American Games to develop a plan for a legacy of increased accessible tourism services after the 2015 Games. There is nothing in these Mandate Letters about enforcement of the AODA, or to ensure that new physical or information technology infrastructure is accessible, or to ensure that public money is never used to create or perpetuate barriers against people with disabilities. There is nothing in the Mandate Letters to re-engineer the Ontario Public Service's approach to disability accessibility, to ensure that it becomes an accessible employer and service provider. In one especially vexing instance, the Premier’s Mandate Letter explicitly diluted a key promise that she made to Ontarians with disabilities a mere four months earlier, during the 2014 election campaign. As detailed further below, in the 2014 election campaign, Premier Wynne wrote us to promise that her Government would develop accessibility standards to address barriers in education and/or health care. Later during the election campaign, speaking for her Government, one of her Cabinet Ministers, Yasir Naqvi, made a stronger commitment on the Government's behalf. He tweeted us that the Government would develop accessibility standards to address barriers in both education and health care. Yet in her September 25, 2014 Mandate Letter to the Minister responsible for developing AODA accessibility standards, Minister of Economic Development, Employment and Infrastructure Brad Duguid, Premier Wynne back-tracked and diluted this. She instructed Minister Duguid to "explore options to develop new accessibility standards in the education or health sector.” We here emphasize her using the word “or,” not “and,” or even “and/or.”If the Premier had only left out 25% of her Government's disability accessibility pledges and duties from these Mandate Letters, this could be written off as a mere oversight. In that case, it might have been justified by virtue of the Government's covering a large majority of them in the Mandate Letters. That is, sadly, not the case here. This omission is systemic and systematic. It results either from a deliberate decision to marginalize promises to Ontarians with disabilities, or a staggering obliviousness to disability accessibility concerns. Either would be very troubling.b) Mandate Letters Systematically Miss Other Excellent Opportunities for the Government to Fulfil its Accessibility Duties and Pledges As is also detailed below letter-by-letter, the Premier has also systematically missed a good number of other opportunities to build accessibility into assignments she gives to her key Cabinet Ministers. For example, the Premier did not direct the Ministers of Education, or of Training, Colleges and Universities, or of Children and Youth Services, to work towards achieving a fully accessible education system in Ontario by 2025 (which the AODA requires). Similarly, the Premier's Mandate Letter to the Minister of Health does not instruct him to set as a priority ensuring that Ontario's health care system becomes fully accessible to people with disabilities by 2025 (a goal which the AODA also requires). As well, the Premier's Mandate Letter to the Minister of Transportation does not direct that Minister to ensure that Ontario's transportation system becomes fully accessible by 2025 (also required by the AODA). These instructions are systematically left out of these Mandate Letters, even though the Premier's Mandate Letters to these Ministers include directions on leadership in the development of Ontario's education system, health care system and transportation system of the future.The Premier's Mandate Letter to the Education Minister issues directions regarding the acquisition of future technology to be used in classrooms across Ontario. Again missing an obvious opportunity for progress on accessibility, that Mandate Letter does not direct the Minister to ensure that this new classroom technology is accessible. Similarly, the Premier's Mandate Letter to the Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities instructs that Minister to treat as a priority the expansion of online learning opportunities. Yet it does not instruct the Minister to ensure that these online learning opportunities are designed to be disability-accessible. These glaring omissions ignore the Government’s 2011 election promise to ensure that future information technology infrastructure is disability-accessible. They also ignore the Government’s 2014 election promise not to use public money to create or perpetuate disability barriers. Capping this off, they ignore the Government's 2011 election promise to make incorporate disability accessibility in vital Government decisions affecting Ontarians. If the Premier does not include these accessibility measures in her Mandate Letters, we cannot assume that Cabinet Ministers will each treat them as priorities. Our past experience shows that we must assume the opposite. As our June 30, 2014 brief to the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review amply shows, the Ontario Government has over and over again failed to show this kind of effective leadership on accessibility, despite promising to lead by example on the issue of disability accessibility. c) A Breath-Taking Double StandardIn these Mandate Letters, over 1.8 million Ontarians with disabilities, and the Government's duties and promises to them on accessibility, are relegated to a cruel second-class posture among Government priorities. The recurring omission or downplaying of the Government's disability accessibility duties and promises stands in marked contrast to the Government's more commendable treatment of other equality-seeking groups in these Mandate Letters. For example, in sharp contrast to the second-class treatment of people with disabilities, in her Mandate Letters the Premier commendably told Minister after Minister that it is a specific priority for them to incorporate the needs and concerns of Ontario's First Nations in important parts of the Minister's and Ministry's work. As well, the Premier commendably directed the Minister Responsible for Women's Issues "to ensure that a gender lens is brought to government strategies, policies and programs."At the Cabinet table, there is a Minister Responsible for Women's Issues, a Minister Responsible for Seniors Affairs, a Minister Responsible for Aboriginal Affairs, a Minister Responsible for Francophone Affairs, and a Minister of Citizenship responsible for needs of newcomers to Ontario. Yet, there is no Minister Responsible for People with Disabilities. For four years, The Government has ignored the recommendation of the 2010 Charles Beer Independent Review of the AODA. It had recommended that such a Minister be designated.The Minister of Economic Development, Employment and Infrastructure is responsible for implementing and enforcing the AODA. However, he is not responsible for overall oversight of disability issues across Government. Moreover, the Premier's specific Mandate Letter to the Minister of Economic Development, Employment and Infrastructure is especially troubling. It assigns so many other massive duties for the Minister and Ministry, while taking an impoverished approach to that Minister’s mandate regarding the AODA. There is now a high risk that our concerns will get far less attention by the Minister and Deputy Minister, whose plates are piled up to overflowing by the Premier's Mandate Letter that to that Minister.In February 2013, we applauded the Premier's decision to move the Accessibility Directorate from the Ministry of Community and Social Services (where it had not properly belonged) to the Ministry of Economic Development, Trade and Employment. To date, that transition has not gone well. It has not served people with disabilities very well. To make matters even more challenging, in the summer 2014 Cabinet shuffle, the Premier has added infrastructure to this Ministry's mandate. It would be great if this led the Government to far more effectively embed accessibility considerations in its infrastructure spending. However, after reading Premier Wynne’s Mandate Letter to that Minister, we now see that there is a much greater likelihood that the Accessibility Directorate and accessibility concerns will be eclipsed and dwarfed in the huge, amalgamated Ministry of Economic Development, Employment and Infrastructure, which Brad Duguid now leads.The Premier's Mandate Letters include a number of helpful measures, as are referred to in our letter-by-letter analysis. We are not saying that the Government is proposing to do nothing for people with disabilities. However, we are deeply concerned that key legal duties and promises to us are being marginalized.d) A Loud, Clear Wrong Message from Ontario's PremierTaken together, these Mandate Letters send a loud, clear message to Ontario's Cabinet Ministers. It is a message which is very harmful and hurtful for Ontarians with disabilities. This message is as follows: the Government's duties and promises to Ontarians with disabilities on accessibility are not a priority for the Government, no matter how many times it has said that accessibility is a top Government priority. Even if a specific Government promise on disability accessibility falls squarely within a Minister's responsibility, it is, for the most part, not a priority for that Minister or for his or her Ministry. The Government will make great pledges to Ontarians with disabilities on accessibility during and between elections. However, when the moment of truth comes -- when the Premier hands out public marching orders to each Cabinet Minister -- these promises are mostly rhetoric for public consumption, rather than plans for actual Government action. The fact that Each Mandate Letter includes a qualification after it lists specific priorities, is no cure for this problem. Each Mandate Letter states near the end:“The above list of priority initiatives is not meant to be exhaustive, as there are many other responsibilities that you and your ministry will need to carry out. To that end, this mandate letter is to be used by your ministry to develop more detailed plans for implementation of the initiatives above, in addition to other initiatives not highlighted in this letter.”This does not solve the problem now facing people with disabilities, thanks to these Mandate Letters. Despite this boilerplate paragraph in each Mandate Letter, each Minister and Ministry will unquestionably dedicate their attention and priority to the measures that each Mandate Letter declares are the Government's "specific priorities." A Minister and Ministry, looking at our letters to them on disability accessibility, will look to see if the Premier's Mandate Letter directs them to take the actions we list. If the Mandate Letter from the Premier does not do so, we can expect a Minister and Ministry not to treat our listed actions as priorities, even if they happen to arise from specific written promises to us from the Government's leadership.We have unfortunate experience with Minister after Minister ducking their disability accessibility duties and the Government’s promises. On December 2, 2011, shortly after the 2011 election, we wrote seven Ontario Cabinet Ministers to identify disability accessibility priorities for them and their Ministries. Each wrote us back over the next weeks. In virtually all responses sent to us, the Ministers ducked or ignored our requests and simply recited their Government’s past record on accessibility. …e) Ontarians with Disabilities Need Action NowThe AODA requires the Ontario Government to lead Ontario to become fully accessible to people with disabilities by 2025. Our June 30, 2014 brief to the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review demonstrates that Ontario now lags behind schedule for full accessibility by 2025. We need the Government to take the actions we identified in writing over the last weeks for the Premier and her Cabinet, to get Ontario back on schedule. Kathleen Wynne promised Ontarians with disabilities in her December 3, 2012 letter to the AODA Alliance that she would ensure that Ontario is on schedule for full accessibility by 2025. We need Premier Wynne to immediately write each Cabinet Minister, to direct them to take the actions we have identified on disability accessibility. She needs to make it clear that these are at least equal in priority to those measures listed in her September 25, 2014 Mandate Letters. It should be made clear that her directions on disability accessibility should not be viewed as any lower in priority by virtue of the fact that they were not included in her September 25, 2014 Mandate Letters. She should immediately make any such letters to her Cabinet Ministers on disability accessibility public. She should post them alongside her September 25, 2014 Mandate Letters. We also need Premier Wynne to take all the 14 other that we asked of her in our September 19, 2014 letter to her. These are set out below. In each of her September 25, 2014 Mandate Letters, Premier Wynne pledges: “We want to be the most open and transparent government in the country." Failure to take the actions we here propose would undermine both that commitment and Premier Wynne's pledge to ensure that Ontario is on schedule for full accessibility by 2025."On further reflection with the benefit of hindsight in early 2019, it is a painful irony that the two instructions to any of her ministers in Premier Wynne's 2014 Mandate Letters on accessibility which were the most substantive turned out not to have led to any real or significant action. As noted above, our October 7,2014 analysis of the premier's 2014 Mandate Letters identified the most substantive accessibility directions in any of those letters as follows:"The most substantive directions on point she gives are to the Minister of Economic Development, Employment and Infrastructure regarding the development of new accessibility standards under the AODA (addressed further below), and her direction to the Minister Responsible for the 2015 Toronto Pan/ParaPan American Games to develop a plan for a legacy of increased accessible tourism services after the 2015 Games."Over the next two years, a decision was only made to develop a Health Care Accessibility Standard, but no decision was made on an Education Accessibility Standard. Even after it was decided to develop a Health Care Accessibility Standard, Economic Development Minister Duguid never established a Health Care Standards Development Committee to work on recommendations for its contents. As addressed further in Chapter 5, that Standards Development Committee was only established in 2017 by Minister Duguid's successor, Minister Tracy MacCharles. Later in this chapter, we show that despite instructions to do so in his September 2014 Mandate Letter from Premier Wynne, the minister responsible for the Pan/Parapan American Games did not create or implement a plan to leave a legacy of increased accessibility in Ontario's tourism and hospitality sector. The former Government did not publicly dispute the accuracy of our October 7, 2014 letter-by-letter analysis of the Premier's September 2014 Mandate Letters. We had hoped that as a result of our detailed analysis of those letters, Premier Wynne would respond in late 2014 by issuing minister-by-minister directions, akin to Mandate Letters, on their accessibility commitments and duties, to make up for this failure in the 2014 Mandate Letters. She did not do so.Instead, on December 23, 2014, Premier Wynne wrote a letter to the AODA Alliance. It responded, ministry-by-ministry, by telling us for the most part, what they had already done on accessibility. This did not fulfil her pledge. We did not need her to write us. we needed her to write and instruct her own cabinet ministers.The January 20, 2015 AODA Alliance Update provided a comprehensive analysis of the December 23, 2015 letter to us from Premier Wynne, and a related letter from the Economic Development Minister, Brad Duguid. Our analysis included this summary:"In summary, Premier Wynne's and Minister Duguid's new letters announce virtually nothing new. They almost entirely re-announce things the Government has already done. What little that is new in these letters is so vague as to add very little. What is found in those letters will not get Ontario back on schedule for full accessibility by 2025… …Our analysis of the Government's two December 2014 letters shows that the Premier's and Economic Development Minister's letters leave unkept too many key Government election promises on disability accessibility. They sidestep important accessibility promises and questions from us. For example, after reading these new letters from the Government at the highest level, we have no idea:* what number of organizations the Government will investigate, audit or inspect to keep its promise to effectively enforce the AODA. * when the Government will at last take the simple step of establishing its promised toll-free number for the public to report AODA violations. * when the Government will end its 3.5 year dithering over which accessibility standards it will next create. * what the Government will do to keep its promise to increase private sector employment opportunities for people with disabilities. * what the Government will do to ensure that the 2015 Toronto Pan/ParaPan American Games leave a strong legacy of improved accessibility of tourism and hospitality services, as well as public transit, for tourists and Ontarians with disabilities. * what the Government will do to remove the barriers that still prevent voters and candidates with disabilities from fully participating in provincial and municipal elections in Ontario……In her letter, Premier Wynne made palpably exaggerated claims about the Government's progress on accessibility. Prominent among these, she claimed that "Hospitals, and all members of the broader public service, are 100 per cent compliant with current AODA standards." Our analysis of these two Government letters explains that Premier Wynne had no basis for making such a claim. The Premier's December 23, 2014 letter's description of the Government's work on disability accessibility lists some helpful past efforts on accessibility. However, these have been proven to be insufficient. The Premier's letter clouds the fact that the Government has treated disability accessibility issue as a sidelined low priority on the front lines. Over the past four years, we have had to deal with a revolving door of four different cabinet ministers and three different deputy ministers shuffled in and out of lead responsibility for the AODA. Ministers in other portfolios appear not to have been directed to treat this issue as a real priority… …We urge Premier Wynne to keep her promise to direct her cabinet ministers and other senior officials to implement the Government's disability accessibility and duties. We need the Government to actually answer our proposals for action set out in our summer 2014 letters to the Premier and ten of her cabinet ministers. We need the Government to come forward with a bold plan of new action to get Ontario back on schedule for full accessibility by 2025, under ten years from now."Even after this, Premier Wynne never did instruct all her ministers on the Government's accessibility commitments. This situation did not improve in 2016, when Premier Wynne issued her second and only other round of ministerial Mandate Letters . the Mandate Letter for the Minister of Accessibility had some more detail in 2016 than it had had in 2014. For the first time to our knowledge, it included instructions on AODA enforcement. This turned out not to make much of a difference. The Wynne Government's first designated Minister of Accessibility, Tracy MacCharles, did not fulfil the premier's written directions to her on AODA enforcement. The AODA Alliance's April 18, 2018 5-Year Report on AODA enforcement, addressed in greater detail in Chapter 2, included this finding, which the former Ontario Government did not publicly dispute:" Premier Wynne's September 23, 2016 Mandate Letter to Accessibility Minister Tracy MacCharles set this as a priority for the minister:"Taking steps to increase compliance reporting rates among private/not-for-profit sector organizations by an additional 50 per cent in 2017."As of the end of 2016, 57% of private sector obligated organizations with at least 20 employees had not filed their required 2014 AODA self-report. The Government reported the same 57% of non-complying private sector organizations with at least 20 employees that had not filed their required 2017 AODA self-report. This was certainly not the 50% increase in private sector reporting that the Premier directed the minister to achieve."Our review of the Premier's other 2016 Mandate Letters to the former Ontario Government's cabinet revealed the same deficiencies as we had revealed in 2014. We raised this concern with the former Ontario Government. We are aware of no corrective steps having been taken to rectify this.b) The Failed Experience of Situating the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario at the Ministry of Economic DevelopmentIn February 2013, we commended the former Ontario Government for moving the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario from the Ministry of Community and Social services to the Ministry of Economic Development. That latter ministry changed its name at various times during and after this transfer. However, it always retained the "Economic Development" portfolio as the lead in its title. The final report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review also commended this move. This transfer had a great deal of promise. It could have embedded disability accessibility as a core component in Ontario's economic development agenda. It appeared even more promising after the 2014 election, when the Economic Development Minister was also assigned some responsibility for infrastructure. We were eager to see accessibility more effectively integrated into Ontario's construction of new infrastructure. Unfortunately, however, this move turned out to be a complete failure. We applauded the former Ontario Government in June 2016 when lead responsibility for the AODA was eventually moved out of that ministry. This failure was due to three interacting factors. First, as addressed earlier, Premier Wynne's Mandate Letter to these ministers did not give needed specific instructions that would have made this a greater priority for them.Second, the ministers who held this portfolio, Eric Hoskins (2013-2014) and Brad Duguid (2014-2016) did not show any strong leadership on this file. At most, they gave it lipservice when outside pressure, such as that mounted by the AODA Alliance, drove probing media attention their way. As well, efforts were made to create positive spin on the issue, at the same time as they continued to act ineffectively either on enforcing existing accessibility standards (see Chapter 2) or on developing new accessibility standards (See Chapters 3, 4 and 5)Third, there is no evidence that the former Government ever tried in a serious way to embed accessibility requirements and considerations in the Government's overall approach to economic development, even though it had publicly committed to do so in the Legislature as far back as May 28, 2013. The AODA Alliance's January 19, 2015 analysis of Premier Wynne's and Minister Duguid's December 2014 letters to the AODA Alliance included:"We were delighted when previous Economic Development Minister Eric Hoskins, announced in the Legislature on May 28, 2013, that his ministry would incorporate disability accessibility as a prominent part of all the Ministry's strategies, programs and initiatives for promoting Ontario's economic development and employment. In the Legislature, he stated:"It means that the goal of greater accessibility must be integrated into all that we do as a ministry, and I have instructed my ministry to do just that. This is something our government is strongly committed to."In her May 14, 2014 letter to us during the 2014 election, Premier Wynne committed: "The Ministry of Economic Development, Trade and Employment - as the government's lead for the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario - has created a new position in its Ministry, a Director of Accessibility Integration and Planning, to work within the Ministry to ensure that accessibility is integrated into all business practices."One year later, in our May 2, 2014 letter to former Economic Development Minister Eric Hoskins, we asked if that Ministry had fully incorporated disability accessibility criteria, goals and action into all of its programs. We asked for specifics of changes made and what practical impact this has had. Minister Duguid's December 8, 2014 letter to us did not answer this inquiry. In Premier Wynne's December 23, 2014 letter to us, she wrote:"As referenced in your letter, the ministry has also worked to incorporate accessibility into all of its economic development and employment strategies, programs and initiatives. In support of this, a Director of Accessibility Integration and Planning position was created within the deputy minister's office. A key outcome of this work is the integration of accessibility criteria into our Ontario Youth Jobs Strategy, and investment funding programs, services and supports."We earlier understood that the Economic Development Ministry's "Director of Accessibility Integration and Planning" position to which the Premier refers was only a temporary position, that terminated some weeks or months ago. We have now asked the Economic Development Ministry to confirm that this position still exists. Apart from the Premier's brief and non-specific reference to "the integration of accessibility criteria into our Ontario Youth Jobs Strategy, and investment funding programs, services and supports," we don't know what the Government has done, or plans to do in this area. It is now two years after that Ministry acquired lead responsibility for the AODA, and more than one and a half years after the former minister directed accessibility to be embedded in all its programs."We subsequently learned from the Ontario Government that the Director of Accessibility Integration and Planning position at the Economic Development Ministry had been abolished and no longer existed. It may not have still existed when Premier Wynne wrote us to tell us about its existence. We have asked, and have seen no proof that any further action was ever taken on that front.We have also learned that the Economic Development Ministry was never a welcoming place for the Accessibility Directorate. That Ministry was not receptive to the idea of regulating and enforcing accessibility. The Accessibility Directorate was administratively located in the ministry, but was never received as an integral part of it. as such, we were not upset to see the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario moved out of that ministry in June 2016. c) The Subsequent Creation of a Minister of Accessibility in 2016In June 2016, as part of an Ontario Cabinet shuffle, Premier Wynne appointed Ontario's first Minister of Accessibility, Tracy MacCharles. We had for years been seeking a full-time minister. This was not a full-time assignment, as Ms. MacCharles was also assigned responsibility for women's issues. We applauded this move, for two reasons. First, it was much closer to a full-time minister for accessibility than we had ever come. Second, the Accessibility Directorate would be moved away from the Economic Development Ministry, where, as shown above, it had not been effectively integrated or welcomed. This progress was, however, unfortunately short-lived. Six months later, in January 2017, six the former Ontario Government had another small Cabinet shuffle. As part of this, Ms. MacCharles was also assigned the conflicting role of Minister of Government and Consumer Services. She was no longer responsible for women's issues. We took strong exception to the combination of her new "government and consumer services" role with the role of Minister of Accessibility. The AODA Alliance's January 13, 2017 letter to Premier Wynne included:"This Cabinet shuffle significantly slashes the time that Minister MacCharles and her ministerial staff can devote to her accessibility portfolio. The accessibility role was a near-full-time portfolio that Minister MacCharles assumed seven months ago. Just seven months ago, on June 13, 2016, you made history by appointing Tracy MacCharles as Ontario's first Accessibility Minister. We congratulated you for this. This was the closest we had ever come to our years-old dream of a stand-alone full-time minister responsible for this important area. It was a good way to kick-start lagging action on accessibility. It was beginning to show real promise just before your Cabinet shuffle took place. Two successive Government-appointed Independent Reviews of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) had earlier pressed the need for renewed leadership in this area. This is needed because Ontario lags behind schedule for ensuring that this province will be fully accessible to people with disabilities by 2025, the AODA's deadline. The AODA requires the Ontario Government to lead Ontario to that goal on time. In the 2015 fall, Prime Minister Trudeau commendably appointed Canada's first national minister for people with disabilities, Carla Qualtrough. Your appointment of Minister MacCharles to a comparable role in Ontario, followed on the heels of that very positive federal move.Before last June, responsibility for leading the AODA's implementation and enforcement had rested with the Minister of Community and Social Services (2005-2011) and then the Minister of Economic Development (2011-2016). In both cases, those ministers had so many other duties that the AODA was just a small part of their mandates. It secured insufficient ministerial attention. People with disabilities suffered as a result. Responding to the good news of Minister MacCharles' appointment, our June 13, 2016 news release stated:"Two successive Government-appointed Independent Reviews of the AODA, in 2010 and 2014, called for the Premier to appoint a stand-alone minister with responsibility for getting Ontario on schedule for full accessibility by 2025 for Ontarians with disabilities. Past ministers with this file have had so much else on their plate that they did not devote enough time to this issue, contributing to the poor recent Government record in this area….The AODA Alliance hopes that Minister MacCharles will devote far more time to keeping Premier Wynne’s December 3, 2012 promise that she would ensure that Ontario is on schedule for full accessibility by 2025."Up until yesterday's Cabinet shuffle, Minister MacCharles only had one added responsibility, namely for Women's Issues. That allowed her to commendably devote a large part of her time to disability accessibility. There are now fewer than eight years left for the Ontario Government to lead Ontario to reach the mandatory goal of full accessibility by 2025. Ontarians with disabilities need every minute of the minister's time we can get, devoted to developing and enforcing AODA accessibility standards. Because of yesterday's Cabinet shuffle, Ontario no longer has an almost stand-alone Accessibility Minister. Minister MacCharles will now be preoccupied with the many duties of leading the work of the Ontario Public Service, and of overseeing the regulation of services to consumers in Ontario. In the past that at times has been a full-time Cabinet job. She will have far less time to devote to accessibility. For people with disabilities, it's one step forward, and then six months later, another step backward.This comes at an especially bad time. Minister MacCharles has just finished her first half-year in the new accessibility role, getting settled in, and staffed-up. She was on the verge of being able to address more of the long list of action items that need attention, given the looming deadline for reaching full accessibility. We will shortly be sending her a letter to highlight action items needing her attention and action now. It will show how much needs to be done, and how much we need full-time ministerial leadership, for the effective development and enforcement of AODA accessibility standards. For years, we had called for your Government to appoint a stand-alone Accessibility Minister to head up a stand-alone Accessibility Ministry. The Government has for years had ministers and at times, even separate ministries, responsible for other key disadvantaged groups in society, but not for people with disabilities. Ontario has, for example, for years had as a Minister for Women's