A bill creating a road to more accessibility in Alberta was well-intentioned but flawed, an MLA said before its passge in the legislture failed March 24.
During second-reading debate of Bill 206, the Accessible Alberta Act, Jacqueline Lovely said provinces with comparable legislation haven’t necessarily made the progress their laws outline.
The bill was defeated along party lines, with only Progressive Tory Peter Guthrie of Airdrie-Cochrane joining the NDP in voting for it.
“Accessibility matters,” said Lovely, the UCP member representing the Camrose riding. “The full and equal participation of Albertans with disabilities in every aspect of life in this province is not a partisan issue. It is a shared value in this chamber.”
Her stance against the bill is “not a rejection of that vision,” Lovely continued as the debate began March 16. “It is a rejection of the way this bill proposes to get us there.”
The bill introduced by Marie Renaud, the NDP’s community and social services critic, would have aligned Alberta with all but one other Canadian province.
Only Prince Edward Island and the territories do not have their own, stand-alone legislation to make their jurisdictions more accessible for residents of Canada with disabilities.
Through the Accessible Canada Act of 2019, the federal government is pushing for a barrier-free Canada by 2040.
Ottawa has encouraged provinces to follow its lead, but it can only remove and prevent barriers to accessibility under its own constitutional authority.
The Alberta bill would have allowed the province to work with experts to develop standards, identify and remove barriers and prevent them from being created in the first place, maintained Renaud, the MLA for St. Albert.
“Alberta disability services and protections are currently based on an intersecting patchwork of legislation that are really antiques,” Renaud told the legislature. “They no longer address today’s challenges and opportunity.”
Her second-reading comments followed an NDP news conference, during which her party and accessibility advocates supported the bill.
Zachary Weeks, an advocate with cerebral palsy, said many Albertans “don’t even know what dignity looks like anymore” because of a lack of accessibility.
“Anyone with any sort of compassion or any sort of lens of inclusion would want to support a bill that supports our most vulnerable, whether it’s financially or otherwise,” said Weeks.
The Accessible Alberta Act would be “a game changer for hundreds of thousands of Albertans.”
People with disabilities make up a minority anyone can be forced to join against their will at any time. “People with dignity now may not have that dignity later,” Weeks said.
Bean Gill, the cofounder of a paralysis recovery centre called ReYu, was on vacation in 2012 when a virus attacked her spinal cord and left her partially paralyzed.
Gill told reporters she “took for granted” 30 years of being able to step over a curb, open a door and access places and services “without a second thought.”
She added: “Now it takes six or seven thoughts before I even get out of my car.”
A disabling injury “can happen to anyone,” said Gill. “And I just want people to really understand that it’s not us versus them. It’s me, it’s us, it’s all of us together.”
Lovely, meanwhile, said that the NDP’s implication that Alberta is “somehow behind” other provinces doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
Three provinces have fully developed their accessibility standards, and “the results have been sobering,” she said.
An independent review in Ontario said a crisis point has been reached there, because of nonexistent enforcement, limited accountability, fragmented oversight and insufficient data, Lovely said.
“A single piece of legislation did not solve the problem. In many ways it created new ones because it wasn’t doing it right. I do not want that for Alberta.”
Lovely said the Alberta act had powers and definitions that were too broad. As drafted, the law would be among the country’s furthest reaching.
“Ambition is not a flaw, but ambition without adequate structure and flexibility is a recipe for exactly the kind of failure we have seen in other jurisdictions,” she said.
More than a quarter of Canadians live with at least some level of disability.
Statistics Canada defines a person with a disability as someone “whose daily activities are limited as a result of an impairment or difficulty with particular tasks.”
The agency found in 2022 that Alberta had the highest proportion of people with disabilities who reported at least one barrier to accessibility in the last year, 74 per cent of them.
In moving second reading of the bill, Renaud said: “This government claims to want to improve unemployment realities for people with disabilities, but they refuse to listen to something or pass something that will actually make that a reality.”
Lovely said that Alberta has the highest employment rate for persons with disabilities in this country at 53 per cent and the highest hourly earnings for employed persons with disabilities at more than $33 an hour.
Alberta Treasury Board and Finance data show that disabled workers create half a million jobs, generate $29 billion in employment income and add $48 billion to Alberta’s GDP.
People with disabilities not currently working but with the potential to do so could add $14 billion and 158,000 jobs to Alberta’s economy, according to TBF.
