In late May, I participated in “Accessible Canada, Accessible World” (ACAW), a conference in Montreal hosted by the International Design Resource Center at the Ontario College of Art & Design and sponsored by Accessibility Standards Canada, a federal agency. It was an extraordinary event, with most discussions held in a “flipped classroom” format: two people, in the somewhat interchangeable roles of facilitator and provocateur, guided attendees—most of whom were accessibility and disability scholars and advocates —in discussion while encouraging virtual and in-person attendees to contribute.
Not surprisingly, the majority of attendees were Canadian, and the majority of discussions were framed around fostering accessibility in Canada. I suddenly found myself outside of what I realized was my United States-centric disability and accessibility comfort zone.
The ACAW event allowed me to see how our geographic and cultural neighbor’s approaches to enabling and optimizing disability inclusion highlight both positives and negatives in our own journey toward full accessibility.
In the U.S., we pride ourselves on having enshrined disability rights in law with the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) 34 years ago. In Canada, the rights of people with disabilities were written into its Constitution in 1982 through the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. That’s as basic as it gets. Yet against the backdrop of the long-running failure in the U.S. to pass, for example, the Equal Rights Amendment for women to our Constitution, it’s difficult to expect that an equivalent amendment guaranteeing equal rights to disabled people would get very far.
Even if it did, would it make it easier to increase the prevalence and quality of accommodations across society? If Canada’s history is any indication, apparently not by much. So, activists kept pushing, and in 2019, the Accessible Canada Act (ACA) became law. The ACA, like the ADA, is a federal statute, but unlike the ADA, it seeks to regulate only entities under federal jurisdiction.
In contrast, the ADA seeks to regulate private enterprise as well as government at the federal, state, and local levels, including education and employment. State laws offering stronger protections than the ADA override it, and vice versa.
Canada’s provinces, territories, and local governments are not under the ACA’s jurisdiction, although they can pass their own regulations. The strongest of these is the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA), passed in 2005, which some provinces and territories have used as a partial template.
The development and passage of both the ADA and ACA were driven by activists, and each reflects a seemingly robust mechanism for embedding accessibility into their respective national landscapes. But that outcome is proving illusory.
Different aspects of the ADA are overseen by multiple federal agencies in the U.S., and the U.S. Department of Justice enforces the ADA through lawsuits and settlement agreements. The Canadian federal department, Accessibility Standards Canada, was created through the ACA and is a framework for collecting and reviewing input from stakeholders across the diverse disability community to design, set, and implement accessibility standards.
In simpler terms, the ADA is a reactive mechanism, permitting government to rely on the disappointment and anger of citizens at the ongoing failures of private and public sector enterprises to acknowledge and act on the need for change. The ACA offers a proactive and collaborative approach to maintain a living legislative framework that theoretically gives citizens with disabilities the means to establish and strengthen the legislation.
Both approaches also reflect each nation’s disinterested attitude toward a full-throated embrace of accessibility. The ADA insists on litigation, guaranteeing the entrenchment of adversarial attitudes toward disability inclusion. For its part, the ACA kindly requests and hopes that everyone will do the right thing. While it includes a procedure for processing complaints and even for asking entities to respond and comply or face fines, the actual mechanisms for doing so are buried in time-consuming and tedious bureaucracy, a less than robust formula for successful remediation.
Despite enormous effort on every front, and despite the plethora of regulation that has been enacted toward the creation of accessible societies, the movement continues to grind against the same basic entrenched barriers: public, business, and governmental indifference. Perhaps as the developed world ages and finds itself understanding that accessibility is both a personal need and essential to how everyone functions, societal attitudes will recognize and accommodate based on reality.
Opinions expressed are solely those of the writer(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Able News at The Viscardi Center and/or The Viscardi Center.