Issues, a Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, a Minister for Francophone Affairs, and a Minister for Seniors. Yesterday's Cabinet shuffle created a stand-alone Minister and Ministry for Seniors. Yet in contrast, it downgraded accessibility to a substantially reduced part-time role for Minister MacCharles.Hopeless Conflicting Roles Imposed on Minister MacCharlesThis Cabinet shuffle also imposes on Minister MacCharles a hopeless position of conflict. As Accessibility Minister, she is responsible for enforcing the AODA against all organizations that must obey it. This includes the largest organization in Ontario that must obey it, the Ontario Public Service. As Government and Consumer Services Minister, she is responsible for leading the Ontario Public Service in its efforts to obey the AODA. It is wrong for her to be in a position to have to be the enforcer and the defendant at the same time, and to be expected to enforce the AODA against herself. This is made worse by the fact that in key ways, the Ontario Public Service has been a major drag on timely progress under the AODA. As the 2014 final report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review showed, the Ontario Public Service has a troubling track record on accessibility. Yesterday's Cabinet shuffle flies in the face of the very first recommendation in the final report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review. The Independent Review recommended that leadership for creating and enforcing accessibility standards should remain with one minister, while a separate minister, the Minister of Government Services, should be made responsible for ensuring that the Ontario Public Service fully obeys the AODA and becomes fully accessible… …In our December 8, 2016 AODA Alliance Update, we commended your Government for assigning Deputy Minister Marie-Lison Fougère to lead the Government's AODA compliance at an administrative level. However, we then cautioned:"One concern is that the same deputy minister will be responsible for both leading the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act's enforcement and for the Ontario Government's compliance with the AODA. It would be better for these to be entirely separated. We urge the Ontario Government, as it implements this new regime, to put in place safeguards in an effort to make this work."We offered that caution at a time when two different Cabinet ministers held these two different roles. Now that yesterday's Cabinet shuffle has assigned both of these roles to Minister MacCharles, the problem that we identified in our December 8, 2016 AODA Alliance Update became considerably worse. As you know, ministerial responsibility is a fundamental ingredient of parliamentary democracy.Working Together with You to Find Solutions to These Problems As always, we remain eager to help your Government keep your commitment to us to ensure that Ontario is on schedule for full accessibility by 2025. After yesterday's Cabinet shuffle, as a first step, the Government should assign responsibility for the AODA's enforcement to an arms-length independent agency. That would be an important step forward in any event. We have urged your Government to do this for some time. We would welcome the opportunity to work with you, as Premier, on finding solutions to this problem. We emphasize that none of this is meant as an adverse comment on Minister MacCharles. Much the contrary. She has shown a strong commitment to accessibility since well before entering politics. We continue to look forward to working with her."After we raised these concerns in early 2017, we saw no action by the Government to eliminate the conflict in the minister's roles. It was evident to us that after this mini Cabinet shuffle, the minister had less time than she previously had for accessibility issues. We also saw no improvement after this Cabinet shuffle in the action by the Ontario Public Service to become fully accessible to customers and employees with disabilities. The conflict in this role became even more obvious to us when we reviewed the results of an earlier Freedom of Information application which the former Ontario Government had strenuously resisted. We found a memo from the deputy minister responsible for the AODA's implementation and enforcement, to the deputy minister of Government Services, alerting the latter that their ministry would be the subject of an AODA enforcement inspection. That email pre-dated the combination of these two ministries under the same minister. After this troubling Cabinet shuffle, both of those deputy ministers reported to the same deputy minister, namely Tracy MacCharles. That would place the minister in a hopelessly conflicting position. To this day, we retain the view that a stand-alone minister of accessibility is a helpful measure. We congratulated the new Government of Doug Ford last summer when it appointed Ontario's first stand-alone Minister for Accessibility and Seniors. Because seniors disproportionately have accessibility needs as people with disabilities, this combination of ministerial roles appeared to give more cabinet profile to this issue than ever before. Yet we have not yet seen any new progress on accessibility generally, or on the AODA's implementation and enforcement in particular, as a result of the creation of this new position of Minister for Accessibility and Seniors. To the contrary, as addressed in Chapter 5, under the new minister, the work in progress of five Standards Development Committees has been frozen for months. Three of those Standards Development Committees remain frozen to this day, with the Government awaiting the report of this AODA Independent Review.d) The Need to Re-Engineer the Way that the Ontario Public Service Manages and Leads Its Own Efforts to Become an Accessible Employer And Service-ProviderThe Ontario Public Service has throughout this period lacked a coherent and effective internal strategy, process and leadership to ensure that its own workplace and services become accessible to people with disabilities. We have spoken to the Premier, to successive Secretaries of Cabinet, and to a parade of successive deputy ministers and assistant deputy ministers on this, without success. Several senior officials have privately conceded that the situation within the Ontario Public Service lacks effective leadership. Yet, the Ontario Government repeatedly makes public claims that it is a leader on accessibility and a model for others to follow.As but one illustration of our efforts in this area, and the responses we got from the Government, the AODA Alliance's January 19, 2015 analysis of letters to us from Premier Wynne and Economic Development Minister Duguid included this:"10.Re-Engineering the Ontario Public Service to Become a Barrier-Free Employer and Service ProviderThe Government has claimed for years that it wants the Ontario Public Service to be a model accessible employer and provider of accessible public services, to lead the rest of Ontario by its example. Right now the Government is no such thing. Part 10 of our June 30, 2014 brief to the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review documented the Ontario Public Service's serious failings on this score. … As a result, last summer we presented proposals to the Premier and to two of her cabinet ministers in writing, in addition to those which we addressed to the Premier as described earlier in this Analysis. In our September 19, 2014 letter to Premier Wynne, we asked the Premier to:* direct the Secretary of the Cabinet to implement effective strategies to ensure the Ontario Public Service becomes a fully accessible employer and service provider, and to ensure that disability accessibility is embedded in all vital Government decisions* create a full time deputy minister or associate deputy minister position with lead responsibility for ensuring that the Ontario Public Service becomes a fully accessible workplace and service provider* direct the Secretary of the Cabinet to require each Ministry's Accessibility Lead be made a full time position, reporting to the deputy minister of that Ministry, with needed accessibility expertise.In our September 12, 2014 letter to the Minister of Government and Consumer Services, David Orazietti, we asked the Minister to:* establish a new effective strategy for ensuring that the Ontario public service becomes a barrier-free, accessible employer and service provider, including a) implementing a system for monitoring implementation of accessibility across the Ontario, public service b) strengthen the position of the accessibility lead in each ministry.* establish a full time deputy minister or associate deputy minister responsible for the accessibility of the Ontario public service.In the AODA Alliance's September 16, 2014 letter to the Treasury Board President, Deb Matthews, we asked the Minister to implement strong, monitored measures for ensuring that all Ontario Government programs are used effectively to ensure that Ontario becomes fully accessible by 2025. The Premier's September 25, 2014 Mandate Letter for the Minister of Government and Consumer Services included in its list of specific priorities for that Ministry this modest goal:"I ask that you collaborate with ministers to ensure that the OPS is working to become more inclusive, diverse, equitable and accessible at all levels."After that, the Premier's December 23, 2014 letter to us offered a slight but inadequate glimmer of hope of some further progress. Premier Wynne's December 23, 2014 letter stated:"Your letter to the Minister of Government and Consumer Services references the need to ensure accessibility within the OPS. I am proud of the great strides we have made in this regard. Our government has promised that the OPS will lead by example on accessibility by serving as a model to the broader public sector and the private sector on how to build an accessible organization.Many instruments and approaches have been, and will continue to be developed, to advance accessibility for OPS employees with disabilities and to improve the accessibility of our services and facilities. For example, an annual, enterprise wide compliance attestation process, entitled Getting to Yes, reports ministries' compliance with the AODA and its regulations to the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario. The process requires that each deputy minister or chief administrative officer certify ministry compliance, and culminates in a single OPS compliance report, signed by the Deputy Minister of Government and Consumer Services. Through this process, we monitor and ensure implementation of accessibility requirements throughout the organization. Each year, the attestation process is reviewed to continually improve the compliance framework.A single office in the OPS is designated for guiding ministries and OPS business areas in achieving organizational readiness for compliance with accessibility standards, and for coordinating enterprise planning and reporting. A deputy appointed committee that includes OPS employees with disabilities has been created, and focuses on improving awareness of accessibility issues that impact employees with disabilities across the OPS. Likewise, an I and IT Assistive Technology Support Service was implemented to simplify the process for OPS employees with disabilities obtaining the assistive technology required to perform their work. Regular, mandatory enterprise wide training on accessibility requirements has been implemented, and policies and strategies are regularly updated as they pertain to Ontario government programs and services.You will be pleased to know that the Ministry of Government and Consumer Services mandate letter publicly commits to a vision of an inclusive organization that is diverse and accessible, and delivers excellent public services. Senior executive leadership is accountable for and dedicated to achieving accessibility and diversity commitments. The OPS Chief Diversity and Accessibility Officer reports directly to the Secretary of the Cabinet on accessibility issues. Likewise, deputy ministers are responsible for ensuring that their ministries comply with the AODA and its regulations.Senior decision makers with enterprise portfolios, such as human resources and I and IT, are consulted regularly for strategic advice on implementing the AODA standards in the OPS, as well as on accessibility priorities, requirements and approaches. Your correspondence references the need to strengthen the current accessibility leads model within the OPS. I am pleased to say that we are working to strengthen and improve this model. Ministry accessibility leads provide guidance, monitor progress and make recommendations to management on meeting accessibility requirements. They are supported with training and other resources to maximize success and consistency in meeting the OPS's commitment to removing barriers to accessibility."Premier Wynne's list of activities initially seems impressive. It appears more detailed and extensive than what her letter offers on many other issues. Yet her letter appears to describe initiatives that were mostly if not entirely in place at the time when the Ontario Public Service showed it was a poor example by which others should not be led (as Part 10 of our brief to the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review shows). Those measures were mostly if not all already in place before the 2014 Ontario election. The only new measure which Premier Wynne described concerns the need to substantially strengthen the position of "Accessibility Lead" in each ministry. Her letter vaguely stated: "…we are working to strengthen and improve this model." She doesn't say what is being considered, or when action will be taken, if ever. Her letter says nothing about designating a single full time deputy minister, associate deputy minister, or even assistant deputy minister, with full time responsibility to lead the Ontario Public Service to become fully accessible. In contrast to the Government, in sharp contrast, IBM recently showed strong leadership by appointing a Chief Accessibility Officer. Premier Wynne said nothing about implementing measures to effectively monitor at the front lines to see if the Government's policies are being effectively implemented and are succeeding at ensuring accessibility. The Government does not now do this. What the Government may have is a collection of policy statements, and check boxes where Ministries claim that they are fulfilling them, whether or not this translates into accessible services and an accessible workplace."Over the next four years, we saw little progress on re-engineering the way the Ontario Public Service addresses accessibility within its own operations. Contrary to Premier Wynne's commitment to do so in her December 23, 2014 letter to us, we saw no indication that the Ontario Public Service ever strengthened the positions of Accessibility Lead in each ministry. We repeatedly raised this with the Premier's office, the Secretary of Cabinet, and various ministers and deputy ministers, to no avail.Over the last 12-18 months of the former Ontario Government, an office was created under the Minister of Citizenship to try to lead efforts on accessibility within the Ontario Public Service. This was well-intended, but destined to make little or no evident difference. This in no small part was no doubt because that office, staffed with able and well-meaning officials, operated entirely outside the structure of the Ministry of Government Services (which has operated under varying names). As well, to this day, the Ontario Public Service has no full-time chief accessibility officer. Some officials within the Ontario Public Service want to make progress on accessibility. however, there is scant if any indication that anyone is held accountable if they do not.A decade ago, in 2009, the former Ontario Government commendably established, for the first time, a full-time position of Assistant Deputy Minister for Accessibility at the Ministry of Government Services. That official was responsible for leading efforts at tearing down accessibility barriers within the Ontario Public Service as an employer and service-provider. From early on, we advocated that this position should be a deputy minister or associate deputy minister, not the inferior Assistant Deputy Minister status that it held. Nevertheless, we found the position quite helpful, especially when it came to trying to change the Ontario Public Service from within.The 2010 final report of the Charles Beer AODA Independent Review applauded the creation of this position as "vital." Despite that, within months if not weeks of that report being made public, the former Ontario Government wrongly downgraded this from a full-time position to a part-time position. We were not consulted on that decision. This was simply done because the individual in that job moved on to another job. The Deputy Minister of Government Services took advantage to roll that position into another Assistant Deputy Minister role, where it remained for several years. Therefore, that official could no longer devote all their time to the huge task of trying to get the Ontario Public Service to change its ways, when it came to achieving accessibility within its own operations.We took our serious concerns about that backwards step to Premier Dalton McGuinty. To his credit, he promised in the 2011 election to restore this as a full-time position. His August 19, 2011 letter to the AODA Alliance, setting out his party's 2011 election pledges on accessibility, included:"?We will create a full-time Assistant Deputy Minister position in the Ministry of Government Services responsible for accessibility, and we will continue to consider options and advice on how to modernize our government structure to promote accessibility. The ADM will pay particular attention to breaking down the barriers and silos experienced across government when implementing accessibility initiatives."A series of deputy ministers at the Ministry of Government Services systematically ignored that election commitment. We alerted them to that commitment. Yet they never honoured it. The Premier's promise was never kept over the ensuing seven years, either by Premier McGuinty or by his successor, Premier Wynne. As noted at several points in this brief, when she was running for leadership of the Ontario Liberal Party, Kathleen Wynne promised the AODA Alliance in her December 3, 2012 letter that she would keep Premier McGuinty's accessibility pledges. She did not keep this one. Kathleen Wynne's December 3, 2012 letter to the AODA Alliance included:"2. Will you stand by and fully honour the past commitments that your Party has made to Ontarians with disabilities regarding disability accessibility?Yes. I will honour the specific commitments made by my party and the government, and look forward to working with you to continue making progress."e) The Major Missed Opportunity of the 2015 Toronto Pan/Parapan American GamesIn the summer of 2015, Toronto hosted the Pan/Parapan American Games. This gave Ontario an amazing chance to leverage a significant increase in accessibility, especially in the tourism and hospitality sectors. Ontario was a lead sponsor and organizer of these Games. An Ontario Cabinet minister was tasked with the responsibility to lead this effort.Other cities around the world that host such international games have leveraged the upcoming arrival of their Games to create more accessibility in their communities. Sadly, Ontario did a very poor job of this. Significant effort was devoted to ensuring the accessibility of the actual sports competition sites and athletes village. That of course is indispensable for any community that hosts such games. However very little was done to try to increase accessibility outside the actual games sites, e.g. in surrounding tourism and hospitality venues. As such, a major opportunity was unjustifiably missed.As quoted earlier, the final report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review signaled the Government about the great potential for the Pan/Parapan American Games. For example, late in 2014, Mayo Moran told the former Ontario Government:"The timing of this Review is also crucial because there is a new government which holds the promise of creating renewed momentum for accessibility in Ontario. In addition, with Ontario hosting the Pan Am/Parapan Am Games next year, we have a key opportunity to showcase an accessible Ontario and to build a strong and lasting legacy that advances our shared goals. The eyes of the world will be on Ontario and, as a province that has championed accessibility and implemented an innovative regime to achieve that goal, this is a rare chance for us to shine."Problems with the former Ontario Government's approach to the Pan/Parapan American Games were foreshadowed two years before the Games took place, when the former Ontario Government held a extensively-planned media event to kick off its work on generating a good legacy for the Games. The August 27, 2013 AODA Alliance Update reported:"We can't make this up! Last week the Government-subsidized Toronto 2015 Pan Parapan American Games sent AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky, who is blind, an inaccessible (and hence, unreadable) email invitation to an upcoming "good news" kick-off of the lead-up to the Games. Lepofsky gets and answers dozens, and at times, hundreds of emails each day and was shocked when this inaccessible one arrived.Lepofsky immediately replied to the email, advising that it is inaccessible. The Pan/Parapan American Games did not respond by re-issuing the invitation in an accessible format, and indeed, did not reply to him at all."This was only the beginning of a troubling series of events on this issue. The August 30, 2013 AODA Alliance Update reported more troubling news:" The Ontario Government held a carefully-planned hour-long news conference on August 28, 2013 to unveil its planned legacy for Ontario for the 2015 Toronto Pan/ParaPan American Games. The "legacy" refers to the long-term benefits to Ontario that will be left behind from the large public investment that is planned for them. Below we set out the speaking notes of the Ontario cabinet minister responsible for these Games, Michael Chan, and the related news release. It is shocking that in unveiling the promised and planned legacy for these Games, not a word was said by the Ontario Cabinet Minister responsible for these Games, Michael Chan, about improving long-term accessibility for people with disabilities in Ontario…The lead Ontario minister’s failing to even mention much less highlight disability accessibility as part of the key legacy for these Games sends the wrong signal at the August 28, 2013 news conference. It calls into question the Government’s priorities. This is even more troubling since three months ago, the Government announced in the Ontario Legislature during National Access Awareness Week that disability accessibility is a “top priority” for the Government…It did not help matters that, according to the Minister’s office, there were no para-athletes present at their news conference. We were told that they attempted to recruit some to attend, but were unsuccessful. Surely, such a carefully-staged event could have been planned with sufficient care to avoid such an embarrassing omission, when it concerns the “Pan/ParaPan" American Games."In the face of this, the AODA Alliance tried to offer a constructive way forward. We proposed that the Ontario Government develop a plan to achieve a positive accessibility legacy for the games. The former Ontario Government never did so.The August 30, 2013 AODA Alliance Update proposed this:"Let's make some good come out of this. We call on the Ontario Government to promptly announce a clear, comprehensive and strong plan for a disability accessibility legacy for this province arising out of the 2015 Toronto Pan/ParaPan American Games. If the Government has such plans, it hasn't told the public at the very news conference it called to unveil the Games' planned legacy.The Government has earlier referred to a legacy of accessible sports facilities. Any accessibility legacy must go much further. It must benefit a wide range of people with disabilities, not just the important needs of those people with disabilities who engage in sporting activities. It should apply to all infrastructure, not just sports infrastructure. For example, with the expected influx of tourists for these Games, including tourists with disabilities, we need to ensure a substantial legacy of accessible tourism services and accommodations for people with disabilities, of public transit, taxis, other transportation services, hotels, restaurants, entertainment, public venues, sidewalks, all public information and communication including electronic infrastructure and digital information, and other public services and facilities. We must ensure that no public money is ever spent to create, perpetuate or exacerbate barriers against any people with disabilities. The Government should live up to its two-year-old pledge that all new physical infrastructure, as well as digital infrastructure, will be disability accessible."To assist the Government, on September 30, 2013, the AODA Alliance made public a proposal for the accessibility legacy for the Pan/Parapan American Games. The September 30, 2013 AODA Alliance Update included:" A disability legacy won't occur unless Ontario now actively plans for it, and ensures it is part of all planning for the 2015 Games. It should announce these legacy plans immediately. It should also reveal what budget it has appropriate within the funding envelope for the Games, to address disability accessibility. Today the AODA Alliance offers constructive proposals to fill the unexplained gap in the Ontario Government's announced legacy, planned for the 2015 Games. We welcome the opportunity to work with the Ontario Government and its various partners who will conduct these Games, to ensure that the Ontario public gets its money's worth for its enormous public investment.More generally, the Ontario Government should put in place an aggressive strategy to ensure that no barriers against people with disabilities are ever created, perpetuated or exacerbated through the use of public money."Our proposed legacy plan included, among other things, the following obvious measures:"5. To ensure that the Greater Toronto Area and other zones around the 2015 Games become an accessible tourist destination for tourists with disabilities, along with their families and friends, Ontario should:a) launch a comprehensive and widely-publicized strategy to get tourism service-providers to become fully accessible;b) as a first step, immediately and publicly tell major tourism service providers in the Greater Toronto Area, (including the zones for the 2015 Games), that the Government will develop and widely publicize an inventory of accessible tourism service-providers, such as hotels, restaurants, retail stores, transportation services, and tourism attractions, in the 2014 summer. This will give these organizations an immediate chance and an incentive to become fully accessible before the Government publicizes the inventory of accessible tourist services;c) work with the City of Toronto, other municipalities hosting the 2015 Games, and taxi services in those areas, on strategies to substantially increase the number of accessible taxis available to private customers, and make public the targets for the number and percentage of accessible taxis per municipality to have on the road by the time of the Games;d) ensure that no official festivities and other celebratory events connected with the 2015 Games is held at a venue or served by services unless the venue and services are barrier-free;e) provide training and information resources to tourism service providers on how to find, remove and prevent accessibility barriers with an emphasis on the economic gains that come with becoming an accessible hotel, store, restaurant, tourism site or other service-provider;f) launch a widely-publicized promotion strategy to promote Ontario as an accessible tourism destination for tourists with disabilities, their families and friends, giving profile to those tourism service providers that are fully accessible;6. To ensure that public money is never used to create, perpetuate or exacerbate barriers against people with disabilities:a) the Government should commit and widely-publicize that no public money associated with the 2015 Games may be used to create, exacerbate or perpetuate barriers against people with disabilities, and direct all public officials, contracting parties and grant recipients associated with the Games of this strict and enforceable condition;b) the Government should commit that in any application to the Government or organizations administering the 2015 Games, any grants, subsidies, procurement of goods, services or facilities, and other contractual arrangements that the Government enters or finances in whole or in part in connection with the 2015 Games, an applicant must show that that the recipient, vender or contracting party will ensure that no public money is used to create, perpetuate or exacerbate barriers against people with disabilities;c) any goods, services or facilities procured in connection with the 2015 Games with public money should be accessible for use by people with disabilities. This should be advertised and included as a requirement for any organization bidding to win those procurement contracts.7. To ensure that all information and communication in connection with the 2015 Games is fully accessible, the Government should:a) ensure that all broadcast programming, websites, advertisements, leaflets and other prepared publicity and public communications in connection with the 2015 Games are fully accessible… …This includes such accessibility supports as captioning and audio description. It should also include working with those providing live play-by-play coverage to include, to the extent possible, descriptive narrative of visual events where feasible;b) ensure that needed communication supports are available for employees, volunteers, athletes and tourists with disabilities such as Sign Language interpretation." One year after the former Government's August 2013 news conference to kick off its Pan/Parapan American Games legacy plans, we made public the fact that far too little was being planned on accessibility in connection with the Games. The August 28, 2014 AODA Alliance Update included:" Today marks one full year since the Wynne Government held a carefully-staged news conference to make public its plans for the long-term legacy of the 2015 Toronto Pan/ParaPan American Games. The Ontario Government Minister speaking that day said not one word about a legacy of improved disability accessibility. The Games' legacy is the long-term benefits to Ontario that will be left behind from the huge public investment in the 2015 Games. Today, exactly one year later, we have written the new Ontario minister responsible for the 2015 Toronto Games, Michael Coteau. That letter is set out below. In our letter, we urge the minister to now make public a comprehensive plan for a lasting and substantial disability accessibility legacy for the 2015 Games. We ask what he plans to do. We explain that the disability accessibility measures that the Government has announced to date are too little, too slow, and too low-visibility. We always like to offer constructive proposals to the Government. Over ten months ago, on October 1, 2013, we made public our own proposal for a comprehensive disability accessibility legacy for the 2015 Toronto Games. In our August 28, 2014 letter to Minister Coteau, we urge him to adopt the suggestions we included in our October 1, 2013 proposal.The Government expects as many as a quarter of a million people to come to the 2015 Games. That can include a great many persons with disabilities. Toronto and surrounding communities are not now able to ensure sufficient effective, accessible public transit, accessible taxis, and accessible tourism and hospitality services such as restaurants and hotels. We want the Games to leave behind a major legacy of improved accessibility in these and other important areas.The 2015 Games will mark ten years since the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act was enacted in 2005. By then there will only be ten more years left before Ontario must be fully accessible to persons with disabilities, according to the requirements of the AODA. Ontario is now not on schedule for full accessibility by 2025.Our letter emphasizes to Minister Coteau that when the whole world has its eyes on Toronto next year, we want the world to see a community that is ahead of schedule, or at least on schedule, for full accessibility by 2025. Yet at the present rate, what the world will see is a community lagging behind schedule, and a Government that dropped the ball when it had a great chance to show strong leadership.On January 27, 2014 and April 15, 2014, Mr. Steven Davidson, the Deputy Minister responsible for the Pan/ParaPan American Games, sent emails to the AODA Alliance, to list what had been done to date regarding a disability accessibility legacy for the 2015 Toronto Games. We set those emails out below. The measures they list, while helpful, are far less than what Ontarians, including Ontarians with disabilities, need and deserve."It was encouraging when Premier Wynne’s September 25, 2014 Mandate Letter to the Minister responsible for the 2015 Toronto Games included, in its list of specific priorities, the following:"Working with stakeholders to make Ontario a more accessible and barrier-free tourist destination.”However, as noted earlier, that instruction in that Mandate Letter was not honoured or obeyed.We secured media coverage of the Government's lack of effective plans for the Games' accessibility legacy. The September 3, 2014 AODA Alliance Update announced:"On page A-8 of the September 3, 2014 Toronto Star is an excellent article reporting on the Wynne Government's failure to ensure that the huge public investment in the 2015 Toronto Pan/ParaPan American Games leaves behind a strong and substantial legacy of improved disability accessibility….