DJD with Jay—Disability Justice: What Does it Mean and What Does it Look Like in Practice?

Disability Justice is revolutionary. It works to put forth the intersectional experiences of all folks in the disabled community, highlighting the disparities each of us faces  at the hands of these capitalist, ableist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, colonial, carceral (I could go on forever) etc. systems of oppression that we  are forced to exist in.

When I was growing up, intersectionality was not a part of any conversation, and disability was not a positive discussion topic. I grew up in a small White town where my family was the only Black family on our street for many years. This fact alone was hard enough for the white, able-bodied and non-disabled people in town to swallow, never mind the fact that I was the only disabled person in my family.

Existing as a Black and disabled student, especially as a female, was isolating. I was not treated with the same respect and autonomy that my siblings received in school. Kids were mean and adults were worse (even though they were supposed to know better). This is not to say that my siblings did not face racism and prejudices in school, but it was different for them. They always had friends to sit with at lunch and did not have people ask what happened to them. if my siblings ever saw or heard about me being mistreated, whether in school or out in the world---they would be the first one’s there to defend my honor. My sister once punched a kid on the playground for making fun of me. But that is a story for another time.

The concepts of intersectionality and disability justice  were brought to my attention when I came to university. From the moment I stepped into my first-year women and gender studies class, back in 2019, something clicked!

I finally belonged somewhere, and it opened my world. This course taught what it means to be a part of a community—to show each other, love, and grace without limits. Everyone in that class was coming to it from different perspectives and diverse backgrounds. No one was too knowledgeable to learn something new and we were doing it together, which was even more enriching.

 I felt the same way when I met my current friend group here on campus, at Carleton University, through the Attendant Services Program. My disabled babes are the true embodiment of the disability justice principles and what unconditional love looks like, in practice. They see me, sit with me, recognize my wholeness, fight for me, and support me in fighting for myself. They  sustain me, mobilize with me, elevate my voice when the world does not hear me, and they find ways to help me access the world with them. I do the same for them too. Community care and collective access are  key in everything I do. My work and the spaces created by me, are the embodiment of the phrase: “Nothing About us, Without Us” (Charlton 1998).

You cannot look at me without seeing my passion for it all, and the sparkle behind my eyes. It is magical.

Until next time, keep rolling, growing, stimming, moving, shaking, resting, resisting and loving.

Jay Baldwin xx

(they/them)

•   Check out Sins Invalid for further details on the “10 Principles of Disability Justice” (Sins Invalid 2015) and access the book Nothing About Us Without Us: Disability Oppression and Empowerment (Charlton 1998) for more information on the Disability Justice/Rights movement, its relevance, and the importance of considering both the individual and collective voices and experiences of Disabled/Mad/Neurodiverse/Chronically ill communities everywhere!

Bibliography

1. Sins Invalid. 2015. “10 Principles of Disability Justice.” Sinsinvalid.org https://sinsinvalid.org/10-principles-of-disability-justice/.

2. Charlton, James I. Nothing about Us without Us: Disability Oppression and Empowerment. 1st ed., University of California Press, 1998, https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520925441.

Letter to Toronto City Council re: Wheel-Trans and the Family of Services (FOS) Model at the TTC

In support of the wider campaign led by TTCRiders, Brad wrote a letter to Mayor Olivia Chow, TTC Chair Jamaal Myers, and Toronto City Councillors. Everyone across Ontario needs to pay attention to what is happening with the TTC’s “Family of Services” (FOS) model as it is being proposed all across the GTHA and wider Province.

If we can stop it here, we can stop it everywhere.

For more on the Family of Services model, see TTCRiders WheelTrans Cuts petition: https://www.ttcriders.ca/wheeltranscuts

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Subject: Wheel-Trans and the Family of Services (FOS) Model at the TTC

2 December 2024

Dear Mayor Chow, TTC Chair Myers, and Toronto City Councillors

As the Executive Director of Disability Justice Network of Ontario and a resident of Ward 12, I write to you regarding our deep and lasting concerns regarding the TTC’s “Family of Services” (FOS) model. In opposition to this model, we would strongly encourage you to both invest in protecting door-to-door Wheel-Trans access and joining the wider movement around this Province to ensure accessible, affordable transit for all.