…As the Toronto Star reports, one of our major concerns is that the Government is not taking strong and effective action to ensure that there is a substantial increase in accessible hospitality and tourism services, like restaurants, hotels, taxis and public transit. It is very troubling that what Minister Coteau had to offer the Star, according to this report, is:"Tourism, Culture and Sport Minister Michael Coteau said the government is working with the tourism industry on an Accessibility Tourism Directory that will list the most accessible hotels, restaurants and other venues for people "to stay, eat and relax." Coteau said it is important the visitors "have a stay that meets a certain comfort zone." He added "there is no question that you have to leverage everything you're doing in government to make sure it becomes a more accessible friendly province.""Yet to prepare a directory of existing accessible tourism services doesn't go anywhere near far enough. It is critical that the Government take concerted action to significantly increase the number of accessible restaurants, public transit, taxis, hotels and other hospitality and tourism services to be included in that directory. The 2015 Games' accessibility legacy should not just be a directory that reminds us how few accessible hospitality and tourism services we now have. Ontarians with disabilities and tourists with disabilities from elsewhere deserve better."The September 3, 2014 Toronto Star article included:" Ontario is nowhere near ready to welcome visitors with disabilities to the province for next year's Pan Am Games, a prominent advocate says. David Lepofsky, a spokesperson for Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance, said Queen's Park is missing a unique opportunity to use the games as a catalyst to improve accessibility in restaurants, hotels and transit, among other things. "We're just not ready," Lepofsky told the Star Tuesday. It will cost taxpayers at least $2.5 billion to host the Games, which will host 7,666 athletes competing in 51 sports at venues in 16 municipalities, including Toronto, Hamilton, Milton, Ajax, Whitby, Oshawa, Caledon, St. Catharines and Welland. Lepofsky told the Star the Liberals' 2005 commitment to make Ontario fully accessible by 2025 is woefully behind schedule and urges the province not to miss this unique opportunity to promote accessibility beyond the gates of the various venues. "The government has an obligation under the Disabilities Act to lead this province to become fully accessible by 2015. "We are behind schedule and we have to use every opportunity we can get. One huge opportunity is the Pan Am and Parapan Games," he said. "It is not enough to say that 'we're going to have accessible buildings for the athletes to live in,'" he said. Lepofsky said the province is expecting 250,000 visitors for the Games and they will all need a place to stay, a place to eat and will need to get around by transit or taxi. "Toronto wants to be a world class city and part of that is a city which can accommodate conferences, and individual tourists which includes people with disabilities," he said. Tourism, Culture and Sport Minister Michael Coteau said the government is working with the tourism industry on an Accessibility Tourism Directory that will list the most accessible hotels, restaurants and other venues for people "to stay, eat and relax." Coteau said it is important the visitors "have a stay that meets a certain comfort zone." He added "there is no question that you have to leverage everything you're doing in government to make sure it becomes a more accessible friendly province." Lepofsky said the government should be encouraging businesses in the tourism sector to make the changes they need and if that doesn't happen, he says, Queen's Park should see to it that employees and volunteers for the Pan Am Games not frequent their businesses. "The government should be making clear that they will not use any hotel, they will not use any restaurants, they will not use any venue for formal events or even informal events . . . unless they are accessible," he said. Lepofsky said games organizers and provincial government officials are always talking about the legacy the games will leave and says there's no better legacy than improving accessibility. "They talk about cultural legacy and athletics legacy but we say what about the legacy of accessibility? If you don't organize it in advance it won't happen," he said. "We have been on their tail for over a year now saying 'it's time already.' ""On January 19, 2015, the AODA Alliance released a detailed analysis of letters that we had received from Premier Wynne and Economic Development Minister Duguid in December 2014. In so far as the Pan/Parapan American Games were concerned, this analysis started in material part:" In our August 28, 2014 letter to the Minister responsible for the Pan/ParaPan American Games Michael Coteau, we asked the Minister to:* announce an effective and comprehensive plan for an enduring and substantial disability accessibility legacy for the 2015 Toronto Pan/ParaPan American Games.* announce that no events having any connection with the Games will be held in a venue or at an organization that does not provide full disability accessibility. * strongly encourage all 2015 Games employees and volunteers to frequent and use only the services of restaurants and other tourism services that have full accessibility for persons with disabilities. * now launch a major strategy to ensure that there will be sufficient accessible transit and. transportation services to meet the needs of the hundreds of thousands who are expected at the Games. In our September 19, 2014 letter to Premier Wynne, we asked her to direct the Minister responsible for the Pan/ParaPan American Games, working together with the Economic Development Minister, to immediately implement and widely publicize a strong plan for an enduring legacy of substantially improved disability accessibility, for the 2015 Toronto Games. We urged that this should include, among other things, strategies to substantially improve the range of accessible tourism and hospitality services, to educate school children on accessible sports, and to substantially increase accessible athletics and sport opportunities for persons with disabilities of all agesIn response, Premier Wynne's December 23, 2014 letter states:"As you mentioned, the 2015 Pan/Parapan American Games are fast approaching. Ontario is excited to be hosting the Games, which will showcase the value of sport and the health benefits of active living for all citizens, regardless of age, fitness level or ability. Ontario is dedicated to hosting an accessible and inclusive Games that reflect the values of our province.In my September 25, 2014, mandate letter to each minister, I outlined the key items and priorities that will be used to guide the work of their respective ministries. In my letter to Minister Michael Coteau, Minister Responsible for the Pan/Parapan American Games, I provided instruction that his priority is to work with stakeholders to make Ontario a more accessible and barrier free tourist destination, and to showcase this accessibility to an international audience. Also, my letter directed Minister Coteau to work to ensure that the Games showcase the talents of athletes of all abilities, and to promote Ontario's success in creating a more accessible, inclusive society. Your correspondence referenced the need for an accessibility legacy of the Games. I would like to highlight two recent Games related accessibility achievements that I am very proud of, as well as one soon to be announced initiative of which I am equally proud.The Pan/Parapan American Kids (PPAKids) program, announced as part of Ontario's Promotion, Celebration and Legacy Strategy, has already impacted over 50,000 children and youth in Ontario who have participated in the program. PPAKids is intended to raise awareness of and increase access to sport and para sport, with accessibility features woven throughout the resources, including instruction on and participation in sitting volleyball, goal ball and boccia. Integrating youth through sport and para sport will continue to support increased physical literacy and participation for all Ontarians.The Canadian Sport Institute Ontario (CSIO), in its new, state of the art facility at the Toronto Pan Am Sport Centre on the University of Toronto Scarborough campus, will provide support for high performance athletes and para athletes with expanded training facilities and supports. The CSIO has been built on the principle of inclusiveness and will be a centre of excellence for accessibility for decades to come. In particular, the CSIO is now the official home base and training centre for Wheelchair Basketball Canada's National Academy. This groundbreaking initiative is the world's first full time, year round daily training environment for high performance wheelchair basketball athletes. During my recent tour of the CSIO, I was thrilled to see the many inclusive features and equipment that have been incorporated to provide the best possible sport and recreation experience for athletes with disabilities, and help to inspire generations of athletes and para athletes.In early 2015, the province will announce that we are working with the tourism industry on an accessible accommodation initiative that will support tourists in making informed choices about where to stay while visiting the Golden Horseshoe area. The 2015 Pan/Parapan American Games is providing an impetus to advance the efforts of the tourism industry. I am happy to see the leadership that the tourism industry is showing, and excited about the potential of this project to demonstrate Ontario's commitment to accessible tourism for years to come.Ontario will also become a true world leader in accessibility by providing, for the first time ever, live broadcast of select Parapan American Games events, including the opening and closing ceremonies. This commitment toward showcasing the abilities and achievements of para athletes from throughout the Americas will not only promote para sport to millions of people, but also will help to encourage and inspire new generations of people with disabilities to become active, try new activities or sports, and not to feel limited in reaching for their goals." The Premier appears to recite measures that the Government had already been planning for months. Nothing in this letter commits to specific concrete actions that will significantly increase the accessibility of tourism and hospitality services, like restaurants, hotels, taxis and public transit. The Premier's letter describes an forthcoming initiative, to be announced soon, that will help people with disabilities know about some existing accessible tourism services. She wrote: "In early 2015, the province will announce that we are working with the tourism industry on an accessible accommodation initiative that will support tourists in making informed choices about where to stay while visiting the Golden Horseshoe area." That is a far cry from implementing a program which we sought. We need to get substantially more tourism and hospitality providers, hotels restaurants, taxis and public transit services to become accessible before hundreds of thousands of tourists flock to southern Ontario for the 2015 Toronto Games. The Premier's December 23, 2014 letter commendably states: "In my letter to Minister Michael Coteau, Minister Responsible for the Pan/Parapan American Games, I provided instruction that his priority is to work with stakeholders to make Ontario a more accessible and barrier free tourist destination, and to showcase this accessibility to an international audience." Yet, since Premier Wynne issued those instructions to her Toronto 2015 Games minister, the Government has alerted us to no specific plans or programs to carry this out." In the first half of 2015, as the Games approached, we let the public know that it had become transparently clear that the former Ontario Government had dropped the ball here. The June 15, 2015 AODA Alliance Update included:"It is now clearer than ever that the Government inexcusably is missing a huge opportunity to help get Ontario back on schedule for full accessibility by 2025. This further shows that the Government's claims to be "leading by example" on accessibility and to be "Number 1 in the world" on accessibility are unfounded. As AODA Alliance chair David Lepofsky wrote in his June 12, 2015 Toronto Star guest column (referring to the Toronto 2015 Games torch that is now travelling around Ontario): "When you see that torch crossing Ontario, imagine the trail of increased tourism accessibility it could have blazed, had the government listened to us."This Update gives you the latest news on three developments:1. The June 2, 2015 letter from Drew Fagan, the Deputy Minister of the Ontario Ministry responsible for the Toronto 2015 Games, shows with crystal clarity that the Wynne Government is doing nothing to ensure a legacy of increased accessibility of tourism/hospitality providers as a result of the Toronto 2015 Games. That letter lists other accessibility legacy actions the Government is commendably taking. However, it is stunningly silent on this key issue.2. The June 13, 2015 Toronto Star included a powerful article that reports on our concern that the Government has not acted to create a legacy of improved tourism/hospitality accessibility for the Toronto 2015 Games.3. The Ontario Transportation Ministry's June 12, 2015 news release announces a commendable new service to make it easier for people with disabilities to book accessible para-transit rides on routes that cut across more than one municipality. However, we call on the Government to make that temporary service permanent, so that people with disabilities in Ontario don't face the same hassles they have in the past when trying to use accessible public transit on a route that cuts across more than one municipality".Despite our efforts, the former Ontario Government did not continue that commendable new inter-jurisdictional arrangement for facilitating paratransit rides after the Games wound up.The June 15, 2015 AODA Alliance Update continued later:"We received a June 2, 2015 letter, set out below, from Drew Fagan, the Ontario Government's Deputy Minister in the ministry responsible for the Toronto 2015 Pan/ParaPan American Games, including the broader tourism portfolio. That ministry, led by Minister Michael Coteau, is responsible for increasing tourism/hospitality accessibility in Ontario, including for the Toronto 2015 Games. Mr. Fagan's letter aims to set out everything the Government is doing to create a legacy of increased accessibility for people with disabilities in connection with these Games. It was written to respond to our public criticism of the Government on this issue. Here are highlights from this detailed letter:* The letter lists no present or future Government actions to try to get tourism and hospitality providers like restaurants, stores and hotels, to increase their accessibility. This silence speaks volumes. Had the Government done anything, or planned anything, they would have listed it in this letter. Premier Wynne had assigned to Minister Coteau responsibility for progress on a tourism/hospitality accessibility legacy for the Toronto 2015 Games in her September 25, 2014 Mandate Letter to him. The Premier's Mandate Letter sets out a minister's priority assignments. The June 2, 2015 letter from Mr. Fagan refers to a May workshop for businesses that the Toronto 2015 Games organization, not the Ontario Government, held in downtown Toronto to show businesses how to become more accessible. A June 13, 2015 Toronto Star article, set out below, reported that this event was not well-attended.* The letter refers to a website (not operated by the Government) which lists hotels that are accessible. However, we don't know who decided if they are accessible, or what accessibility standard or criteria they use, or if those criteria cover all accessibility barriers or if the hotels that are identified as accessible have fully complied with AODA accessibility standards. We thus cannot assume that all the supposedly accessible hotels listed on that website are in fact fully accessible. Even if we assumed that, this website only tells us what is already accessible. To point to a list of supposedly-accessible hotels does not, of itself, lead to any improvement of the accessibility of any other hotels. An accessibility legacy concerns causing improvements to accessibility as a result of holding these Games.* The letter lists a number of commendable efforts aimed at leaving behind a legacy of improved accessibility on sporting activity across Ontario, with an emphasis on para-sports. This is a step forward. However, the letter does not identify any significant new funding for this activity. It does not specify that the Government is spending much more on this than it did last year or the year before. As well, the letter does not specify any comprehensive effort to publicize to the broader public the availability of the accessible sporting resources to which the letter refers. If many who could benefit from these have no idea about their availability, they won't know to ask. We therefore urge the Government to make clear what additional funding it will invest in this area, and what plans it has for ensuring that these accessible sporting resources are widely publicized.* The letter over-inflates what we all mean by a legacy of increased tourism/hospitality accessibility. It lists commendable efforts at training the Toronto 2015 Games' volunteers on providing accessible Customer Service. This is merely complying with the Games' obligations under the Customer Service Accessibility Standard. When we all speak of a long term legacy of improved accessibility, we are talking about long-lasting measures, like a ramp where stairs now must be ascended to enter a store, or new Braille and large print menus offered in a restaurant. Giving the Games' volunteers legally obligatory accessible Customer Service training, while helpful, is far more fleeting and ephemeral. Because that training is evidently being delivered online, it will likely have less impact than in-person training where there is a chance to meet and interact with people with disabilities. For the Government to over-inflate this as a major part of its tourism/hospitality legacy of increased accessibility is to distract from the Government's failure on this important issue."The June 15, 2015 AODA Alliance Update also explained:"It is no small irony that on June 13, 2015, the 10th anniversary of the day when the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act went into effect, the Toronto Star ran an excellent article that also confirmed that the Government has failed to lead with any strategy to increase the accessibility of tourism and hospitality services in advance of the Toronto 2015 Games. The Star reported on our concerns in this area, and then approached the Government for its response. The Government did not respond by denying what we have said. Instead, Economic Development Minister Brad Duguid is quoted as rejecting a proposal that some of the $50 million or more that the Games are under budget be used to help these tourism/hospitality services increase their accessibility. We usually don't suggest that the Government finance accessibility retrofits for private businesses. However, we have suggested this as one option for a short-term last ditch strategy, using even a small fraction of the budget that the Games didn't spend, because the Government has unjustifiably failed to act over the past 22 months on our recommendations for other actions on this front.The Government's explanations, as reported in this article, deserve comment. The Toronto Star article states:"Despite calling the Parapan Am Games "an incredible spring board to inspire Ontarians and our business communities to embrace accessibility," Brad Duguid, the minister responsible for economic development, said no funding was on its way. The province will employ legislative tweaks and beefed up enforcement, according to a recently announced 10-year accessibility action plan. "It's not about incentives or rebates. It's about a good business case. And that's what we're planning to sell," said Duguid. The province estimates improved accessibility by 2020 could generate $1.6 billion in new tourism."The new enforcement measures and other actions to which the Government refers don't take place until after the Toronto 2015 Games. That will be too late for creating an accessibility legacy for tourism/hospitality services. Minister Duguid's reported opposition to providing financial incentives for businesses acting pro-actively on accessibility is hard to understand. His Government's AODA empowers the Government to use incentives. Moreover, his Governments Accessibility Action Plan that he just proudly announced a few days ago offers businesses new financial incentives if they hire people with disabilities. We don't understand how the Government can then here say: ""It's not about incentives or rebates. It's about a good business case. And that's what we're planning to sell," said Duguid." Moreover, as far as we have been able to tell, the Government has not taken the business case for improving accessibility directly to the restaurants, stores and other tourism/hospitality services adjacent to the Toronto 2015 Games sites in a targeted outreach effort, as we have been urging for almost two years.If any options we have proposed for action on this front are unacceptable to the Government, we would expect the Government to implement its own effective alternatives."Our concern about accessibility at the Games was not just a theoretical one. We promptly publicized two unjustifiable barriers that surfaced in mid-late June 2015 in connection with the Games. The June 22, 2015 AODA Alliance Update reported:"Two entirely preventable barriers have surfaced, facing tourists with disabilities, in connection with the Toronto 2015 Games. The initial official reaction to them was insufficient. Only when the media shone a glaring spotlight on them did the publicly-funded Games officials scurry to address barriers that should never have been created in the first place. In this Update, we focus on:1. The fact that the Toronto 2015 Smart Phone app for Apple devices like the iPhone was released with preventable barriers. These made key parts of the app inaccessible to blind or dyslexic people who use Apple's free VoiceOver screen-reader. This problem was first brought to the attention of the Games' organizers back on June 1, 2015, by Mr. David Best. He is a blind information technology specialist, and a member of the Government-appointed Accessibility Standards Advisory Council. Yet the Games organizers did not address this app's problems until Global TV's evening news broadcast on Friday, June 19, 2015. That broadcast made this accessibility barrier the day's top news story. That is the first time in many years that an AODA-related story was the top news story on a news broadcast. Within hours of that broadcast, and with no public notice that we saw, the app's accessibility problems were quickly addressed. We have not had a chance to fully test the app to see if all problems are resolved. 2. A 12-year-old girl with a disability found to her consternation that the rules governing accessible seating at the new aquatics centre to host part of the ParaPan American Games this summer would not let her sit beside more than one person without a disability. She could go to a competition and sit with only one person. We don't understand why this new centre was not built with ample flexible seating around the stadium that could accommodate either people with disabilities or people with no disability, so that rationing accessible seating need not be even contemplated. The rigid rules were relaxed after the media got on the story."In the end, the July 28, 2015 AODA Alliance news release summarized the former Ontario Government's sad failure in this context. Its headline read:"Despite All the Official Rejoicing, Toronto 2015 Pan Am Games Sadly Missed a Huge Chance for a Great Legacy for Ontarians with Disabilities by Failing to Increase Accessibility of Tourism/Hospitality Venues like Restaurants and Stores - Before any 2024 Toronto Olympic Bid, Ontario Must Ensure It Doesn't Repeat This Wasteful Mistake".The July 28, 2015 AODA Alliance news release reported as follows:"Despite all the official self-congratulation over the Toronto 2015 Pan American Games, Ontario inexcusably missed a huge chance to create a lasting Games legacy of increased accessibility of tourism/hospitality services (like restaurants, stores, hotels, taxis and public transit) for tourists and local residents with disabilities. “When all eyes were on Toronto, including up to one billion people with disabilities world-wide, the cruel reality is that many if not most restaurants and stores remain inaccessible,” said David Lepofsky, chair of the non-partisan AODA Alliance, which led the campaign to get the Government to create a strong Games legacy of improved tourism/hospitality. “These barriers, which daily confront over 1.8 million Ontarians with disabilities, hurt so many and cause Ontario to lose out on a massive tourism market.”Even though this summer the Wynne Government celebrated the tenth anniversary of Ontario’s Disabilities Act, it has repeatedly dropped the ball when it comes to implementing and enforcing that law, which requires the Government to lead Ontario to become fully disability-accessible by 2025. The Toronto 2015 Games gave the Government a great chance to use its leadership and its enforcement powers to get Ontario’s tourism/hospitality providers to gear up to increase their accessibility. Yet the Government again missed the boat. Two years ago, on August 28, 2013, when the Wynne Government unveiled its plans for the 2015 Games’ legacy, it announced no plans for a legacy of increased accessibility of tourism and hospitality services. The AODA Alliance spent the last two years pressing the Government to expand its legacy plans, and offered the Government a detailed plan of action. For months, the Government did nothing about this. Ten months before the Games, on September 25, 2014, Premier Kathleen Wynne at last directed her cabinet minister responsible for the Games, Michael Coteau, to work with stakeholders to ensure a Games legacy of improved tourism/hospitality. As far as we could discover, the Government still did nothing. Therefore the 2015 Games have so far left no legacy whatsoever of increased accessibility of community-based tourism and hospitality. The Government has aimed to ensure that the Games sports venues are accessible for para-athletes at the upcoming ParaPan Am Games. That is not enough. We remain profoundly concerned that Toronto and the other communities hosting the Toronto 2015 Games are not ready to effectively accommodate the needs of tourists and athletes with disabilities who venture out of the small bubble of the sports stadiums and athletes’ village. If tourists and athletes with disabilities want to eat in our restaurants, shop in our stores, visit our tourism sites, take a taxi, ride public transit, or even find a place to go to the bathroom, they will run up against the many pervasive barriers which have impeded Ontarians with disabilities for years. As a small effort to fill in for the Government’s failure in this area, the Games organizers held a seminar for some tourism/hospitality providers last spring to emphasize benefits of increasing accessibility. However, much more was and is needed than one limited workshop.This Government failure is inexcusable. The Government is behind schedule for ensuring that Ontario becomes fully accessible by 2025. To make up at least in part for this major missed opportunity, we urge two constructive actions: First, the Wynne Government should use these ten days before the ParaPan Am Games for a last-minute accessibility blitz, targeted at key tourism/hospitality services like restaurants and stores. Public attention over the next days will be focused with heightened emphasis on disability issues as the ParaPan Am Games approach.It won’t take long for a restaurant to order a Braille and large print menu, or make sure its menu is posted in an accessible format on its web site. A ramp to bridge a few steps at the front door can be put in place relatively quickly. A focused public blitz could be deployed to ensure that restaurants do not block people with disabilities with service animals, and hotels don’t try to charge them an illegal pet fee. The Ontario Government can also help by taking steps to get municipalities not to impede local businesses, like stores and restaurants, who want to do the right thing by installing a ramp at their front door. The Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review Report recently highlighted the importance of the Government using the Toronto 2015 Games to increase the accessibility of Ontario as a tourism destination.The Government cannot use a lack of money to justify any further inaction. The Toronto 2015 Games announced weeks ago that they are tens of millions of dollars under budget. Second, as the media and political leaders ponder whether Toronto should bid on the 2024 Olympics, Ontario must learn from its recent big mistakes. Before committing to any such bid, our government should publicly pledge to make increased accessibility of tourism and hospitality services a central and important goal of any such bid. Ontario cannot afford to miss any more opportunities to increase disability accessibility. Ontario now has no comprehensive plan that will ensure that Ontario reaches full accessibility by 2025."Neither of those constructive recommendations were acted upon, as far as we could ascertain. The August 5, 2015 AODA Alliance Update shed more light on this issue, as follows:" In an August 4, 2015 news release (set out at the end of this Update), the Wynne Government claims that the upcoming Toronto 2015 ParaPan American Games will be "The Most Accessible Parapan Am Games Ever." … …The Government may have issued its August 4, 2015 news release in response to the AODA Alliance's July 28, 2015 news release, under the headline: "Despite All the Official Rejoicing, Toronto 2015 Pan Am Games Sadly Missed a Huge Chance for a Great Legacy for Ontarians with Disabilities by Failing to Increase Accessibility of Tourism/Hospitality Venues like Restaurants and Stores - Before any 2024 Toronto Olympic Bid, Ontario Must Ensure It Doesn't Repeat This Wasteful Mistake." … …We applaud those individuals who have taken their stories of barriers they have faced at the Toronto 2015 Games, or in restaurants and other venues in Ontario to the media. As illustrated in examples set out below, these help focus public attention on the need for greater Government action."Thanks in part to our efforts, the media gave good attention to accessibility issues in connection with the Pan/Parapan American Games. The August 18, 2015 AODA Alliance Update included:"Our efforts over the past months in pressing disability accessibility in connection with the Toronto 2015 Games paid off in terms of increased media attention on this issue. Sadly, it did not generate the extent of Government effort on accessibility that we had sought and deserve.Here is the latest media sampling:1. An especially important article in the online edition of the August 15, 2015 Toronto Star, set out below, made public two important accessibility shortfalls at the ParaPan American Games. First, the article revealed that the brand-new Athletes' Village, built specifically for the Games and intended as a major piece of accessibility legacy for the Games, did not include Braille signage. Unlike one typically finds on the guest room doors of US hotels, the Athletes' Village, which housed many blind athletes, had no Braille room numbers on the guest rooms. This is an easy accessibility feature to provide. Second, the article made public our news that at the Games Opening Ceremony, a glossy print program was offered to attendees, but no Braille version was available. The article reported the following excuse for this: "Officials referred to printing costs and the ability for spectators to read accessible documents online as reasons behind their decision."Yet the cost of printing some Braille copies of this program would not have caused the Government undue hardship, within the meaning of the Ontario Human Rights Code, especially when the Games were reportedly millions of dollars under budget. The alternative of offering the program online is no answer. This is because the Toronto 2015 website had real accessibility deficiencies. Moreover, sighted attendees at the Opening Ceremony were given the chance to read the program there and then. They were not told to go home and read it afterwards. Treating blind people differently hardly is a good illustration of the Government leading by example on accessibility.2. An August 12, 2015 story on CITY TV News, (transcript set out below) focused on difficulties para-athletes at the ParaPan American Games faced when leaving the Games bubble and trying to find an accessible place to eat. 3. An August 12, 2015 article in the Toronto Star (set out below) asked how accessible Toronto is from the perspective of para-athletes coming to the ParaPan American Games. Because there are so many barriers in the Toronto community, the article focused on a new app that was released that week. Called "Access Now," it lets anyone post information about the accessibility of specific locations. Its innovative creator, Maayan Ziv, created it because of the great many barriers she has faced in Toronto. We commend Ms. Ziv for her ingenuity. We urge one and all to post accessibility information on the Access Now app. You can send in accessibility reports about specific venues to post in the app by email info@accessnow.ca or by visiting the Access Now website at accessnow.ca Because this app was released just before the ParaPan American Games, it was obviously not populated with enough postings to ensure that para-athletes could get around the many barriers in Toronto.This great new app is no substitute for actually increasing the accessibility of stores, restaurants and other public establishments in our community - something the Ontario Government did not focus on in preparation for the 2015 Pan/ParaPan American Games. 