We know that the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act has failed to be implemented and materialized across this Province, practically. In the spirit of existing legislation, cities are encouraged to expand access, not to limit it. However, the Wheel-Trans 10-Year Strategy has consistently failed to uphold these values and the consequences are wide-ranging. While GTHA interconnectedness and regional transit accessibility becomes more complex and less straightforward for disabled riders, the TTC is serving as a model for how many transit agencies wish to move forward, which sadly, is in the wrong direction.

Through this plan and the FOS model, TTC plans to screen out 50% of current Wheel-Trans users from door-to-door services to meet “diversion targets” and leave disabled riders with an inconsistent, unsafe, inaccessible conventional system. As is obvious to any disabled rider, the TTC is not fully accessible and will not be up to AODA standards by 2025. This has been the reality I’ve experienced as a disabled rider, where injury, strain, failed accessibility features are a regular occurance.

Wheel-Trans users need choice and safety and the FOS model does not meet this standard and should not be made mandatory for any disabled Wheel-Trans riders. 

It is also clear that this model reflects an effort, long before the current Mayoral administration, to cut costs. Forcing seniors and disabled people to use the conventional TTC just to save public money that should be invested in accessibility is a failure of public, social policy and deeply counter to the values of Torontonians. Such actions will result in riders:

• getting stranded at bus stops: Instead of a single, door-to-door trip, the “Family of Services” involves multiple transfers. Conventional TTC might be accessible on paper, but in reality, TTC buses can be too crowded to board. FOS trips can also involve Wheel-Trans pick-ups at TTC stops halfway through a trip: People get stranded when their connecting TTC bus trip is more than 5 minutes late, the grace period that a Wheel-Trans vehicle will wait.

• feeling isolated: Being forced to use conventional streetcars, subways, and buses will discourage people from using transit, resulting in isolation and a loss of independence.

• taking more expensive transit trips: Because “Family of Services” trips involve multiple transfers between Wheel-Trans vehicles, buses, streetcars, and subways,, Wheel-Trans users have reported that some trips take longer than the 2-hour transfer window, and can cost two fares.

• having unsafe transit trips: People with chronic health conditions and disabilities are concerned about the risk of being pushed or jostled on crowded subway platforms and slipping or falling while boarding crowded buses.

What’s further, as your own consultations have indicated, Wheel-Trans users do not support this policy. Public consultations held in April 2024 found that:

• 39% of Wheel-Trans users said they would never use the Family of Services.

• 61% of Wheel-Trans users felt that the TTC did not meet their accessibility requirements.

• 60% of Wheel-Trans users feel that crowding is an issue that affects people with disabilities.

Further to this: many “Conditional” Wheel-Trans users have the condition that they are eligible for Wheel-Trans door-to-door trips only in the peak periods. But because the 2023 TTC Operating Budget changed the crowding standard from the TTC’s official Service Standards, every hour has become rush hour. Service in the off-peak is currently planned for "standing room only,” and people who use wheelchairs and other assistive devices have reported that conventional buses are sometimes too crowded to get on. I have seen this in my own lived experience of attempting to use the TTC every week in this city.

Finally, as with so many of our social services, financial and other barriers are preventing Wheel-Trans users from engaging with appeals processes around their “Conditional” status: From gathering supporting documentation for the appeal requires booking appointments with specialists to paying for a doctor's notes and attendant supports—administrative appeals of these processes take time and money in an already incredibly costly city for disabled people. This is only more so for racialized, disabled riders who face the intersections of medical racism when navigating gathering information for these appeals processes.

The estimated cost of maintaining door-to-door service for all Wheel-Trans users in 2025 is $5.3 million. This is nothing compared to countless other expenses that are made by the City on policing, on mega-events, and much more. It is time for extended investment into accessibility on the TTC in all areas. It’s time to surpass the city’s failure to advance the AODA. It’s time to join disabled organizers to advocate for more from the Province. 

As such, we join TTCRiders and others in the city to urge you to fully fund the cost of maintaining this critical service and to vote against making the “Family of Services” mandatory.

Respectfully, 

Brad Evoy,

Executive Director, Disability Justice Network of Ontario

Disability Benefit regulations show feds don’t care about institutionalized Canadians

After being abandoned through the pandemic, disabled people living in long-term care facilities and group homes are once again invisible to the Liberals in Ottawa’s new draft regulations.

Originally Published on

Click the above text and image for the link to the original article

BY KENDAL DAVID and MEGAN LINTON | September 27, 2024

The new Canada Disability Benefit is slated to roll out in July 2025. Once promising to lift hundreds of thousands of disabled Canadians out of poverty, the draft regulations reveal a limited program which advocates argue excludes many of the most marginalized and impoverished disabled people. 

After being abandoned through the COVID-19 pandemic, disabled people living in residential institutions like long-term care facilities, group homes, and continuing care facilities are once again invisible in the newly written draft regulations for the Canada Disability Benefit (CDB).

In particular, the draft regulations, released in June, make no reference to the more than 100,000 disabled Canadians living in residential institutions across the country. These facilities often subject disabled residents to abject living conditions: mass-produced meals lacking in nutrition, rationing of care, frequent infectious outbreaks, and disproportionate rates of death. On top of these grave indignities, many institutionalized disabled people are forced to survive on just $5 a day.

Residential institutions continue to provide a core supply of housing for people with disabilities across Canada. In Ontario alone, about 63,000 disabled people who receive provincial social assistance payments from the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) live in institutions, according to data up to March 2019. The 14,800 people living in long-term care or group homes receive measly personal needs allowances of $149 per month from ODSP. The remaining 48,000 living in boarding homes get support from ODSP to pay their housing provider for room and board—often paid directly to landlords—and a $71 allowance to cover all other expenses.

Given the depth of poverty for institutionalized disabled people, they stand to gain a lot from receiving the otherwise inconsequential $200 a month benefit. An extra $200 can make a meaningful impact to blunt the sharp edge of isolation and the daily mundanity of institutional life by facilitating access to the internet, a personal phone line, taxi fare or bus passes, fresh fruits and vegetables, a gym membership, or a meal out with friends.

Institutionalized folks are among the poorest disabled people in Canada, and could be significantly better off with the new Benefit—if only they can access it. Currently, the regulations propose using the Disability Tax Credit (DTC) as the eligibility criteria to access the new benefit. The DTC application process is complex and burdensome, and—amongst other problems—presumes people have access to a family doctor, which over 2.5 million people in Ontario do not. The federal government has committed to fund a navigation support program to help disabled people file their taxes, and get their DTC application packages together. But it’s unclear whether the federal government either knows or cares that institutionalized people exist, and should be prioritized as a target population for these efforts. They’re not mentioned anywhere in the proposed CDB regulations, even as a target population for tax filing support.

The proposed regulations rationalize that using the DTC eligibility criteria allows the federal government to implement the CDB quickly. While the roll-out of the CDB is indeed urgent, it needs to be functional enough that the most impoverished people can access it in the first place. People living on allowances of $5 a day stand to benefit from the CDB, but they’re also among some of the least likely to bother filing taxes and jumping through the hoops of DTC’s complex—and potentially expensive—application.

It’s unsurprising that the CDB regulations ignore institutionalized disabled people given that the federal government hasn’t bothered to collect data about them since 1991. Unlike their neighbours in market or subsidized housing, disabled people in these institutional settings are excluded from the Canadian Survey on Disability. As the primary federal data source on disability, the federal government is using it to inform the design of regulations, their cost-benefit analysis, and impact modelling.

This lack of data presents an enormous challenge in the CDB's design, and will continue to be a thorn in the side of the federal government for years to come as it tries to evaluate its impact, and prove the CDB’s value to voters. But it’s not too late for the feds to take action, and to address these gaps.

If designed properly, the CDB could make meaningful impacts in the lives of the most marginalized Canadians. For it to work, and to ensure that institutionalized Canadians would receive the new CDB, the benefit eligibility criteria must include provincial social assistance recipients and those who get Canada Pension Plan-Disability. And for the benefit to actually count, the federal government needs to modernize and re-implement the institutional component of the Canadian Survey on Disability so the true impacts for all disabled people can be really understood.

Kendal David is a PhD candidate in social work at Carleton University. She’s currently studying institutionalized poverty in Ontario using policy and discourse analysis, and interviews with institutionalized folks in Ottawa. 

Megan Linton is the policy lead at the Disability Justice Network of Ontario, creator of the audio documentary project Invisible Institutions, and a PhD Candidate at Carleton University.