4. An article in the August 16, 2015 Toronto Star, set out below, included accessibility as one of the issues to consider when reflecting back on the ParaPan American Games. The article noted: "An influx of athletes and other visitors with disabilities put accessibility issues top of mind for the week." It referred to the new Access Now app.Under the heading "The Bad," the article included:"Accessibility barriers Athletes reported the athletes village was lacking in Braille signs for the visually impaired. Accessibility advocate David Lepofsky commended the organizers for "a number of good accessibility features," including live audio description, as he took in the ceremonies, wheelchair basketball and goalball. But the service was not well-publicized, he said."The article also listed poor attendance at the ParaPan American Games as a negative. It reported that with three days left, fewer than 85,000 of the 200,000 ParaPan American Games tickets had sold.We consider this a serious failure by the Government and the Toronto 2015 organization. Had these Games been effectively marketed, far more would have attended. One major benefit of the ParaPan American Games is as a means of tearing down attitudinal barriers that impede people with disabilities every day of their lives. Half-empty stadiums at too many of these competitions represent a huge missed opportunity to change public attitudes. It also sent a bad message to the para-athletes who came here to compete."We summarized the overall results of the Pan/Parapan American Games from an accessibility perspective in a guest column by AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky in the August 20, 2015 Toronto Star, which included:" As talk of a Toronto Olympic bid heats up, we must ensure we don't repeat the shortcomings on accessibility for people with disabilities surrounding the Pan Am and Parapan Am Games. The Parapan Am Games showed amazing ways that athletes with disabilities play sports that others think impossible. They showed how people with disabilities can participate fully in school, work and play if given a chance. The Wynne government deserves credit for some real accessibility innovations. It acted on our proposal to provide audio description at some Games events, so blind people like me could follow the action. CBC is said to have given more coverage to the Parapan Games than in the past. Volunteers were warm, welcoming and eager to assist. A great but temporary service (one the government has not committed to continue) let people with disabilities book para-transit rides across municipal borders, without the usual multi-jurisdictional headaches. Yet several avoidable barriers show that the government's boasts about the Pan Am Games' accessibility were over-inflated. Blind computer users like me faced obvious accessibility problems using the Toronto 2015 website and iPhone app. I couldn't buy tickets using either. Until blasted in the media, the app's link to the Games' accessibility features was ironically inaccessible. No braille room numbers on the athletes' village guest rooms? U.S. hotels typically have braille signage. They handed out print programs but offered none in braille at the opening ceremonies for the Parapan Am Games. Goal ball is a sport for blind players. Ironically, there was no braille on public bathroom doors in the stadium where it was played. Spectators could get the rules only in print, not braille. Properly designed websites are easy for me to use. It was hard to navigate CBC's website to find Parapan Am broadcasts. It was even worse using an iPhone. There were bigger failures. An international para-sport official said that before the Beijing and Sochi Paralympics, those governments worked hard to make their communities - not just the stadiums - more accessible. We spent two years urging our government to do this as well. Yet the government did nothing to improve the accessibility of tourism and hospitality services, like stores, restaurants and taxis. What a legacy of increased community accessibility we could have created had the government listened. If the province had effectively advocated to businesses and targeted Disabilities Act enforcement, it could have made a huge difference. Instead, it cut back on accessibility enforcement this year. The Pan Am Games committee's last-minute accessibility seminar for a mere 175 businesses eight weeks before the Games was a drop in the bucket. As I stood in the crowd at the Parapan Am opening ceremony, cheering 1,600 para-athletes, the electrifying excitement was tempered by my embarrassment as an Ontarian. I knew that if these para-athletes ventured outside the Games' tiny bubble, they would have a hard time finding places to eat, shop or go to the bathroom. With a billion potential tourists with disabilities around the world, we should have shown our guests a far more accessible community. The government must do better if it launches a bid for the Olympics. It must ensure that all the stadiums and buildings built for the event meet our Human Rights Code's accessibility requirements. The government must work vigorously for years before the games to substantially increase accessibility outside the Games' bubble. The Parapan Am Games had great potential to tear down stereotypes that hold back the 1.8 million Ontarians with disabilities. Yet poor marketing meant that half of the tickets never sold. One hundred thousand empty seats translates into 100,000 people whose attitudes on disability were not changed. I believe Premier Kathleen Wynne wants to do better. Her government must squarely face the finding of its own independent review that 10 years of implementing our accessibility law has not made a significant difference in the lives of people with disabilities. Ontario is not on schedule for full accessibility by 2025, the deadline imposed by the Disability Act. The government can make groundbreaking progress. As a small illustration, it did so by providing audio description for some of the Games. By listening to us, keeping commitments to us and effectively implementing and enforcing the Disabilities Act, Ontario could become a world leader in accessibility."An international Paralympic official spoke during the event's formal closing ceremonies about the para-athletes as "super-human." This reinforced a counter-productive stereotype regarding people with disabilities, hurting rather than helping the message of inclusion. To make matters worse, as the AODA Alliance video on accessibility problems at new Toronto area public transit stations shows, the new Union-Pearson commuter line, built for the Pan/Parapan American Games, had serious accessibility problems at the two stations that we investigated. f) Other Missed Opportunities for the Ontario Public Service to Advance the Goal of Accessibility The AODA Alliance's January 19, 2015 analysis of Premier Wynne's December 23, 2014 letter to the AODA Alliance identified a range of other ways that the Ontario Public Service could show leadership on accessibility, and that we had raised with Premier Wynne. The former Ontario Government took none of the actions we there identified, as far as we have been told. These are yet more missed opportunities for Ontario Government leadership on accessibility. That Analysis includes:" There are several other important questions that we asked of the Premier and her cabinet ministers last summer, which the Premier's and Minister Duguid's December 2014 letters do not answer. These include:In our September 16, 2014 letter to the Minister of International Trade, Michael Chan, we asked the Minister to:* incorporate disability accessibility as a prominent part of the International Trade Ministry's strategy for economic development and innovation. * develop and implement a comprehensive strategy for incorporating disability accessibility as a core focus in the Ministry's international trade agenda and activities. * incorporate disability accessibility as a condition of grants and subsidies for economic development, innovation and international trade that the ministry provides to the broader public and the private sectors. * take into account whether business representatives have accessible products to sell to the international market, when the Government decides which business leaders are to be invited to join the Government on international trade tours and missions.* strengthen Ontario producers of adaptive technology in order to help reach international markets for these products.In our September 16, 2014 letter to the Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities (who is also the Minister of Research and Innovation), Reza Moridi, we asked the Minister to: * ensure disability accessibility is a key focus of research and innovation programs and projects that the Government operates or finances.In our September 16, 2014 letter to the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing, Ted McMeekin, we asked the Minister to show leadership by effectively advocating to the municipal sector on achieving municipal accessibility more broadly.In our September 16, 2014 letter to the Minister of Health, Eric Hoskins, we asked the Minister to ensure that health records in the new eHealth system are fully accessible to people with disabilities."6. Developments Since the June 2018 Ontario ElectionOn July 19, 2018, the AODA Alliance wrote Doug Ford to list priority actions that only he, as premier could take. These are the kinds of things that we need to have included in Mandate Letters. That letter included among its requests, the following:"1. Issue written directions to the Secretary of the Cabinet, and to all cabinet ministers, deputy ministers and associate deputy ministers, to take effective action to ensure that the Ontario Government leads Ontario to full accessibility by 2025. Please include specific directions on this in Mandate Letters to each cabinet minister."That letter also recommended the following to Premier Ford:"IV. Re-Engineer How the Ontario Public Service Acts to Ensure Accessibility of Its Services and WorkplacesFor decades, disability accessibility has been weakly and disjointedly addressed across the huge Ontario Public Service, in isolated, disconnected silos. We have suffered frustrating year after year, having to separately advocate to several different ministries and ministers, endlessly chasing our tails. After each cabinet shuffle, we must start all over again. We recommend that your Government substantially re-engineer how the Ontario Public Service ensures that its services, facilities and workplaces are fully accessible. We need the Secretary of the Cabinet to institute effective new Government-wide initiatives, to far more effectively ensure that accessibility for persons with disabilities is imbedded and integrated in all the Ontario Public Service's work. Despite its claiming to do this, it too often has been difficult to get accessibility integrated into its activities across the board. This is so, despite constructive laws and policies on point. We recommend that you:5. Direct the Secretary of the Cabinet to implement effective new strategies to ensure the Ontario Public Service becomes a fully accessible employer and service provider, and to ensure that disability accessibility is embedded in all vital Government decisions. Leading major corporations like IBM and Microsoft have a Chief Accessibility Officer. Ontario does not. The Ontario Public Service needs a fulltime deputy minister or associate deputy minister responsible for, and armed with the authority for ensuring that the Ontario Public Service becomes a fully accessible workplace and service provider. No such full-time position now exists. Leading the Ontario Public Service to full accessibility is not just a part time job. We recommend that you:6. Direct that a full-time deputy minister or associate deputy minister position be immediately created, as a Chief Accessibility Officer, with lead responsibility and authority for ensuring that the Ontario Public Service becomes a fully accessible workplace and service provider.Right now, each ministry is supposed to have a part time or full time official designated as an Accessibility Lead for that ministry. However, too often, these Accessibility Leads are buried too far down in the hierarchy of their organizations to have a full and effective impact. Moreover, these individuals have varying disability accessibility expertise, some more than others. We have tried for years without success to get this weak system strengthened.We recommend that you 7. Direct the Secretary of the Cabinet to require each Ministry’s Accessibility Lead be made a full-time position, reporting to the deputy minister of that Ministry, with needed accessibility expertise." Premier Ford wrote the AODA Alliance in response on July 31, 2018. He did not make any commitments to action. Instead he referred all our inquiries to Minister for Accessibility and Seniors Raymond Cho. He wrote:"I note that you’ve sent a copy of your email to the Honourable Raymond Cho, Minister for Seniors and Accessibility. As this issue falls in his area of responsibility, I’ve asked that Minister Cho or a ministry staff member respond to you as soon as possible."We received a similar letter from Minister for Accessibility and Seniors Cho on 15, 2018. It did not commit to any of the action we had requested of Premier Ford, such as the request to include in the premier's Mandate Letters to ministers instructions on their accessibility commitments and duties.We do not know what instructions, if any, Premier ford has given his minister on accessibility in his Mandate Letters. Premier Ford's Mandate Letters to his cabinet have not been made public, as far as we have seen. Chapter 11 The Unmet Need for a Strong and Effective Ontario Strategy to Substantially increase the Employment of Ontarians with Disabilities 1. Introduction To fulfil the AODA's goal of accessibility for people with disabilities by 2025 in the context of employment, in addition to a much stronger Employment Accessibility Standard (as addressed in Chapter 3), Ontario also needs a strong and comprehensive strategy to promote expanded employment opportunities for people with disabilities. It is widely recognized and undisputed that people with disabilities face excessive and unfair unemployment rates. The 2011 Employment Accessibility Standard, while helpful, was incapable of solving this problem, on its own. This chapter explores what the Ontario Government has done about this. In summary, the former Ontario Government commendably committed to act on this in February 2013. However, it took far too long and did far too little in this area.2. Recommended Findings We urge this AODA Independent Review to find as follows:* People with disabilities continue to face unfair and high rates of unemployment. This inflicts serious hardships on people with disabilities and on society. Society significantly benefits by substantially increasing the employment of people with disabilities * The Ontario Government is a significant cause of the disability unemployment problem* Ontario does not now have in place sufficient measures to combat this. At the present rate, employment in Ontario will not be achieve full accessibility for people with disabilities by 2025. A stronger AODA Employment Accessibility Standard would help. However, companion Government strategies on increased employment for people with disabilities are also needed. Short term tax cuts or financial incentives are no long term solution* Barriers that students with disabilities face in Ontario's education system contribute to the unemployment plight facing too many people with disabilities. A good education is needed to get a good job. As such, delays in creating a strong and effective AODA Education Accessibility Standard contribute to the ongoing unemployment plight facing people with disabilities. That includes the previous 'Governments multi-year delay in deciding to create an AODA Education Accessibility Standard, and the current Government's freeze on the work of the K-12 and Post-Secondary Education Standards Development Committees.* If Ontario had in place a combination of a stronger Employment Accessibility Standard, a strong Education Accessibility Standard, a stronger Transportation Accessibility Standard, a strong Built Environment Accessibility Standard, and a strong provincial disability employment strategy, the workplaces of 5 to 6 years from now can and should be fully accessible to people with disabilities.* It was unjustifiable for the former Ontario Government to have taken over four years to develop a disability employment strategy. There have already been ample studies, reports and advisory councils on employment for people with disabilities. What is needed now is action, not more delay for extensive study and discussions.* The former Government's "Access Talent" disability employment strategy, announced in June 2017, has some helpful ingredients. However these were too often too high-level or preliminary. More concrete action is needed with prompt benefits for people with disabilities trying to enter or remain in the workforce. 3. Recommendations to Improve Employment Opportunities for People with Disabilities The Ontario Government should designate a specific minister and deputy minister with lead responsibility for ensuring that all the needed measures are taken to ensure substantially increased employment opportunities for people with disabilities.The Ontario Government should, within two months, make public a list of options for a strengthened disability employment strategy, drawn from the Government's own past and present programs, and from the programs and ideas that others have accumulated, e.g. those readily discoverable on the internet. The Government should promptly consult the public, including employers and people with disabilities on those options, and on any additional options that the public brings forward. Within three months of releasing that list of options, the Government should announce a new and strengthened Ontario disability employment strategy, supplementing the existing Access Talent strategy, to substantially increase employment opportunities for people with disabilities. As part of this strategy:The Government should not treat "raising awareness" among employers about the benefits of employment for people with disabilities as its core strategy for substantially increasing employment opportunities for people with disabilities.The Government should become a role model - leading by example through increased employment of people with disabilities in the Ontario Public Service (OPS) and the broader public sector and procuring services, providing grants or financing to organizations with a strong orientation toward supporting employment of people with disabilitiesThe Government should eliminate Government-created barriers to increased employment of people with disabilitiesThe Government should promptly implement a pro-active strategy to ensure that all students with disabilities in K-12 education secure an experiential learning opportunity, to work towards getting a good job reference to assist them in securing their first paid job.4. What the 2014 Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review Report FoundThe 2014 report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review included:* "Barriers to employment received considerable emphasis during the consultations. Individuals and organizations discussed the fundamental importance of a job to quality of life. Viewed in this context, the unemployment of people with disabilities is harmful, not only because it causes poverty, but also because it means decisions in government, education, health care, business and other fields are made without their input. “It is easy to ignore or forget about us,” as one presenter at a Toronto session said."* "According to many people with disabilities who participated in the consultations, transportation barriers continue to restrict employment and participation in the life of the community."* "Access to EmploymentThe Review heard that the AODA has made little difference on the employment front. People with mental health issues still face stigma in the job market and in the workplace. Employees with episodic disabilities, such as HIV/AIDS or multiple sclerosis, may need flexible work schedules but often are not offered this accommodation. The Review was told that managers frequently overestimate how much accommodation will cost and conclude they can’t afford to hire someone with a disability. Employers are sometimes unfair in interpreting medical certificates, leading to inadequate individual accommodation plans."* "On the positive side, stakeholders from both obligated sectors and the disability community generally applauded the move of the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario to the Ministry of Economic Development, Trade and Employment (now the Ministry of Economic Development, Employment and Infrastructure). The ministry that deals with business and industry seems a logical home for efforts to bring the private sector on side with accessibility. The move fits in with the message that accessibility makes good business sense and generates economic benefits. The Ministry’s employment mandate was also welcome, as a recent survey showed that employment is the most important issue for people with disabilities. On the other hand, some felt the Ministry was moving too slowly on its promised strategy to increase private sector employment of people with disabilities."* "The mental health community feels strongly that mental health and other non-visible disabilities should be better integrated into the content of standards. For example, it was suggested that the Employment standard should provide clear guidelines for accommodating employees with mental health disabilities."* "EmploymentSeveral participants argued that the Employment Standard in the IASR should be extended to cover volunteers and other unpaid workers. Mental health patients often perform unpaid work as a pathway to employment and the Ontario Human Rights Commission has made it clear that the Human Rights Code applies to work-like contexts.Business and disability stakeholders both observed that the standards address the stages in the employment lifecycle but leave out measures to actually promote employment. Disability groups proposed creation of an accessibility employment centre under the standard. This would develop a database on the skills and qualifications of people with disabilities – helping them to find jobs and employers to find candidates. A business group tabled a similar proposal for an employment “hub” that would link multiple employers with people with disabilities seeking work. More generally, a number of participants noted the importance of increasing the employment of persons with disabilities as a key element in ensuring full inclusion.Business and disability stakeholders both observed that the standards address the stages in the employment lifecycle but leave out measures to actually promote employment."5. What the Former Ontario Government Did from 2014 to 2018It was commendable that shortly after the AODA was enacted in 2005, the former Ontario Government agreed to create an AODA Employment Accessibility Standard, and that one was enacted in 2011. However, the 2011 Employment Accessibility Standard, enacted as part of the 2011 Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation, while somewhat helpful, fell miles short of what people with disabilities need to advance the goal of equal employment opportunity in Ontario. Chapter 3 of this brief addresses the insufficiency of the existing Employment Accessibility Standard and of the recommendations to revise it that the Employment Standards Development Committee proposed in early 2018. For the most part, the 2011 Employment Accessibility Standard helps facilitate workplace accommodation of employees and job-seekers with disabilities. However it does far too little to try to change the workplace, so that it becomes barrier-free for job-seekers and employees with disabilities. If Ontario had in place a combination of a much stronger Employment Accessibility Standard and a strong provincial disability employment strategy, the workplaces of 5 to 6 years from now can and should be fully accessible to people with disabilities. Therefore it is essential both to strengthen the Employment Accessibility Standard and for the Ontario Government to adopt a broader disability employment strategy that is strong and effective. It was commendable that just days after Kathleen Wynne became Ontario's premier in February 2013, her first Throne speech, read on February 19, 2013, committed to making employment for people with disabilities a priority. The February 19, 2013 Throne Speech included:“Your government will ensure that all individuals can find their role in this economy. And so it calls on the private sector to increase the number of people with disabilities in the Ontario workforce. As a demonstration of its commitment to this goal, your government will shift the Accessibility Directorate from the Ministry of Community and Social Services to the Ministry of Economic Development, Trade and Employment. Because men and women with disabilities deserve a level playing field.”However, after that, the establishment of a supposedly broad new Ontario disability employment strategy took an unwarranted four years and four months. The resulting action was to high level and vague to effectively meet this need, though it included some potential for progress. At the rate Ontario is now going, employment will not be fully accessible to people with disabilities by 2025, or ever. We here show what happened and why it was palpably insufficient.Here is how the saga unfolded. Three months after the first Wynne Government Throne Speech, Premier Wynne’s new Employment Minister, Eric Hoskins, who was also responsible for the AODA's implementation and enforcement, commendably announced in the Legislature on May 28, 2013: “Talk is important, but it will only get us so far. We need action. So I have instructed my ministry to develop a strategy for accessible and inclusive employment so that we can all work together to improve the participation rate of Ontarians with disabilities in the workforce.”That was another early hopeful signal. Yet as far as we saw, that led to no real action for the next nine months, if not much longer.The next time the former Ontario Government was to show a glimmer of any substantive action on this issue was a full year after the February 19, 2013 Throne Speech. We made it public when we learned about it through the grapevine. The February 7, 2014 AODA Alliance Update bore the headline: "Ontario Government's Promised Plan to Increase Private Sector Employment for Ontarians with Disabilities Turns Out To Be More Delay, Re-Inventing the Wheel, No Teeth and No Imminent Practical Improvements". The February 7, 2014 AODA Alliance Update then offered this analysis:" We have learned that to keep its year-old Throne Speech commitment for action to increase employment of Ontarians with disabilities in the private sector, the Ontario Government still has no prompt results in mind, and just more delays. It is planning to set up a new advisory council to suggest ideas on how to increase the private sector employment of persons with disabilities in Ontario, to report by the end of 2014. Below, we set out the text of a letter that the Government has sent to people it is encouraging to apply to sit on that Council. We also set out an article in the February 7, 2014 Toronto Star describing some of our concerns with this. Rather than now implementing prompt, bold new action that will effectively help unemployed persons with disabilities, the Government seems headed on a course of slowly re-inventing the wheel. The many unemployed and underemployed Ontarians with disabilities may see and feel no results for months, if ever.In this Update we describe what the Government is proposing to do, explain why we disagree with the Government's approach, and propose a quicker, better plan of action. More details1. Our Response to the Government's PlansThe Government is setting up a new advisory council, to include representatives from business and the disability community. This Council is expected to make recommendations on how to increase the private sector employment of persons with disabilities in Ontario.At first blush, this sounds great. Anything that helps create more job opportunities for persons with disabilities should be welcomed. Anything that directly engages the private sector in this cause should be especially desirable.Yet we have serious concerns:* The Government has taken far too long to get moving on its commitment regarding the chronic unemployment plight facing persons with disabilities. Fully one year ago, on February 19, 2014, in Premier Kathleen Wynne's first Throne Speech, the Government said that employment would be a new priority, with a new minister responsible for employment. That minister is Dr. Eric Hoskins. He is the same person responsible for leading the implementation and enforcement of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act. That Throne Speech called on the private sector to specifically address employment for persons with disabilities. It should not have taken a year to get this process started. The Government should already have developed and launched an action plan to get more employment opportunities for persons with disabilities. Last summer, Dr. Hoskins proclaimed that accessibility for persons with disabilities is a "top priority" for him and the Ontario Government.* The Government is giving this new advisory council an excessive ten months to come up with recommendations. The text of the Government's letter, set out below, states "…it will be the objective of the council to submit its final report before the end of 2014." This shouldn't take as much as ten months. No doubt, the Government contemplates yet more delay after receiving that report, to decide what to do with the Council's recommendations. Unemployed and underemployed persons with disabilities should not have to suffer yet more delay. The AODA requires a fully accessible by 2025, 20 years after it was enacted. Nine of those 20 years have already passed. Only eleven years remain. * This feels like a bad case of déjà vu. The Government has already created, staffed and operated a multi-year advisory committee drawn from the disability community, the private sector and the broader public sector, to identify impediments to employment for persons with disabilities, and to recommend corrective action. Back in 2007, under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, the Ontario Government appointed the Employment Standards Development Committee. It was required to consult the public and craft recommendations for an Employment Accessibility Standard to be enacted under the AODA. That Committee worked hard. It presented its final recommendation to the Government in September 2009. The Government invited and received public input on those recommendations. The Government studied that feedback for at least one year. After this, the Government enacted the Integrated Accessibility Standard Regulation in June 2011 under the AODA. That regulation includes a series of provisions addressing accessibility in the workplace for persons with disabilities.Regrettably, when the Government passed that regulation, it did not incorporate all our recommendations to make it strong and effective. The Government seems now to be creating yet another committee to re-plough much of the same terrain.We agree that the employment accessibility provisions passed under the AODA in June 2011 don't go far enough, and have time lines that are too long. Reinforcing this, the Honourable Frances Lankin et al rendered an important report in October 2012 at the Government's request entitled: "Brighter Prospects-Transforming Social Assistance in Ontario." It reaffirmed that persons with disabilities need more to gain proper access to employment. That report stated: "Third, governments, employers, and indeed all of us, must do more to remove the significant barriers that people with disabilities face. Discrimination, a lack of workplace accommodation, and other barriers can discourage or undermine individual efforts to engage in the labour force or community, despite high personal motivation. While there has been progress in removing workplace barriers for people with disabilities, it will take time to see the full impact. For example, the Accessibility Standard for Employment under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) is being phased in over five years (from 2012 to 2017). As long as systemic, structural, and attitudinal barriers impede employment and participation, these barriers must be recognized in the Pathway to Employment Plans for people with disabilities."That report made detailed recommendations for action. * Since the AODA was enacted in 2005, the Government has also appointed and maintained the Accessibility Standards Advisory Council (ASAC). It includes representation from the disability community, the public sector and the private sector. Giving advice on strategies for improving the employment of persons with disabilities is well within that under-utilized Council's mandate. * The Government stated as follows in a February 4, 2014 email to us: "The Partnership Council will provide strategic advice and recommend best practices to government as we develop our first-ever employment strategy for people with disabilities. This council is different than the advisory panel that helped develop our employment standard because it is focused on working with the business community to raise awareness about the economic opportunities of hiring people with disabilities to grow our economy and create jobs. We anticipate the Partnership Council will make its final report before the end of the year."Yet it is our understanding that this very activity was part of the focus of the Employment Accessibility Standards Development Committee from 2007 to 2009. * Making this worse, the Government seems to be taking all this time to re-invent a wheel that it has already invented. For example:a) Years ago, the Ontario Government retained the Martin Prosperity Institute to do a major study of the benefits of making Ontario disability-accessible. In the 2010 summer, an excellent and thorough report was produced as a result. … b) The Ontario Government's Ministry of Community and Social Services (which had lead responsibility for the AODA until last year) has for several years spearheaded the Government's "Don't Waste Talent" initiative to promote employment for persons with disabilities. For more on the Ontario Government's "Don't Waste Talent" program, visit c) The Accessibility Directorate of Ontario, the branch of the Ontario Government that is mandated to oversee the AODA's implementation and enforcement, has for several years operated the Enabling Change Program. In this program, the Government has partnered with several private sector organizations and funded several projects to promote accessibility. d) The Federal Government has already undertaken a project to gather input on a similar topic. The Government of Canada's "Re-Thinking Disability in the Private Sector - Report from the Panel on Labour Market Opportunities for Persons with Disabilities" is available at e) If the Government were to now simply do an internet search, it would instantly find many other sources of good ideas for an employment strategy for persons with disabilities in the private sector, such as:The Harvard Law School's Project on disability, available at International Labour Organization I.L.O.'s new initiative to promote employment of disabled people in the private sector, available at U.S. Government's "Job Accommodation Network" has operated for years, providing information supports for employers in the area of employment for persons with disabilities. To learn more about the U.S. Job Accommodation Network, visit Strategies to Support Employer-Driven Initiatives to Recruit and Retain Employees with Disabilities: A joint publication from the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development and the Kessler Foundation, by visiting . What the Ontario Government Should Be doingWe believe these steps are long overdue:First and foremost, the Ontario Government should immediately effectively enforce and make full use of the employment accessibility requirements of the Integrated Accessibility Standard Regulation that it enacted in June 2011.For example, section 4 of that regulation directs that by January 1, 2014, private organizations in Ontario with at least 50 employees are required to establish, implement, maintain and document a multi-year accessibility plan. It must outline the organization's strategy to prevent and remove barriers and meet its requirements under that Regulation. This includes reviewing and addressing barriers to employment in the workplace. The Ministry of Economic Development, Trade and Employment should quickly assemble a list of options for a disability employment strategy, drawn from the Government's own past and present programs, and from the programs and ideas that others have accumulated. The internet makes this very quick and easy to do. The Government should immediately make this list public.If the Government wishes to informally bring together a group of disability advocates and private sector leaders to discuss action options to expand disability employment, it should hold that meeting within the next four weeks. No fancy and formal "council" is needed, with all the attending bureaucracy and cost. The attendees should be given in advance the list of action options from Ontario and around the world that the Ministry has discovered. That informal group should take one or two days to brainstorm its own ideas and offer members' reactions to the list of action options that the Ministry has accumulated. The group should not be bogged down with voting on any of the options, but just offer individual feedback.The Government should then review this feedback and announce and implement its action plan within four weeks of that meeting.With the prospect of a possible spring election in Ontario, persons with disabilities should not have to wait months or years before action is taken."On this issue, more wind was added to our sails when the February 10, 2014 Toronto Star included an editorial that called for more and swifter action by the Ontario Government on disability employment. This was the twelfth editorial in the previous sixteen years that had supported our organized accessibility campaign. The February 10, 2014 Toronto Star editorial included: "Mark Wafer travels the world giving corporate leaders his business case for hiring disabled workers - and he's attracting a receptive audience. Increasingly, business sees the value they bring to the workplace. But here in Ontario, home to Wafer's seven Tim Hortons franchises, government policies still actively hinder the economic and emotional growth of disabled residents. It doesn't have to be this way. While Premier Kathleen Wynne's government still needs to develop an overarching strategy for the long-term housing and care of the disabled in a province where many people have varying degrees of disability, there's no reason why some employment barriers at least can't be quickly stripped away. Consider Wafer, a man who understands disabilities. He's deaf. With a small empire of Tims restaurants in Scarborough, he's been hiring the disabled for years. Some are intellectually challenged, with Down syndrome. Others have severe autism, or Tourette's syndrome. Some just need a wheelchair. As he says of his employees, "We tend to put limits on people with intellectual disabilities but we really don't know what their limits are until we get them into the workplace." What he discovered, over the years, is both inspiring and maddening. Some of those intellectually challenged workers turn out to be his best employees. Individually, they blossom, taking on responsibilities their families had never imagined. Collectively, they've enabled Wafer to achieve an increase in productivity, a drop in absenteeism and a relatively low turnover rate of 40 per cent, half of Ontario's fast food average of 75 to 90 per cent. Since it costs some $4,000 to advertise for, hire and train each new staff member, the savings are notable. As Wafer says, that's good business. But perversely, some Ontario government policies serve to block people with disabilities from entering the workforce. That's wrong. And the Wynne government has something to learn by listening to advocates like Wafer, or Joe Dale of the Ontario Disabilities Employment Network, who have ideas for getting people off social assistance and helping them join the workforce. For example, parents often don't want their working-age child to give up the security of a rare and coveted spot in a daytime enrichment program for a job that may or may not pan out. That might force their child back to the bottom of a long waiting list for programs and services. As Dale says, the province should allow for a "rapid reinstatement" of services. Mitigating the risk of taking a job would encourage more people to try working. If Wafer's experience rings true many will succeed, freeing up space in day programs for others. Some need the expensive drug coverage they only receive under the Ontario Disability Support Program, for those on social assistance. There should be some provision to provide essential coverage for the disabled who are working. There's more that can be done. As Progressive Conservative deputy leader Christine Elliott notes, tweaking the education system could bring rewards. Creating disability-friendly training programs in community colleges, for example, could open doors to jobs. "Many families liken the end of high school to 'falling off a cliff' because their children have no supports, either vocational or recreational, to turn to after age 21. They end up watching TV in their parents' home," Elliott says. Moreover success in the workplace needn't require big spending. It can be as simple as training that is tailored to a person's disability. Or giving workers with poor eyesight larger computer screens. Nobody is advocating big provincial subsidies to spur hiring. As Wafer says, "This is not charity. Of the 92 people I've hired with a disability, every single one of those was meaningful with competitive pay." That's just the point. Whether a physically disabled worker is earning a hefty paycheque in say, the technology industry, or an intellectually challenged worker is making basic wages in a restaurant, they've built their own success. This is one area where the Wynne government shouldn't have to strike yet another panel for discussion and debate. Some of the solutions seem obvious. What's needed are a few basic changes to help people to thrive."Months later, we appreciated it when the Government-appointed Partnership Council on disability employment invited the AODA Alliance to make a presentation to it. That Council did not render its final report by the end of 2014, as the former Ontario Government had initially said it would. Its final report did not come for some two years after its appointment, or three years after the February 13, 2013 Throne Speech commitment on disability employment. That undue delay was not the fault of the Partnership Council. That Council was a part-time project made up of volunteers. It was the fault of the former Ontario Government that did not design an support this project to operate far more quickly.Over the next 16 months after our February 2014 revelation of the former Ontario Government's plans to appoint the Partnership Council, and leading to fully two years and three months after the Wynne Government’s February 19, 2013 Throne Speech commitment, the Government had still announced no new targeted measures to assist unemployed people with disabilities get and keep jobs. Fifteen months after the Partnership Council was appointed, on May 11, 2015, it delivered an Initial Report to the Wynne Government. On February 19, 2016, the three-year anniversary of the former Ontario Government's February 19, 2013 Throne Speech commitment on disability employment, the AODA Alliance released a detailed analysis of the Partnership Council's interim report. We included this summary of its findings re the Partnership Council's interim report:"Our analysis is summarized as follows:1. The Partnership Council's Initial Report made these strong findings, with which the AODA Alliance agrees:a) Unemployment among people with disabilities is far too high and inflicts serious hardshipsb) Society significantly benefits by increasing the employment of people with disabilitiesc) The Ontario Government is a significant cause of the disability unemployment problemd) Short term tax cuts or financial incentives are no long term solutione) There are deficiencies in Ontario's education system for students with disabilities that support the AODA Alliance's call for the Government to create an AODA Education Accessibility Standard 2. With only a very few but important reservations (set out below), the AODA Alliance endorses the Report's recommendations as good ideas worthy of action. However, the AODA Alliance emphasizes the Partnership Council's recommendations which we endorse are not the only actions needed to be effective at significantly increasing employment opportunities for people with disabilities. All the Report's recommendations, even if immediately and fully implemented, will take considerable time to produce real results for unemployed people with disabilities. Moreover, even if all of those recommendations were implemented, they would not ensure that workplaces in Ontario would ever become fully accessible to and barrier-free for employees and job applicants with disabilities. Unemployed people with disabilities cannot wait any longer for action. 3. The Partnership Council's Initial Report recommendations included:The Government must create strong strategic leadership, including appointing a Cabinet Minister and dedicated Deputy Minister The Ontario Government should become a role model - leading by example through employment of people with disabilities in the Ontario Public Service (OPS) and the broader public sector and procuring services, providing grants or financing to organizations with a strong orientation toward supporting employment of people with disabilitiesThe Government should better engage youth with disabilitiesThe Government should heighten business awareness of the value of employing people with disabilitiesThe Government should involve employers in planningThe Government should eliminate Government-created barriers to increased employment of people with disabilitiesThe Government should set goals and ensure accountability."Also addressed elsewhere in this brief, three weeks after the Government received the Partnership Council's Initial Report, on June 3, 2015, the Government made what it billed as a major announcement of its plans to beef up the implementation of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act. That included actions for expanding employment opportunities for people with disabilities. When the Government announced those plans, it deliberately withheld the Partnership Council’s Initial Report from the public. We were later to learn that the Government’s June 3, 2015 announcement of modest new action on disability employment directly contradicted the Partnership Council’s recommendations that the Government was then keeping under wraps. On Friday August 28, 2015, over three months after the Government received the Partnership Council’s Report, and over two months after the Government’s June 3,2015 announcement of its first planned actions on employment for people with disabilities, the Wynne Government finally made public the Partnership Council’s May 11, 2015 Initial Report. The Government then had in hand a Freedom of Information application by AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky. It sought public disclosure of that Report, among other things. At the same time, the Government released an August 28, 2015 statement about the Partnership Council's preliminary Report by Economic Development Minister Brad Duguid, and a short “Backgrounder” that aimed to explain both what the Partnership Council's preliminary Report said and what the Government was doing in response. The Government did not make public the Partnership Council’s May 11, 2015 covering letter to Economic Development Minister Brad Duguid. The AODA Alliance has obtained that letter from the Government, and itself made it public. That important letter pointedly emphasized the Partnership Council’s top priorities, and the importance of the Report’s prompt release to the public.The AODA Alliance only heard about the Partnership Council Report’s public release via the grapevine on August 28, 2015. The Government did not let the AODA Alliance know it was released, nor did the Government consult with the AODA Alliance on the Partnership Council’s Report’s findings over the three months after it received the Report. The February 19, 2016 AODA Alliance analysis of the initial Partnership Council Report also provided our response to the Government's August 28, 2015 backgrounder, in which the former Ontario Government responded to that initial report. Our February 19, 2016 analysis summarized our reflections as follows:"4. The AODA Alliance's analysis of the Government's August 28, 2015 Backgrounder, responding to the Partnership Council's Report, reveals the following: The Wynne Government announced no new action for unemployed people with disabilities when it made the Partnership Council's Report public and responded to it There was no commitment of new Government leadership on disability employment, or of new Government action to make the Ontario Government and broader public sector become a positive role model or of new action targeted to get youth with disabilities into the workforce, or to new action to heighten business awareness of the benefits of employing people with disabilities, or of new action to further engage employers in planning for a disability employment strategy, or to new action to remove Government-created barriers to disability employment, or to set goals for increased employment of people with disabilities. The Wynne Government acted against the advice in the Partnership Council's Report without acknowledging it or explaining why, when the Wynne Government announced a planned program for incentives to hire people with disabilities on June 3, 2015.5. There has been even more Government delay on disability employment since it received the May 11, 2015 Partnership Council Initial Report."The Wynne Government's February 2016 budget included a commitment to create a Disability Employment strategy. The Partnership Council's final report described that budget commitment as follows:"According to the budget, the provincial employment strategy will:?establish a cohesive made-in-Ontario vision with goals, priorities and desired outcomes to ensure Ontarians have access to a continuum of employment and training services?provide a better service experience through streamlined access to employment and training services that recognize the varied needs and employment goals of individual clients, and?engage employers as active partners in breaking down employment barriers for people with disabilities and promoting inclusive workplaces"The AODA Alliance's February 19, 2016 news release made it clear in its headline that progress for three years on the former Ontario Government's commitment on disability employment was far too slow. It read: " On Third Anniversary of Premier Wynne's First Throne Speech, that Promised Increased Employment for Ontarians with Disabilities Is a Priority, the AODA Alliance Releases a Detailed Analysis Showing Three Years of Government Dithering and Delay, Despite Declarations by the Wynne Government's Special Advisor on Disability, Former Lieutenant-Governor David Onley, that the Unemployment Rate Facing People with Disabilities Is a National Shame."The next step in this protracted saga came on April 29, 2016, when the Partnership Council submitted its final report to the Wynne Government. That report largely echoed what the Partnership Council said in its initial report a year earlier, amplified with some more details. Many of its recommendations could be helpful in the longer run. Yet it placed too much emphasis on the proposal of a Government public education campaign aimed at employers, and not enough emphasis on enforced and enforceable actions that will ensure that workplaces become barrier-free for workers with disabilities.In late May or early June 2017, over four years after the former Government had promised a new effort on disability employment, we received word from the Government that on June 5, 2017, it would unveil a new disability employment strategy. The June 2, 2017 AODA Alliance Update stated:"The Wynne Government has not undertaken a consultation with the AODA Alliance on what to include in its promised Disability Employment strategy. We have asked to be consulted. Our leadership role on this issue is certainly well-known to the Wynne Government."This failure to consult us was especially frustrating. We had been undertaking research on options to recommend for the promised disability employment strategy. The June 2, 2017 AODA Alliance Update also noted:"Three successive ministers have been responsible for action on this: Eric Hoskins (February 2013 to June 2014), Brad Duguid (June 2014 to June or September 2016) and then Tracy MacCharles (September 2016 to the present). Under each minister, the Wynne Government has emphasized the importance of the Government educating businesses on the benefits of hiring people with disabilities and of removing accessibility barriers in their organizations. It has said that that was its lead strategy on accessibility. Throughout this period, the Wynne Government has proclaimed itself a model employer of people with disabilities that aims to lead others in Ontario by its example."On June 5, 2017, after the former Government released its disability employment strategy, the AODA Alliance issued a news release bearing the headline:"Today's Wynne Government Disability Employment Strategy Offers Too Little Immediate Concrete Action and More Delays for Unemployed Ontarians with Disabilities, After More Than Four Years Since the Government Promised Action".That news release stated in part:"The Wynne Government's Disability Employment Strategy, unveiled this afternoon, will do little for months, if not years, to combat high levels of unemployment facing Ontarians with disabilities. In 2015, David Onley (Ontario's former Lieutenant Governor and now the Wynne Government's Special Advisor on Accessibility) declared that the unemployment rate facing people with disabilities in Canada is not only a national crisis, it's a national shame. "Fully four and a third years in the making, what the Wynne Government today announced to tackle high unemployment disability rates, is mainly high-level long-term concepts. It includes some good general ideas, but not enough specifics or timelines for results. It too often re-announces things Government had said it was already doing, and the risk of months of more delay. After years of waiting, what we need instead is a plan to hit the ground running now, with immediate, practical action that will quickly help get jobs for far too many unemployed and under-employed Ontarians with disabilities," said David Lepofsky, chair of the non-partisan AODA Alliance that spearheads the campaign to achieve accessibility for Ontarians with disabilities. "Premier Wynne committed to action way back in her first Throne Speech on February 19, 2013. It took her Government over a year after that just to set up an advisory Partnership Council. It took another year after that Council's April 2016 final report to make today's announcement." The Government today announces yet another new advisory council, a public education program that the Government previously said it was already doing, and months of more deliberations. The Government's announcement also has some good high-level ideas. However, unemployed Ontarians with disabilities better not be holding their breath before they see concrete action and more jobs. It's helpful that the Government wants to focus in part on youth with disabilities, and that it implicitly acknowledges the need for internal Government bureaucratic reforms to employment services for people with disabilities. However, problems in these areas and good ideas for front-line action have been well known for decades. The Wynne Government said it was consulting youth on these issues in its youth roundtables two ministers ago. It has taken the Government over two years to act on ideas its own advisory Partnership Council recommended over in May 2015 – recommendations the Government had said it was already moving on, back in August 2015.Some of this announcement wraps up last year's old shoes as this year's new birthday present. The Government's proposal to educate employers on the benefits of employing people with disabilities is something that minister after minister has announced for years. The Government has for years held out the Ontario Public Service as a model employer, leading others by its example. That had disregarded the Government's own internal accessibility shortcomings, highlighted two and a half years ago, in a Government-appointed independent review of the AODA, made public on February 13, 2015. The 2014 Moran Report stated: “The disability community believes that the Government of Ontario has not succeeded in embedding accessibility into its internal operations.” "It's regrettable that the Wynne Government did not consult us on this Disability Employment strategy, despite our repeated offers," said Lepofsky. "This announcement could have been far more beneficial for people with disabilities if the Wynne Government had talked to us about what it should include, as we offered." Below the AODA Alliance sets out the Government's key points, and a detailed response to them. We commend Minister MacCharles for at least getting something announced, but urge that concrete new action should swiftly follow. The AODA Alliance calls for the Wynne Government to take these actions:The Government should direct senior Government officials to now hold swift face-to-face consultations on concrete action on disability employment now, not limited by the contents of its June 5, 2017 high-level Disability Employment strategy. The Government should now commit to announcing a plan for immediate action on disability unemployment no later than September 1, 2017, with implementation to be completed by the end of this year. Accessibility Minister Tracy MacCharles should be assigned the full lead on this, with strong authority to break log-jams that typically plague inter-ministerial projects.The Wynne Government should commit to introducing a bill into the Legislature on the first day of this fall's sitting, to remove employment barriers created in Ontario Government laws and programs, such as those that the Government's own advisory Partnership Council reminded the Government about in its initial report, delivered over two years ago, on May 11, 2015. Today's announcement did not promise action on these Government-created employment barriers. The Wynne Government should commit to promptly restore the Vocational Rehabilitation Services Act, repealed decades ago, that gave Ontarians with disabilities a good path through job-focused education toward entering the workforce.The Wynne Government should place little reliance on educating employers and on the Ontario Government's leading by example. Both have been tried. Neither has proven to be the solution.The Government should speed up the establishment of the promised Education Standards Development Committee to make recommendations on what the promised Education Accessibility Standard should include. The Wynne Government should not impose restrictions on which accessibility barriers in Ontario's education system that committee can examine."The AODA Alliance's June 5, 2017 news release then provided this detailed point-by-point analysis of the former Ontario Government's disability employment strategy:"Key Points in the Wynne Government's June 5, 2017 Disability Employment Strategy and AODA Alliance Responses to Them* It is clear from the document released today that the Wynne Government means today's announcement not as a final plan, but just as a first step in a longer-term process of developing a real plan:In this document, Accessibility Minister Tracy MacCharles describes this announcement as "first steps."The document states: "To develop a truly inclusive strategy over the long term, we will continue to collaborate with others."The document announces four "pillars" which it calls "strategic objectives." The document states:"Success in the long term will rely on sustained efforts to strengthen and connect these strategic objectives." Our Response: After four years and four months since the Wynne Government committed to action on disability unemployment in its February 19, 2013 throne speech, unemployed Ontarians with disabilities need much more announced now, than just "first steps." And "strategic objectives" that will require long term action to sustain and connect them. * Accessibility Minister Tracy MacCharles states in the report's opening: "We have talked to people from across the private, public and non-profit sectors, and we have heard from those with a range of perspectives and lived experiences to inform these first steps." As quoted above, the document also states: "To develop a truly inclusive strategy over the long term, we will continue to collaborate with others."Our Response: The Ministry did not consult the AODA Alliance on what to include in this Disability Employment Strategy, despite our repeated requests for a chance to do so. As the community coalition that leads the non-partisan campaign for accessibility for people with disabilities in Ontario, its failure to consult with us on this strategy makes no sense. Our input and expertise could have substantially strengthened this document and avoided the problems we here identify. * The document states: "…the unemployment rate for people with disabilities is about 16% - far higher than the rate for people without disabilities."Our Response: If anything, the disability unemployment rate could well be much higher. Other data that the document cites shows this is virtually triple the unemployment rate facing people without disabilities. This shows why more specific, concrete result-oriented action was needed today.* The document states:"Unfortunately, too many people with disabilities face barriers that prevent them from participating in the workplace. These barriers block them from enjoying the personal benefits of employment. They also limit business growth, affecting employers as well as existing and future employees. That's why removing these barriers is a social and economic imperative that Ontario must respond to collectively."Our Response: We agree. That is why it is so harmful to unemployed Ontarians with disabilities that the Wynne Government has for years done such a paltry job of enforcing the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, including the employment accessibility requirements it enacted six years ago, on June 3, 2011. The Ontario Government has repeatedly promised to effectively enforce the AODA. Today's announcement offers no further action to enforce the AODA, including its employment accessibility requirements. Obligated organizations have had six years to bring themselves into compliance. The Ontario Government has had six years to educate obligated organizations on those requirements. * The document makes it appear that its goal is getting jobs for 56,000 Ontarians with disabilities.Our Response: Elsewhere, the document confirms that almost 1.9 million Ontarians have a disability. While any increase in employment of people with disabilities would be welcomed, 56,000 appears to be a tiny fraction of those needing help in this area. * The document states: "Let's take action to get 30% more people with disabilities working in Ontario." Our Response:We do not know how the Government got the 30% figure. However, even if achieved, it would not bring the unemployment rate facing people with disabilities down to anything close to that facing people without disabilities. 30% of a number that is too small yields a result that is itself also too small.* The document states:"First, we will empower leading employers to share the message that it is simple and beneficial to hire people with disabilities. Through an innovative Employers' Partnership table, we will build a coalition of influential leaders that can help shift the business culture across the province.Next, we'll work with youth and service providers, while also leveraging the expertise of the Ontario Public Service - one of Canada's best Diversity Employers for 10 years running."Our Response: As addressed below, neither of these ideas, listed as lead measures, can be expected to have significant impact.* The document states:"The first pillar is: Start early - Inspire and support youth and students with disabilities."The document lists these future areas of action:"The strategy will start with:oencouraging post-secondary education and future planning through enhanced career exploration at earlier agesopiloting a person-centred case management approach in the Ontario Disability Support Program to help more young people with disabilities identify employment goals and actionsosupporting the transition to workplaces, apprenticeships, college, or university before and after graduation from secondary school through stronger community partnerships and youth programmingoexpanding community-connected experiential learning opportunities for students in kindergarten to grade 12 and adult learnersohelping colleges and universities support students with disabilities throughout their studies, with an early focus on students with Autism Spectrum Disorders"Our Response: These are helpful areas needing immediate action. However, no immediate changes are taking place under this announcement, that unemployed people with disabilities will now experience. There is no way to know how many months or years will pass before any do take place. None of these areas come as a surprise. It has been well known for years that action on all these are needed.The Government's emphasizing more post-secondary education for people with disabilities is commendable. Yet it won't get far until the Wynne Government enacts a strong, effective Education Accessibility Standard under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act to tear down the many accessibility barriers that impede students with disabilities from getting a good education in school and in post-secondary programs.……* The document states:"Ontario will be piloting a new approach to supporting the employment goals of these youth. The focus will be on providing early upfront assessment at the point of application, collaborative planning, and individualized and coordinated wrap-around services and supports to help youth on their path to employment."Our Response:This could be helpful. However, this is truly a case of spending years to reinvent the wheel. The Ontario Government had this kind of support for years under the former Vocational Rehabilitation Services Act, long ago repealed. Many years ago, we urged the Ontario Government to restore that fulsome program, during its first round of work on its anti-poverty strategy. * The document states:"Pillar 2 - Engage - Support and encourage employers as champions and partners.Access Talent recognizes that making workplaces accessible and educating employers is essential to increasing employment for people with disabilities.Misconceptions and misinformation about employing people with disabilities persist in many workplaces.That's why we want to support leading employers as accessibility champions. We want to empower them to spread the word about how simple-and beneficial-it is to hire people with disabilities. We want to connect them to other businesses to share best practices and raise the bar on what it means to be accessible to employees and customers.We also want to partner with a diverse range of employers to gain their insights into the needs of businesses today. This will help us develop employment supports that are tailored to both job seekers and employers, helping to address skills gaps and sector shortages, while fueling business growth and job creation."The document also states:"The strategy will start with: oamplifying the voices of employers who are leading by example through a new Employers' Partnership Table.ochampioning and sharing best practices to help businesses break down barriers to employment for people with disabilitiesoEnhancing Employment Ontario supports tailored to the needs of both individuals and employersopromoting dialogue between employers through an innovative online platform that will connect businesses, people with disabilities, and the public to share advice and lessons learnedoincreasing awareness and supporting compliance with the Accessible Employment Standard"The document also states:"Ontario is bringing together business and non-profit leaders from across the province to form a new Employers' Partnership Table. This dynamic group will advise the government on innovative ways to include more people with disabilities in our workforce. It will be empowered to influence businesses and non-profits across the province through coalitions building and targeted outreach."Our Response: Much of this includes actions the Government has said it has been doing, or has done before. It took the Wynne Government over a year (2013-2014) to set up an employers' partnership council to give advice in this area, and then two years (2014-2016 for that council to render its initial and final report. Now the Government takes yet a fourth year (2016-2017) to decide to set up another partnership council to give it advice. This brings foot-dragging to a new level.Moreover, the Government has been claiming for years that it has been treating as a lead priority its strategy of informing obligated organizations of their duties on accessibility and the economic benefits to them of hiring people with disabilities and providing accessibility for them. This largely looks like more of the same, dressed up as if it were something new.The Government should not have taken over two years to announce these high level ideas, when its Partnership Council recommended such over two years ago, in its initial report. None of them were new ideas, even at that time.* The document states:"Pillar 3 - Integrate - Create seamless, person-centred employment and training services.Both people with disabilities and employers feel frustration in the face of complex and uncoordinated employment and training services.They want a seamless, easy-to-access system that can meet their specific needs - whether that involves skills upgrading, higher intensity employment help, or straightforward information about available jobs and candidates.Access Talent recognizes that employment supports are more effective when they are offered through a person-centered lens - one guided by an individual's interests and strengths. A better coordinated and more integrated system will help connect people to jobs that match their aspirations and skills.Employers also need to be connected to a streamlined system that takes into account their business goals and staffing challenges. That's why Ontario's employment and training services for people with disabilities will be integrated to respond to the full spectrum of abilities and supports required by jobseekers and employers to increase opportunities for everyone involved.The strategy will start with:oWorking with stakeholders to gradually integrate employment and training services for people with disabilities and introduce a new Supported Employment program in Employment Ontario. This new program will create high-quality, consistent services for job seekers with disabilities who require more intensive support and provide targeted services for employersotracking best practices and testing innovative new approaches in education and employment support for people with disabilities, as well as developing performance measures to track program impactoimproving how we serve people with disabilities through better training and new resources for staff at Employment Ontario Employment Service centres, which currently serve about 12,000 people with disabilities each yearopromoting employment in the skilled trades through enhanced apprenticeship opportunities and vocational training programsoencouraging entrepreneurship by increasing awareness of entrepreneurship programming"The document also states:"Individualized support for personal successOntario's Ministry of Advanced Education and Skills Development has invested in a new action plan to help colleges and universities support students with disabilities as they move from secondary to postsecondary education. Part of this support involves helping students with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) to succeed at college and university.Two pilot projects at Algonquin College in Ottawa and York University in Toronto create a transition process for students with ASD that is tailored to each person's needs. This individualized approach identifies and addresses key issues and barriers for students as they start their postsecondary education, helping them maximize their strengths. The projects were led by Disabilities Services Office staff, and in-person supports helped students with their unique learning needs.Nearly 90% of the students involved in the early stages of the pilot completed their first year of postsecondary study, successfully making the switch from secondary school to a future full of possibility."The document also states:"Supported Employmentis an evidence-based program that will offer flexibility and choice to meet a broad range of job seeker needs, including job readiness supports, job matching, retention /on-the-job coaching services, as well as financial support for assistive devices, adaptive technologies and other workplace accommodations.The transition to Supported Employment will be planned and introduced in phases to create consistent services that meet a range of needs. The first phase will launch in April 2018 in select communities across Ontario. We will use feedback from this first phase to plan for a full provincial rollout. By integrating employment programs that serve people with varying support needs, job seekers with disabilities will have a clear door to employment and training services tailored to them. For employers, Supported Employment will provide better aligned services to meet their workforce needs and to create a more supportive and inclusive workplace." Our Response:These measures, once actually developed and implemented in the unspecified future, can be helpful. The only time line for action is for a trial period for the first phase of these ideas, in an unspecified number of test communities, to start almost a year from now. In the longer passage above, the document states:"The transition to Supported Employment will be planned and introduced in phases to create consistent services that meet a range of needs. The first phase will launch in April 2018 in select communities across Ontario. We will use feedback from this first phase to plan for a full provincial rollout."Beyond that, it is not clear when people with disabilities will actually see any of these measures in place, and how much will be new.Nothing in this announcement commits to remove key Government -created accessibility barriers to employment that the Wynne Government's own Partnership Council reported over two years ago as needing major reforms, in the social assistance system. Only the Government can fix this for all employers, public and private sector. In this regard, the Partnership Council's initial report, delivered to the Wynne Government on May 1, 2015, included the following Government-created problem in the employment context, which today's announcement does not fix:"The Partnership Council's focus is on creating employment for Ontarian's with disabilities. However, experience from employers indicates there are significant barriers to employment supported through government policies. The most significant involve people supported through social assistance."* The document states:"Pillar 4 - Trail blaze - Establish the Ontario government as a leading employer and change ernment leadership is critical for this strategy to succeed. As a Top 100 Employer in Canada, and one of the country's Best Diversity Employers and Top Employers for Young People, the Ontario Government is in an optimal position to counter negative attitudes and shift societal perceptions about people with disabilities. Access Talent seeks to leverage this advantage.About 12% of the Ontario Public Service's (OPS) employees self-identify as having a disability. We are on the right path, but we want to do even better.The OPS's progressive policies and diverse workforce position it to lead others in building more inclusive workplaces.Another way the OPS can be a change agent is through strategic government spending and procurement. The government spends billions of dollars in goods and services each year. This significant purchasing power can be leveraged to generate greater social impact and promote the employment of people with disabilities.The Government of Ontario will lead by example as an employer, taking a proactive role in shifting the culture, attitudes and perceptions of employers and the general public. It will also adopt innovative policies that build inclusion into all aspects of its operations.The strategy will start with:oraising awareness and changing attitudes through public education and outreach targeted to employers, service providers, educators, healthcare professionals, and the general publicoextending the government's track record in supporting employees with disabilities through an OPS-specific campaign that reinforces the government's expectations as an employer of choiceoleveraging the OPS procurement framework to encourage more ministries to contract with vendors that employ under-represented groups, including people with disabilitiesoanalyzing best practices within the OPS and sharing lessons learned across government and throughout the private and not-for-profit sectorsobuilding on the OPS's commitment to foster a workplace culture that promotes psychological health and safety and reduces stigma by breaking down barriers and challenging stereotypes of mental health."Our Response: This announces nothing new. It too often flies in the face of the reality within the Ontario Public Service. The Ontario Government has a long, long way to go before it can lead anyone by example in this area. For example, the Ontario Public Service lags behind on such key areas as ensuring digital accessibility within its workplaces.The Government has claimed for years that the Ontario Public Service and the Ontario Government is already leading by example. Yet the AODA Alliance has emphasized for years that too often, the Ontario Government leads by the wrong example on accessibility. The 2014 final report of the Government-appointed Mayo Moran Independent Review of the AODA emphasized the need for substantial reforms on accessibility within the Ontario Government. We have seen no major, effective, implemented and enforced new Government strategy in the 2.5 years since then to put that into action. the final report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review stated:"One of the prominent themes that emerged from the consultations was the belief of the disability community that the Government of Ontario has not succeeded in embedding accessibility into its internal operations. Stakeholders urged the appointment of a single minister - and a full-time deputy minister - to be responsible for ensuring that the Ontario Public Service (OPS) becomes a fully accessible employer and service provider. This new Cabinet post would focus on internal government operations, while the MEDEI minister would remain responsible for the development and enforcement of accessibility standards. To an extent, this thinking echoes the recommendation in the Beer Report to elevate the role of the assistant deputy minister in the ADO to the rank of deputy minister to lead a change management strategy within government. Many believe that there is an important opportunity for the Government to be seen as an accessibility champion, setting an example for other organizations. The disability community believes that the Government of Ontario has not succeeded in embedding accessibility into its internal operations.A particular concern with the Government, the Review heard, arose where public funds were actually used to create new barriers. Examples given include the Presto smart card, where the cash balance is shown on a screen that cannot be read by people with vision loss or dyslexia; and the absence of accessibility requirements for information technology and electronic kiosks in the Government's 10-Year Infrastructure Plan. These cases sparked some groups to recommend a comprehensive strategy to ensure public money is never used to create, maintain or worsen barriers against people with disabilities. It was also suggested that establishing compliance with the Human Rights Code, as well as the AODA, should be a precondition to obtaining public funds through procurement, grants or loans."This pillar in the Government's document, announced today, promises little for quite some time. We know of no evidence that inspiring speeches and PR campaigns actually change what employers do, when it comes to increasing employment for people with disabilities."The AODA Alliance's response to the former Ontario Government's disability employment strategy secured media attention. The June 6, 2017 AODA Alliance Update gave this comment on some of that media coverage:" We are delighted that the AODA Alliance's appraisal of the Wynne Government's June 5, 2017 announcement of its "Disability Employment Strategy" quickly secured great media attention. This included:* leading in June 6, 2017's Toronto Star report on this issue, set out below.* also appearing in the Globe and Mail's online article on this announcement, written by Canadian Press's Michelle McQuigge, set out below. The version of this article in the June 6, 2017 print version of this article regrettably cut the reference to our response to the Wynne Government's announcement.* CKTB Radio's June 5, 2017 edition of the Larry Frederick Show included an interview with AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky, highlighting our response to the Government's announcement.Emerging from the news articles, set out below, you will find among other things:* The Government does not specify how much money in total it has allocated to implement the June 5, 2017 Disability Employment Strategy. To us, this is a further indication of how preliminary or half-baked this Strategy is, even after four years and four months in the making. The Globe article, set out below, reported:"The government provided few figures on the costs of its initiatives, only saying it budgeted $1 million for public education related to the new strategy and an additional $2 million for employment supports under the ODSP."* The Strategy focuses on the 56,000 private sector organizations that have at least 20 employees, and on getting each to hire one employee with a disability. This leaves out the overwhelming majority of the private sector, the hundreds of thousands of private-sector organizations with fewer than 20 employees. It is often said that small business is the key job-creator in our economy. The Government's own Partnership Council had confirmed that the cost of accommodating employees with disabilities in the workplace is typically very low, there is no reason to have so narrow a focus in this Disability Employment mendably, Accessibility Minister Tracy MacCharles also urged private sector organizations with under 20 employees to act in her interview with Canadian press. Nevertheless, the Disability Employment strategy focuses on the limited percentage of the private sector with at least 20 employees. The Globe article, set out below, reports:"Businesses with fewer than 20 employees may find it more difficult to comply with the government's request, MacCharles said, but all companies should step up to tap into an overlooked talent pool of well-educated, highly motivated workers."* We are concerned about a reported claim that taking action under this Strategy to ensure accessible employment for qualified workers with disabilities is a "complex" issue which should "scare the crap" out of the Government. This statement is attributed to Rich Donavan. The Government has appointed him as the chair of its Accessibility Standards Advisory Council and of its Information and Communications Standards Development Committee. The Globe article, set out below, reports:"Rich Donovan, CEO of business research group Return on Disability, praised the government for a sweeping vision and enlisting three ministries to bring it to fruition. But he said the government will soon realize that words are not enough when dealing with an issue as complex as accessible employment.“It’s a happy day because of the announcement, but when you start to assess what has to happen next, that should scare the crap out of you,” Donovan said."Assuming the quote is accurate, and after this issue being in the works for four years and four months, and after study after study on point here and elsewhere. It is not so complex. It should not "scare the crap" out of anyone, either in Government or the private sector. If it does, it would be symptomatic of a bigger problem within Government."6. Developments Since the June 2018 Ontario ElectionIn the June 2018 election campaign, Doug Ford said this on employment for people with disabilities in his May 15, 2018 letter to the AODA Alliance, in which he set out his party's disability accessibility election pledges:* "Too many Ontarians with disabilities still face barriers when they try to get a job, ride public transit, get an education, use our healthcare system, buy goods or services, or eat in restaurants. Whether addressing standards for public housing, health care, employment or education, our goal when passing the AODA in 2005 was to help remove the barriers that prevent people with disabilities from participating more fully in their communities.For the Ontario PCs, this remains our goal. Making Ontario fully accessible by 2025 is an important goal under the AODA and it’s one that would be taken seriously by an Ontario PC government."* "It’s also completely unacceptable that someone should be passed over for a job because of the myth that people with disabilities can’t do the work. We have a moral and social responsibility to change this.This is why we’re disappointed the current government has not kept its promise with respect to accessibility standards. An Ontario PC government is committed to working with the AODA Alliance to address implementation and enforcement issues when it comes to these standards."In the July 17, 2018 letter from the AODA Alliance to the new Minister for Accessibility and Seniors, Raymond Cho, we listed this among priorities for the minister:"9. Substantially strengthen the previous Government's limited strategy for expanding employment for people with disabilities."The minister's August 15, 2018 letter to the AODA Alliance in response did not address this specific request. We have seen no announced plans or action by Ontario's new Government on this general topic.Appendix – Recommended Findings and Recommendations in this Brief, Listed Chapter By ChapterChapter 1 The Big Picture – How is Ontario Doing?Recommended Findings We recommend that this AODA Independent Review make these findings:* There has been progress on accessibility since the AODA's enactment. However, this progress has been far too slow. * Ontario is not now on schedule for becoming accessible to people with disabilities by 2025. At the present rate of progress, Ontario will not even come close to reaching full accessibility by 2025. A dramatic improvement is needed now to the AODA's implementation and enforcement.* Since the 2014 report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review, the Ontario Government did not show the renewed leadership and revitalized approach to the AODA's implementation that the Moran report recommended.* There is a pressing need to revitalize the AODA's implementation, as both the 2010 Charles Beer AODA Independent Review and the 2014 Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review recommended. This revitalization never took place in response to those reports' recommendations.* The Ontario Government has never had and now has no comprehensive plan for leading Ontario to reaching accessibility by 2025. There is a clear and present need for such a plan.* There is a clear need for substantial reform at the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario, the Government office that has lead responsibility for the AODA's implementation and enforcement, such as the development of AODA accessibility standards. This is so despite the fact that there are many hard-working, dedicated people working at various positions in the Accessibility Directorate.* The Ontario Government has tried to shroud the AODA's implementation and enforcement, including the development and review of AODA accessibility standards, with far too much secrecy. The public is entitled to expect the AODA's implementation and enforcement, including the development and review of AODA accessibility standards, to be open, transparent and publicly accountable.Recommendations Regarding the Big Picture We therefore recommend that:The Ontario Government must act promptly to re-vitalize and breathe new life into the implementation and enforcement of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA). This should start with strong new leadership from the top, including the Premier, the Cabinet and the senior leaders within the Ontario Public Service.The Ontario Government should act quickly to adopt, implement and make public a comprehensive multi-year plan for effectively leading Ontario to become accessible by 2025, which includes the issues regarding the AODA's implementation and enforcement that are addressed in this brief.There should be substantial reform at the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario so that it better provides the leadership on the AODA's implementation and enforcement that Ontario needs.As is addressed in further detail elsewhere in this brief, the Ontario Government's implementation and enforcement of the AODA, including the development and review of AODA accessibility standards, should be carried out in an open, public transparent and accountable way. The Ontario Government's current pre-occupation with excessive secrecy and confidentiality should be eliminated. For example, members of and presenters at Standards Development Committees should not be asked or required to sign non-disclosure agreements.Chapter 2 The Ongoing Unmet Need for the AODA's Effective EnforcementRecommended Findings We recommend that this AODA Independent Review make the following findings:* For years, the AODA has not been effectively enforced, even though the former Ontario Government knew for years about unacceptably high levels of AODA non-compliance, particularly within the private sector. Enforcement efforts have been too weak. * This ineffective AODA enforcement does a disservice to Ontarians with disabilities, to the broader public, and to all the obligated organizations who have opted to comply with the AODA. * The former Ontario Government did not significantly improve AODA enforcement after the 2014 Mayo Moran Report called for strengthened enforcement. To the contrary, within a week of the former Ontario Government's public release of the final report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review in February 2015, the former Ontario Government instituted a substantial cutback of the already-weak AODA enforcement. In June 2015, the former Ontario Government announced that it had a new plan for increased AODA enforcement, to begin in 2016. Subsequent Government records and the results of an AODA Alliance Freedom of Information application demonstrate that this never took place.* The former Ontario Government failed to effectively publicize the Government's promised toll-Free number for the public to report AODA violations, for purposes of AODA enforcement.* It is important to make AODA enforcement independent of the Ontario Government. The Ontario Government should not enforce the AODA against itself. Moreover, independent enforcement of the AODA will better ensure effective enforcement of the AODA. AODA enforcement should not be subject to any political involvement.* While enforcement is not the only way to get obligated organizations to comply with the AODA, it is one important way to do so. The failure to effectively enforce the AODA has contributed to low rates of AODA compliance.* The failure to effectively enforce the AODA also works against the efforts of those who try to get obligated organizations to comply, such as accessibility consultants. Those consultants can point to strong enforcement powers in the AODA. However, the fact that only five monetary penalties were imposed in 2015, 2016 and 2017 combined, is ample proof that obligated organizations need not fear any real consequences if they don't comply with the AODA.* It is not sufficient for AODA enforcement to take the form of "paper audits", where Government officials review an obligated organization's documentary records on AODA compliance, such as records of an obligated organization's accessibility policy and of its staff training on accessibility. Effective auditing or inspections need to include on-site examination of the actual accessibility of the obligated organizations, not just its accessibility paper trail.Recommendations on the AODA's Enforcement We therefore recommend that:AODA enforcement should be substantially strengthen, including effectively using all AODA enforcement powers, enforcing all AODA accessibility requirements, and enforcing the AODA in connection with all classes of organizations that must obey the AODA. The Government should not just enforce the requirement of certain obligated organizations to file an accessibility self-report. The Government should effectively enforce AODA requirements vis à vis both the public and private sectors, and vis à vis all classes of organizations within each sector. AODA enforcement should be transferred outside the Ministry responsible for the AODA, and be assigned to an arms-length public agency to be created for AODA enforcement. The number of inspectors and directors appointed with AODA enforcement powers should be significantly increased.Among other things, Ontario Government and local municipal inspectors and investigators under other legislation should be given a mandate to enforce the AODA when they inspect or investigate an organization under other legislation or by-laws.A core feature of AODA enforcement should be the on-site inspection of a range of obligated organizations each year on the actual accessibility of their workplace, goods, services and facilities, not a mere audit of their paper records on accessibility documentationThe Accessibility Directorate of Ontario and any successor body assigned responsibility for AODA enforcement should publicly release and promptly post detailed information on AODA enforcement actions at least every three months. It should report on how many obligated organizations are actually providing accessibility, and not, as too often is the case at present, how many organizations simply tell the Government that they are providing accessibility. This should include prompt reports of quarterly results and year-to-date totals, broken down by sector and size of organization. At a minimum, it should include such measures as the number of notices of proposed order issued, the total amount of proposed penalties, the number of orders issued and total amounts and number of penalties imposed, the number of appeals from orders and the outcome, the total amount of penalties including changes ordered by the appeal tribunal, and the orders categorized by subject matter.Obligated organizations should be required to report to the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario or any successor AODA enforcement agency on accessibility complaints received via their required AODA feedback mechanisms, and on how they were resolved, while protecting individual privacy.New ways for crowd-sourced AODA monitoring/enforcement should be created, such as the Government beginning to post all online AODA compliance reports from obligated organizations in a publicly-accessible searchable data base, and by requiring each obligated organization to post its AODA accessibility policy and its AODA compliance report on its own website, if it has one.To reverse the public perception that the Government is not and will not be effectively enforcing the AODA, the Government should immediately and widely publicize its enforcement plans and its intention to substantially increase its efforts at AODA enforcement. This should not be limited to postings on a Government website. The Government should develop an effective strategy for ensuring that municipalities effectively enforce the Ontario Building Code's accessibility requirements as well as any built environment accessibility requirements in AODA accessibility standards, including providing effective training tools on the Ontario Building Code accessibility requirements that can be used by municipal enforcement officials;monitoring levels of enforcement and compliance at the municipal level across Ontario regarding the Ontario Building Code accessibility requirements.Chapter 3 Current AODA Accessibility Standards Don't Ensure Ontario Will Become Accessible to People with Disabilities by 2025 Recommended Findings We recommend that this AODA Independent Review make the following findings:* The current AODA accessibility standards will not ensure that Ontario becomes accessible to people with disabilities by 2025, even in the specific areas they regulate, e.g. customer service, employment, transportation, or information and communication. The 2014 final report of the Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review correctly identified significant deficiencies with these accessibility standards. In the intervening years, the former Ontario Government did not rectify those deficiencies.* The Government's mandatory 5-year review of the 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard did not rectify most of the significant deficiencies with that accessibility standard. In one way, it made that weak accessibility standard even weaker.* The Government's mandatory 5 year- review of the 2011 Transportation Accessibility Standard resulted in weak recommendations to the Government from the Transportation Standards Development committee. Even if those recommendations were all implemented, these would not materially or substantially improve that accessibility standard.* Similarly, the 2018 draft recommendations from the Employment Standards Development Committee on how to improve the very limited Employment Accessibility Standard would not significantly improve that accessibility standard.Recommendations Regarding Deficiencies in Current AODA Accessibility StandardsWe urge this Independent Review to recommend as follows:The Ontario Government should substantially strengthen all the existing accessibility standards.Any accessibility standards enacted under the AODA should, at least, measure up to the accessibility standards and accommodation and undue hardship requirements of the Ontario Human Rights Code. Where any existing standard falls below that standard, or provides defences to obligated organizations that are broader than those under the Human Rights Code, the AODA accessibility standard should be amended as part of any review of that accessibility standard, to bring it in line with the Human Rights Code.The Ontario Government should direct each Standards Development Committee that is now developing recommendations for a new accessibility standard or that is reviewing an existing standard, or that is appointed in the future, to make recommendations on accessibility that live up to the Ontario Human Rights Code. To assist with this, the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario should give each Standards Development Committee up-to-date information on relevant rulings by the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario and courts, and should centrally involve the Ontario Human Rights Code in each Standards Development Committee on an ongoing basis, including appointing a representative of the Ontario Human Rights Commission as an ex officio non-voting member of each Standards Development Committee.When any Standards Development Committee is conducting a review of an existing AODA accessibility standard, that Committee should be advised that its mandate is not simply to decide if the existing accessibility standard is working "as intended". Rather, it should investigate whether the accessibility standard will ensure that accessibility in the area that the standard addresses will be achieved by 2025. If it does not, then the Committee should recommend measures needed to ensure that accessibility in that area will be achieved by 2025.The Ontario Government should appoint a Standards Development Committee to review the sufficiency of the general provisions in the Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation, since no Standards Development Committee appears to be reviewing them. The Ontario Government should now launch the next review of the Customer Service Accessibility Standard, since that standard remains so weak, and since the last review of that accessibility standard failed to significantly improve it. As part of that review, that accessibility standard should be revised to remove the barrier it impermissibly creates. That review should be mandated to consider, among other things, the low-cost revisions that the AODA Alliance and ARCH Disability Law Centre recommended to the Ontario Government in their joint March 15, 2016 brief.The Ontario Government should now convene a summit with leaders from the disability community and the transportation sector to identify substantially stronger reforms to the 2011 Transportation Accessibility Standard than those which the Transportation Standards Development committee had recommended. The Ontario Government should ask the Employment Standards Development Committee to expand its efforts, and to develop recommendations on measures to remove and prevent specific workplace disability barriers.Chapter 4 The Need for New Accessibility Standards, Including a Strong and Comprehensive Built Environment Accessibility StandardRecommended Findings We recommend that this AODA Independent Review make the following findings:* After the AODA has been part of Ontario law for 13 and a half years, the built environment in Ontario remains replete with far too many disability accessibility barriers. The AODA has not had a significant effect on removing existing barriers or preventing new ones in the built environment. A new building can be built in full compliance with the AODA and the Ontario Building Code and yet have serious accessibility problems. The Ontario Building Code's accessibility requirements, like the few built environment requirements in AODA accessibility standards, are entirely inadequate to meet the known modern needs of people with disabilities.* Ontario also has a pressing need for a comprehensive Built Environment Accessibility Standard to be enacted under the AODA. The former Ontario Government's decision to carve the built environment largely out of AODA accessibility standards and to only address it in the Ontario Building Code was wrong. It set Ontario back. * The former Ontario Government's failure to keep its August 19, 2011 election promise to promptly enact the promised Built Environment Accessibility Standard set Ontario back. * The former Ontario Government's failure to act effectively on the 2014 Mayo Moran recommendations to address retrofits in existing buildings further set Ontario further back.* Ontario has a pressing need for a Residential Housing Accessibility Standard. There is a serious shortage of accessible housing in Ontario for people with disabilities. It is getting worse because the demand for accessible housing increases as Ontario's population ages. There is no effective strategy in place in Ontario to ensure a sufficient increase in the supply of accessible housing in Ontario.* Ontario needs a Goods and Products Accessibility Standard to be created under the AODA.* The former Ontario Government never undertook a comprehensive consultation or other effort to determine what additional accessibility standards need to be created in order for the AODA to ensure that Ontario reaches full accessibility by 2025. There is no indication that the current Government did this, or has a plan to do this.Recommendations Regarding Next Accessibility Standards to be DevelopedThe Government should consult with the public, including with people with disabilities, over the next three months, on all the sectors that other accessibility standards need to address, to ensure that Ontario becomes accessible by 2025, with a decision to be announced on the economic sectors to be addressed in those standards within three months after that consultation. The Government should not delay a decision on whether to have a new accessibility standard developed, while the Ontario Public Service decides what barriers it might include. Immediately after the Government decides what remaining accessibility standards need to be created, it should promptly create Standards Development Committees to develop recommendations for each of those new accessibility standards.The Government should now publicly recognize that there is a problem with the inaccessibility of the built environment in Ontario. It should launch a concerted and comprehensive strategy that will address new construction, major renovations, and the retrofit of existing buildings that are undergoing no major renovations, using feedback from the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal complaints and findings, and the Ontario Human Rights Commission's policies and advice.The Government should develop and enact a comprehensive Built Environment Accessibility Standard under the AODA, ensuring that it effectively addresses accessibility retrofits in existing buildings, as well as accessibility in new construction and major renovations (not limited to those covered in the DOPS accessibility standard). Among other things, the new and comprehensive Built Environment Accessibility Standard should include additional accessibility requirements for elevators that are not currently addressed by the requirements in the Ontario Building Code and other provincial laws. To this end, the Ontario Government should appoint a new Built Environment Standards Development Committee, both to review the 2011 Public Spaces Accessibility Standard and to develop recommendations for a far more comprehensive Built Environment Accessibility Standard.The Government should create a Residential Housing Accessibility Standard under the AODA, and should promptly appoint a Standards Development Committee to make recommendations on what it should include, or assign this to the Built Environment Standards Development Committee, referred to in the preceding recommendation.The Government should direct each AODA Standards Development Committee now in operation to make recommendations on standards for the built environment as it relates to the area that that Standards Development Committee is studying. For example, the Education Standards Development Committee should be directed to make recommendations for accessibility in schools, colleges or universities. The Health Care Standards Development Committee should be directed to recommend requirements for the accessibility of the built environment in the health care system.The Government should announce a comprehensive strategy on accessible housing to address the current and growing crisis in accessible housing in Ontario, in addition to creating an AODA accessibility standard on point.The Government should strengthen enforcement of accessibility in the built environment. For example, it should require that before a building permit or site plan approval can be obtained for a project, the approving authority, municipal or provincial, must be satisfied that the project, on completion, will meet all accessibility requirements under the Ontario Building Code and in all AODA accessibility standards. The Government should require professional bodies that regulate or licence key professionals such as architects, interior designers, landscape architects, and other design professionals, to require detailed training on accessible design, to qualify for a license, and continuing professional development for existing professionals. The Government should also require, as a condition of funding any college or university that trains these key professions, that their program curriculum must include sufficient training on accessibility and universal design. This should be designed to ensure that no new graduates in these fields will make the same mistakes as too often is the case for those now in practice. The Government should substantially reform the way public sector infrastructure projects are managed and overseen in Ontario, including a major reform of Infrastructure Ontario. This should include: A requirement that accessibility advice be obtained on all major projects starting at the very beginning, during master planning, feasibility studies, and functional programming, with any accessibility advice that is received being made public. This input should also be obtained through consultations with people with disabilities. A requirement to track any decisions to reject any accessibility advice, identifying who made that decision and the reasons why. That information should promptly be publicly reported. To require the Government to promptly make public the accessibility requirements under consideration as a requirement for a contract for any infrastructure, with enough time before the start of the bidding competition to allow for feedback and adjustments. It is too late to make this public only after the bidding competition. A requirement for post-project accessibility commissioning inspections which would include compliance with the project specific output specification accessibility requirements as well as the Ontario Building Code and AODA accessibility standards. A requirement in all contracts that any accessibility deficiencies found must be the financial responsibility of the Project Company who built the project to fix them.The Government should require that when public money is used to create new public housing, 100% of that housing should include universal design and visit-ability as mandatory design features.The Government should agree to create a Goods and Products Accessibility Standard.Accessibility standards should include, where appropriate, not only end-dates for achieving results, but also interim benchmarks for major milestones towards full accessibility.Chapter 5 The Need to Substantially Reform the Standards Development Process Under the AODA Recommended Findings We urge this AODA Independent Review to find as follows:* There is a pressing need to reform the standards development process under the AODA. The problems with the standards development process that the 2010 final report of the Charles Beer AODA Independent Review identified remain present to this day. The former Ontario Government's attempt to address these by temporarily assigning the Accessibility Standards Advisory Council with responsibility for developing recommendations for all accessibility standards was a failure and was properly abandoned by the former Ontario Government by 2016.* The Ontario Government has been and remains in violation of the AODA, because it has thrice failed to appoint Standards Development Committees on time to conduct mandatory 5-year reviews of existing AODA accessibility standards by the AODA's deadline. This includes the former Ontario Government's failure to appoint the mandatory review of the 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard until sometime in 2013, and its failure up until it left office to appoint the mandatory review of the 2012 Public Spaces Accessibility Standard by the end of 2017 and the review of Part I of the 2011 Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation by 2016.* Since taking office in June 2018, the current Ontario Government has also not appointed the mandatory review of the 2012 Public Spaces Accessibility Standard, or the mandatory review of Part I of the 2011 Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation. * Once the former Ontario Government had decided to develop new accessibility standards in the area of education and health care, it took far too long to take the simple first step of appointing Standards Development Committees to start working on recommendations on what those accessibility standards should include. It took some two years for the former Ontario Government to appoint the Health Care Standards Development Committee and over one year to appoint the K-12 and Post-Secondary Education Standards Development Committees. It took that Government longer to set up any of these Standards Development Committees than it had taken the Government to develop the entire AODA legislation and introduce it for First Reading in the Legislature back in 2003-2004.* The new Ford Government has unjustifiably created further delays in reaching accessibility in Ontario, by its excessively-long freeze of the work of existing Standards Development Committees that were already appointed and working on their mandates before the June 7, 2018 Ontario election. It froze the work of the Employment Standards Development Committee and the Information and Communication Standards Development Committee for five months, and then lifted that freeze around November 2018. Its freeze on the work of the Health Care Standards Development Committee and the two Education Standards Development Committees has continued in effect up to the time of this brief. The Ford Government has indicated that it is awaiting the report of the current AODA Independent Review before deciding on whether to lift that freeze.* The former Ontario Government inappropriately tried to restrict or narrow the work of some of the AODA Standards Development Committees that it had appointed.* The Ontario Government has shrouded the work of Standards Development Committees in far too much secrecy, especially in recent years. * The mandatory minutes that each Standards Development Committee must keep and publicly post, regarding their meetings, are too often insufficiently detailed and informative to enable the public to know what these committees are doing, and have confidence in their work.* The former Ontario Government was wrong to require Standards Development Committees to have a 75% vote in support before a recommendation for an accessibility standard could be submitted to the Government, or for any other decision by a Standards Development Committee, e.g. a decision to approve an amendment to its minutes.* It put the cart before the horse for the former Ontario Government to require a Standards Development Committee in its first six months to set priorities for its work, before it had fully assessed which barriers exist in the area that the committee was assigned to study.* The former Government did not give the public sufficient advance notice of when it would be consulting on a proposed accessibility standard.* The Accessibility Directorate of Ontario has been overstepping its role, when supporting the work of Standards Development Committees, by attempting to inappropriately micromanage and influence the direction of their work and recommendations.* Standards Development Committees have not been effectively fulfilling their core role under the AODA to propose an accessibility standard for the Government to consider enacting. For example, in 2018 the Transportation Standards Development committee submitted recommendations that are in significant part made up of items that are not a proposal for revisions to the 2011 Transportation Accessibility Standard. * The recommendations from Standards Development Committees for revisions to the 2007 Customer Service Accessibility Standard and the 2011 Transportation Accessibility Standard, and the draft recommendations for revisions to the 2011 Employment Accessibility Standard, are all very weak, and dramatically less than people with disabilities need.* The standards development process requires much more extensive involvement by the Ontario Human Rights Commission.* Standards Development Committees have at times insufficiently consulted with the disability community, especially when formulating their draft recommendations.* Since 2013, the former Ontario Government has broken its 2007 election promise to provide dedicated staff support to disability sector representatives on Standards Development Committees.* In and after May 2018, the Government has inappropriately failed to consult the public on final recommendations it received for revisions to the 2011 Transportation Accessibility Standard from the Transportation Standards Development committee.* The Government' has repeatedly failed to comply with the statutory deadline for deciding on making an accessibility standard after a Standards Development Committee recommends one. * The former Government took the extraordinary and highly problematic step in June 2016 of purporting to amend parts of the 2011 Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation without first appointing a Standards Development Committee to review the relevant parts of that standard, a mandatory precondition under the AODA.Recommendations on Improving the Process for Developing New Accessibility Standards and Revising Existing StandardsWe urge this Independent Review to recommend as follows:There is a strong need for the standards development process under the AODA to be substantially strengthened so that it produces stronger accessibility standards that will fulfil the AODA's purposes.The Government should lead by example, by always ensuring that it meets all of its own deadlines set by the AODA, such as the deadlines for appointing Standards Development Committees 5-year mandatory reviews of existing AODA accessibility standards.The Government should immediately lift its freeze on the work of the Health Care Standards Development Committee, the K-12 Education Standards Development Committee, and the Post-Secondary Education Standards Development Committee.The Government should modify the Mandate Letter for the Health Care Standards Development Committee so that it ensures that that Standards Development Committee makes recommendations on barriers throughout the health care system, and not only or primarily regarding barriers in hospitals.The Government should ensure that the Standards Development Committees, appointed under the AODA to make recommendations on what an accessibility standard should include, can operate in a more open and accountable manner and are fully independent of Government. These should not be shrouded in secrecy and non-disclosure requirements. An independent Ontario Access Board should be created to conduct and oversee this work, that is fully independent of and arms-length from the Ontario Government.The Ontario Government should not try to get members of Standards Development Committees to sign non-disclosure agreements when inviting them to serve on an AODA Standards Development Committee.The Accessibility Directorate should provide effective dedicated staff support to the disability sector representatives on each Standards Development Committee.The Government should amend the Terms of Reference for Standards Development Committees, to allow them to make a recommendation on what an accessibility standard should include as long as that recommendation is supported by a simple majority of 50% of the voting members, at least half of which comprise representatives on the Committee from the disability sectorThe Accessibility Directorate should not direct Standards Development Committees that when they vote on other matters such as approving or amending Committee meetings' minutes, they require a 75% super-majority. A simple majority should be all that is required. Minutes kept by Standards Development Committees should be more detailed and informative. They should include minutes of any sub-committee and should have appended to them, as part of any public posting, any documents which are tabled with the Standards Development Committee to review. Minutes of meetings of a Standards Development Committee should accurately and comprehensively record the detailed issue-by-issue deliberations of that committee on accessibility standard proposals. They should be written in a fashion to make them fully understandable by members of the public who did not attend those meetings.The Ontario Government should not direct Standards Development Committees to decide, within their first six months of work, on priorities for their work.The Government should widely publicize the opportunity for community groups to request a chance to present to a Standards Development Committee, when it is developing proposals for an accessibility standard. Because several different AODA public consultations will be coming up, the Ontario Government should make public a schedule of all the forthcoming public consultations that will come up over the next 24 months under the AODA, and ensure they are not overlapping, so that the public can adequately prepare to participate in them all.The Government should now launch the process to recruit members of a new Standards Development Committee to comprehensively review disability barriers in the built environment, including those addressed in the 2012 Public Spaces Accessibility Standard.The Government should now appoint a Standards Development Committee to conduct the overdue mandatory 5-year review of Part I of the 2011 Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation.When it is developing proposals for the contents of an accessibility standard, the Government should strongly encourage a Standards Development Committee to extensively and publicly consult the public, including the disability community. As part of this, each Standards Development Committee should be encouraged to invite stakeholders from the disability community and regulated sectors to meet together with that Standards Development Committee, to informally discuss issues that a Standards Development Committee has found challenging to resolve.When a Standards Development Committee submits an initial or draft recommendation to the Government for the contents of a new accessibility standard, or for revisions to an existing accessibility standard, the Government should then convene face-to-face stakeholder meetings as one avenue for gathering input and should not restrict input to written submissions from the public. It is best when these meeting include stakeholders from all perspectives, rather than isolating disability sector from obligated organizations. When a Standards Development Committee submits to the Government a final proposal for the contents of a new accessibility standard, the Government should obey s. 9(7) of the AODA by the minister, responsible for the AODA, deciding within 90 days what to enact from that proposal. The Government should immediately make that decision public. When a Standards Development Committee is developing a recommendation for the contents of an accessibility standard, the Accessibility Directorate should provide to that committee, and post on the internet for public input, a review of measures adopted in other jurisdictions to advance the goal of accessibility for persons with disabilities in the area that the new accessibility standard or the existing accessibility standard under review is to address.The Human Rights Commission should be far more extensively involved in the formal and informal work of each Standards Development Committee, including during review of public input and discussion and votes on clauses of proposed accessibility standards. This could include having a representative of the Ontario Human Rights Commission sit on each Standards Development Committee, as they work on proposals for the contents of accessibility standards, whether as a voting member or a non-voting member.The Government should encourage each Standards Development Committee, when developing proposals for the contents of an accessibility standard, to identify where changes are needed to provincial or municipal legislation, regulations or bylaws, to advance the goal of a fully accessible Ontario.Standards Development Committees should fully fulfil their core mandates under the AODA by each recommending the specific contents of a proposed accessibility standard, or revisions to an existing accessibility standard. The accessibility standard or revisions to a standard that they recommend should be designed to meet the AODA's goal of achieving accessibility in Ontario by 2025. If they are to recommend any other measures at all, such as non-legislative measures, this should be secondary to their core mandate, and not the core of their recommendations.The Government should now conduct a robust consultation with the public on the Transportation Standards Development committee's final recommendations for revisions to the 2011 Transportation Accessibility Standard, because those recommendations are so weak.The Government should never attempt or purport to amend an AODA accessibility standard without first fulfilling the mandatory AODA requirement to appoint a Standards Development Committee to consider revisions to that accessibility standard.Chapter 6 Public Education on Accessibility Remains InsufficientRecommended Findings We recommend that this AODA Independent Review make the following findings:* With only six years left before we reach 2025, and with the AODA having been the law since 2005, the findings in the 2010 Charles Beer AODA Independent Review report and the 2014 Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review report remain valid and current. Many if not most in the public are not aware of their AODA obligations. Of those who are aware of the AODA, too many, including too many within the Ontario Government itself, are not aware that the Ontario Human Rights Code and, where applicable, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms impose disability accessibility obligations that are as high as or higher than those now imposed by AODA accessibility standards. * Government efforts on public education on the AODA since 2014 have not solved this problem.* The former Ontario Government's ineffective enforcement of the AODA has undermined efforts at public education on the AODA. This is because the message has been widespread that failing to comply with the AODA likely brings no adverse consequences for an obligated organization.* It works against the AODA's goals for the Ontario Government to have publicly posted online that accessible customer service does not include providing ramps or automatic door openers.* There is a pressing need to include disability accessibility and inclusion in school curriculums. Moreover, professional training for a range of professions (such as design professionals e.g. architects and interior designers), needs to include sufficient training on disability accessibility. The former Ontario Government never kept its 2007 election promises to take action in these two important areas.* This many years after the AODA was enacted, it would be wrong to contend that effective AODA enforcement must now await further efforts to educate the public and obligated organizations on their obligations under the AODA. It is incorrect and harmful to treat public awareness and education as some unending precondition to initiating effective AODA enforcement.* While it has made available some useful tools and resources, the Ontario Government has not provided obligated organizations all the tools that could help them comply with the AODA and has not effectively and sufficiently publicized the tools and resources it has provided.* The public, including obligated organizations, will pay far more attention to public education and awareness efforts on accessibility when they know there is effective AODA enforcement.* The aim and core focus now should be raising action, not raising awareness.Recommendations on Public Education on the AODA We urge this Independent Review to recommend as follows:The Government should widely advertise on the mass media, and not just on the internet, via email and on Twitter, about the availability of resources, training materials and guides it has already developed for organizations to comply with accessibility standards enacted under the AODA. Promptly after any new AODA accessibility standard is enacted or an existing accessibility standard is revised in the future, the Government should make available and widely publicize a free guide, policy guideline and other like resource materials for obligated organizations to comply with that accessibility standard's accessibility requirements The Government should develop, make available and widely publicize a free web-authoring tool for creating accessible web pages, to comply with the, Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation's information and communication website accessibility requirements.The Government should promptly implement a permanent program to ensure that students in the school system are educated in disability accessibility. For example:The Government should identify the Minister and public officials responsible for this program's development and implementation. School boards and teachers' representatives should be consulted on its development and implementation. The Government should develop a sample curriculum which school boards could adopt if they wish, in lieu of developing their own curriculum.The Government should report to the public on this program's implementation and effectiveness. The Government should promptly require the self-governing bodies for key professions (such as architects, interior designers, planners, other design professionals, lawyers, doctors and social workers) to adopt, implement and require education on disability accessibility to qualify for those professions, and to require continuing professional development on this topic for those already qualified in those professions. Among other things, as part of this effort:For these key professions such as architects and planners, the Government should require that to qualify in future for a licence or other qualifications certificate, a specified amount of training in barrier free design must be completed, that goes beyond the insufficient requirements of the Ontario Building Code and AODA accessibility standards. A lead minister and public servants should be identified as responsible for this initiative. The Government should make publicly available resource materials to help those self-governing professional bodies develop the needed disability accessibility curriculum on accessibility needs of persons with disabilities. The Government should report to the public on this program's monitoring, implementation and effectiveness. Funding to any post-secondary faculty or self-governing professional organization for any of these professions should be made strictly conditional on compliance with this provincial policy and goal. Any college, university or other educational institution that provides training to any of those professions should be required to include accessibility training in their curriculum, especially if they are to receive any public funding.The Government should promptly consult with persons with disabilities, including the AODA Alliance, on the content of these public education materials. This should involve in-person discussions, and not merely an invitation to provide on-line feedback to the Government.The Government should not treat AODA public education or AODA awareness-raising as a substitute for or precondition for effective AODA enforcement. The Government's aim and core focus now should be raising action, not raising awareness.Chapter 7. The Government's Failure to Effectively Ensure that Public Money Is Never Used to Create, Perpetuate or Exacerbate Disability BarriersRecommended Findings We urge this AODA Independent Review to find as follows:* Public money should never be used to create or perpetuate accessibility barriers against people with disabilities. Public spending to which accessibility strings can and should always be attached includes, for example, infrastructure spending, spending on procurement of goods, services and facilities, transfer payments to the Ontario Government's transfer partners, and spending on grants or loans such as those given to businesses or local authorities, or the broader public sector. It would be irresponsible for any public official or office to permit public money to be used to create or perpetuate disability accessibility barriers. It creates more future costs – the cost of removing barriers that should never have been created in the first place.* The Ontario Government does not have in place effective, monitored procedures for ensuring that public money is never used to create or perpetuate disability accessibility barriers. There is no real accountability or consequences for a public official who permits or directs the use of public money in a way that creates or perpetuates disability barriers. The public has no way to find out who made or advocated for the bad decisions that result in these publicly-funded barriers.* The former Government did not take effective new action to address this concern after the 2014 Mayo Moran AODA Independent Review Report identified it as a concern. * Where the Government has put in place some policies regarding accessibility considerations when undertaking public procurement of goods, services or facilities, there are no publicly-disclosed regimes for monitoring or enforcing these. There are no known consequences for contravening these policies or procedures. * As widely-viewed online videos produced by the AODA Alliance in 2016, 2017 and 2018 reveal regarding the new Centennial College Culinary Arts Centre, the new Ryerson University Student Learning Centre, and new and recently-renovated Toronto area public transit stations, the former Ontario Government broke Premier Wynne's pledge in the 2014 Ontario election that public money would not be used to create or perpetuate disability barriers.* There was no discernable progress in ensuring accessibility of publicly-funded infrastructure from June 2014 to June 2016, when the Minister of Infrastructure was also the minister responsible for the AODA. The fact that both subjects were under one minister should have led to far better provincial efforts at ensuring that new infrastructure is fully accessible to people with disabilities.* An effective use of the Government's lever of power over the use of public money could have a very dramatic impact on the removal and prevention of disability accessibility barriers, at little or no cost to the Ontario Government.* Infrastructure Ontario, part of the Ontario Government, has not shown itself to be effective at or truly committed to ensuring that provincially-funded infrastructure projects are fully accessible to people with disabilities. In connection with public transit, the same problem persists with Metrolinx, the major provincial organization that oversees many transportation infrastructure projects. This is so despite any positive rhetoric on this subject emanating from those Government organizations.Recommendations on Ensuring Public Money Is Not Used to Create, Perpetuate or Exacerbate Barriers We urge the Independent Review to recommend that:The Ontario Government should adopt and broadly publicize a cross-government policy that public money may never be used to create or perpetuate accessibility barriers against people with disabilities.The Government should set standards for, implement, widely publicize, monitor, enforce and publicly report on a comprehensive strategy to ensure that public money is never used by anyone to create or perpetuate barriers against people with disabilities, for example, in capital or infrastructure spending, or through procurement of goods, services or facilities, or through transfer payments to the Ontario Government's transfer partners, or through business development grants or loans, or research grants. A senior public official within the Ontario Public Service should be designated with lead responsibility and authority for this effort.The Government should make it a condition of research grants that it funds or to which it contributes that people with disabilities should, where feasible and appropriate, be included in research study as subjects.In any Government strategy to ensure that public money is not used to create or perpetuate accessibility barriers, it is not sufficient for the Government to make it a condition that a recipient of public money merely obey the AODA and AODA accessibility standards. It should require that recipients of public money comply with accessibility requirements in the Ontario Human Rights Code, and where applicable the Charter of Rights. It should require, among other things, that the recipient organization's specific capital project or goods, services or facilities be fully disability accessible or require a commitment to remediate these to become fully accessible by time lines to be set out in the grant, loan or other terms of payment of public money.Any Government contract for infrastructure or for the procurement of goods, services or facilities should include a mandatory, enforceable term that requires the recipient of the public money to remediate any accessibility barriers that the recipient allows to be created or perpetuated at the recipient's expense.The Government should make it a condition of transfer payments and capital or other infrastructure funding to municipalities, hospitals, school boards, public transit providers, colleges, universities, and transfer partners that these recipient organizations adopt comparable initiatives to ensure that their procurement and infrastructure spending, and any loans or grant programs that they operate, do not create, exacerbate or perpetuate barriers against people with disabilities. The Government should make public a resource guide to assist those transfer partners to know how to effectively implement this requirement. The Government should promptly establish a process for monitoring and enforcing the recommended comprehensive strategy to ensure that public money is not used to create, perpetuate or exacerbate accessibility barriers. It should not be left to each ministry to do as little or as much as it wishes to implement Government policy and procedures on this topic, and to have to re-invent the wheel in this area.The Government should widely and prominently publicize as soon as possible to any organization that seeks Ontario infrastructure or procurement funds, or any Government funded or subsidies, loans or grants, that they must prove in their applications that they will ensure that public money isn't used to create, perpetuate or exacerbate barriers against persons with disabilities.The Government should establish and widely publicize an avenue for the public to report to the Government on situations where public money is used to create, perpetuate or exacerbate disability accessibility barriers.The Provincial Auditor should audit the Government to ensure compliance with recommendations on ensuring that public money is not used to create, perpetuate or exacerbate disability accessibility barriers.It should be a mandatory Government policy that when an accessibility consultant is retained on an infrastructure project to which Ontario public funds are contributed, whether that consultant is working for a Government office or a contractor that is hired using public money the accessibility consultant should report directly to the Ontario Government, with the consultant's advice being made promptly public.When a public infrastructure project is undertaken involving any Ontario Government funds, the Project Specific Output Specifications (on disability accessibility PSOS) for the project should be made public well before the competition process, and subject to public input. These should not be kept secret until after the bid competition is completed. The Provincial Auditor should audit the accessibility practices at Infrastructure Ontario, and provide a report to the public, including on any recommended reforms to how that Government organization approaches the planning for accessibility in infrastructure projects.When a Government-funded infrastructure project is undertaken, successive plans in progress for the project should be made public on a real time basis, for crowd-sourced input on accessibility.Where a public official or private contractor project team member, paid out of the public purse, vetoes or decides against an accessibility measure that an accessibility consultant recommends, the identity of that public official or private contractor should be recorded and made public, when successive plans for the project are made public, with an explanation of what the accessibility feature is that was excluded from the project on the decision or advice of that public official or private contractor.Chapter 8. Ensuring that All Ontario Laws Do Not Authorize or Require Disability BarriersRecommended Findings We urge this AODA Independent Review to find as follows:* The Ontario Government has a special obligation to ensure that Ontario legislation and regulations are barrier-free for people with disabilities. These laws should not create or permit the creation of disability accessibility barriers. * The former Ontario Government promised to review all Ontario laws for accessibility issues in the 2007 election. It repeated that pledge in the 2011 and 2014 elections. * The former Government delayed even starting this review until 2011. That effort was further delayed for another two years after that. * Over eleven years after the initial pledge, the Ontario Government has only reviewed a mere 51 of Ontario's 750 statutes and no Ontario regulations, for accessibility problems. Of the 51 statutes reviewed, the former Ontario Government only amended a mere 11 of them. The former Government rejected further NDP amendments. The former Government did not correct a number of barriers in the 51 statutes it reviewed.* Within the former Government, this issue was shuffled from ministry to ministry over the past 11-12 years, and through a revolving door series of deputy ministers.* After some amendments were made to 11 Ontario statutes in spring 2016, the former Ontario Government in effect did nothing further on this review for its last two years in power. The new Ontario Government has not announced any action or plans on this issue. * It should not take 11 years to complete this review, much less a review of only 51 Ontario statutes. Between 1982 and 1985, the Ontario Government reviewed all laws for compliance with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, including its equality guarantee in section 15.Recommendations on the Government's Duty to Review Ontario Statutes and Regulations for Accessibility Barriers We urge this Review to recommend that: The Government should announce, within four months of this Independent Review's report, a detailed plan for completing a comprehensive review of all Ontario statutes and regulations for accessibility problems, and for ensuring that new legislation and regulations will be screened in advance to ensure that they do not authorize, permit, create or perpetuate barriers against people with disabilities.The Government should complete this review of all legislation for accessibility barriers by the end of 2020, and of all regulations by the end of 2021. The Government should introduce into the Legislature, with the intent of passing it, an omnibus bill or bills to amend any legislation as needed a result of this review, along timelines that the Government should announce by the end of March 2019. Cabinet should amend any regulations that the government deems necessary as a result of the accessibility review, by the end of 2022.The Government should appoint the Attorney General of Ontario to lead this review of all Ontario laws for accessibility problems, in coordination with the Secretary of Cabinet.The Government should report to the public by the end of 2018, the end of 2019 and the end of 2020 on its progress toward meeting the deadlines for reviewing all legislation and regulations for accessibility barriers. These reports should give specifics on what the Government has done and plans to do, whether by legislative amendments or other actions, to address accessibility barriers it has discovered in this review. When the Government identifies a potential barrier in an Ontario statute or regulation, it should consult with the public, including with people with disabilities, on options for addressing the barrier, before deciding on the contents of possible amendments to those laws.Chapter 9 Making Ontario and Municipal Elections Accessible to Voters and Candidates with DisabilitiesRecommended Findings We urge this AODA Independent Review to find as follows:* In 2018, voters and candidates with disabilities in Ontario provincial and municipal elections continue to face too many disability barriers. This is unjustified and unacceptable.* The same disability barriers can present themselves in provincial and municipal elections. It is inappropriate to have to reinvent the accessibility wheel in the election context at both the provincial and municipal levels, and then again, from one municipality to the next. This slows progress on accessibility while wastefully costing the taxpayer more.* Elections Ontario has not solved this problem at the provincial level, even though this issue has been within its mandate for many years.* A comprehensive new strategy is needed to ensure elections accessibility for voters and candidates with disabilities, which can be expected to require legislative and non-legislative reforms.Recommendations on Ensuring Municipal and Provincial Elections are Barrier-free for Voters and Candidates with DisabilitiesWe urge this Independent Review to make these recommendations:By June 2019, the Government should appoint an independent person to conduct a three month independent review of barriers facing voters and candidates with disabilities in provincial and municipal elections, including both in the campaign process and the voting process. This Review, should, among other things, gather information on the use of telephone and internet voting in municipal elections in Ontario. This Review should hold an open, accessible and province-wide public consultation, and report to the public within six months of its appointment. Its report should be made public immediately on its being submitted to the Government. Within six months after the report of the Disability Elections Accessibility Independent Review, the Government should introduce into the Legislature omnibus elections accessibility reforms for both municipal and provincial elections, to remove and prevent barriers impeding voters and candidates with disabilities in the voting process, and in participating in election campaigns, to ensure that:all voters with disabilities can independently mark their own ballot in private and verify their choice. This bill should, among other things, open up the option of telephone and/or internet voting in Ontario elections and by-elections.all voters with disabilities have full physical accessibility to all polling stations and all public areas in polling stations, including sharing at the provincial and municipal levels information on accessible polling station venues, so each does not have to reinvent the same accessibility wheel.Ensure that election campaign information is immediately and readily available in accessible formats, and that campaign websites are designed to be fully accessible.ensure that all-candidates debates are accessible.Chapter 10 Ontario Government - Leading by Example, But by What Example is it Leading?Recommended Findings We urge this AODA Independent Review to find as follows:* The Ontario Government and Ontario Public Service has not led and is now not leading by a good example, in the area of accessibility. That is not to say it has done nothing on accessibility. Rather it has done far too little, and has not lived up to its stated intention to lead Ontario by example. * The former Government did not keep Premier Wynne's commitment to instruct all ministers on their accessibility commitments. This contributed to slower progress on accessibility.* The fact that the new Ontario Government has not made its Mandate Letters public makes it impossible for the public, including people with disabilities, to know what the Premier has instructed his ministers to do on accessibility for people with disabilities.* The transfer from 2013 to 2016 of the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario to the Ministry of Economic Development was well-intentioned and held great promise. However it turned out to be a failure. * It is important for the Ontario Government to have a full-time Minister of Accessibility, to lead the AODA's implementation. It was inappropriate for the former Ontario Government to assign to the same minister both the responsibility as Minister for Accessibility and the conflicting role of Minister of Government Services.* There is a pressing need for the Ontario Government to re-engineered the way the Government delivers and oversees the delivery of accessibility within the Ontario Public Service, as an employer and service-provider.* The Ontario Government's efforts at becoming an accessible employer and service-provider were slowed and hampered by virtue of the fact that the Government has no Chief Accessibility Officer, at the level of a deputy minister or associate deputy minister, with lead responsibility and authority for ensuring that the Ontario Public Service becomes accessible as an employer and service-provider.* The Ontario Government missed an extraordinary opportunity to achieve advances on accessibility in the tourism and hospitality sector, when Ontario hosted the 2015 Toronto Pan/Parapan American Games. Despite our repeated efforts over two years, the former Ontario Government did not undertake a strategy to use the Games to leverage an increase of accessibility in the tourism and hospitality sector, such as in hotels, restaurants and tourism sites.* The Minister of International Trade did not incorporate disability accessibility as a prominent part of the International Trade Ministry's strategy for economic development and innovation.* The Minister of Research and Innovation did not ensure disability accessibility is a key focus of research and innovation programs and projects that the Government operates or finances.Recommendations on the Ontario Government Leading By Example on Accessibility The Government should designate a single minister to be responsible for ensuring that the Ontario Public Service becomes a fully accessible employer and service provider, and to ensure that the Government keeps all its accessibility commitments and duties, other than those for which the Minister for Accessibility and Seniors is responsible. The Government should establish a full-time Deputy Minister or associate deputy minister responsible for ensuring the accessibility of the Ontario Government's services, facilities and workplaces, to be called the Chief Accessibility Officer.The Premier should include in the mandate letter that his office issues to each cabinet minister, specific directions to fulfil the Government's commitments and duties on disability accessibility which fall in whole or in part in that ministry's purview. The Premier's instructions to cabinet ministers on accessibility should be made public.The Premier's office should direct the Secretary of Cabinet to ensure that the Government's disability accessibility commitments and duties are kept, and direct the Secretary to Cabinet to take all needed steps to implement them.The Government should announce and implement a plan to re-engineer how the Ontario Public Service discharges its duty to ensure that its own services, facilities and workplaces are fully accessible. The Government should ensure that there remains an Accessibility Lead position in each ministry, and should ensure that it is or becomes a full time position, which reports directly to the deputy minister of that minister, with an option for a dual report as well to the ministry's Chief Administrative Officer.The Government should promptly implement and widely publicize within the Ontario Public Service a comprehensive permanent periodic program for auditing and monitoring its workplaces and public services and facilities for disability accessibility and barriers. This program should include, among other things, on-site audits and inspections, and not merely paper trail audits. The results of this monitoring should annually be made public. The Government should promptly implement a constructive program for ensuring accountability of public servants in the Ontario Public Service for efforts on disability accessibility. Among other things, the Ontario Public Service should require that every employee include in his or her annual performance review, performance goals on disability accessibility within the scope of their duties. Performance on this criterion should be assessed for performance, pay and promotion decisions. The Government should not solely or predominantly rely on on-line programs to train the Ontario Public Service on accessibility. It should implement live, interactive programming where possible that involves face-to-face interaction with persons with disabilities.The Minister responsible for International Trade should incorporate disability accessibility as a prominent part of Ontario's international trade strategy for economic development and innovation.The Minister who is responsible for research and innovation should ensure disability accessibility is a key focus of research and innovation programs and projects that the Government operates or finances.Chapter 11 The Unmet Need for a Strong and Effective Ontario Strategy to Substantially increase the Employment of Ontarians with Disabilities Recommended Findings We urge this AODA Independent Review to find as follows:* People with disabilities continue to face unfair and high rates of unemployment. This inflicts serious hardships on people with disabilities and on society. Society significantly benefits by substantially increasing the employment of people with disabilities * The Ontario Government is a significant cause of the disability unemployment problem* Ontario does not now have in place sufficient measures to combat this. At the present rate, employment in Ontario will not be achieve full accessibility for people with disabilities by 2025. A stronger AODA Employment Accessibility Standard would help. However, companion Government strategies on increased employment for people with disabilities are also needed. Short term tax cuts or financial incentives are no long term solution* Barriers that students with disabilities face in Ontario's education system contribute to the unemployment plight facing too many people with disabilities. A good education is needed to get a good job. As such, delays in creating a strong and effective AODA Education Accessibility Standard contribute to the ongoing unemployment plight facing people with disabilities. That includes the previous 'Governments multi-year delay in deciding to create an AODA Education Accessibility Standard, and the current Government's freeze on the work of the K-12 and Post-Secondary Education Standards Development Committees.* If Ontario had in place a combination of a stronger Employment Accessibility Standard, a strong Education Accessibility Standard, a stronger Transportation Accessibility Standard, a strong Built Environment Accessibility Standard, and a strong provincial disability employment strategy, the workplaces of 5 to 6 years from now can and should be fully accessible to people with disabilities.* It was unjustifiable for the former Ontario Government to have taken over four years to develop a disability employment strategy. There have already been ample studies, reports and advisory councils on employment for people with disabilities. What is needed now is action, not more delay for extensive study and discussions.* The former Government's "Access Talent" disability employment strategy, announced in June 2017, has some helpful ingredients. However these were too often too high-level or preliminary. More concrete action is needed with prompt benefits for people with disabilities trying to enter or remain in the workforce. Recommendations to Improve Employment Opportunities for People with Disabilities The Ontario Government should designate a specific minister and deputy minister with lead responsibility for ensuring that all the needed measures are taken to ensure substantially increased employment opportunities for people with disabilities.The Ontario Government should, within two months, make public a list of options for a strengthened disability employment strategy, drawn from the Government's own past and present programs, and from the programs and ideas that others have accumulated, e.g. those readily discoverable on the internet. The Government should promptly consult the public, including employers and people with disabilities on those options, and on any additional options that the public brings forward. Within three months of releasing that list of options, the Government should announce a new and strengthened Ontario disability employment strategy, supplementing the existing Access Talent strategy, to substantially increase employment opportunities for people with disabilities. As part of this strategy:The Government should not treat "raising awareness" among employers about the benefits of employment for people with disabilities as its core strategy for substantially increasing employment opportunities for people with disabilities.The Government should become a role model - leading by example through increased employment of people with disabilities in the Ontario Public Service (OPS) and the broader public sector and procuring services, providing grants or financing to organizations with a strong orientation toward supporting employment of people with disabilitiesThe Government should eliminate Government-created barriers to increased employment of people with disabilitiesThe Government should promptly implement a pro-active strategy to ensure that all students with disabilities in K-12 education secure an experiential learning opportunity, to work towards getting a good job reference to assist them in securing their first paid job. ................
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