Disability, accessibility and independent living

The position

He put it plainly in his maiden speech and never really departed from it. Medicine now saves people who would not have survived a generation ago. Having saved them, the country then fails to provide what those same people need to lead full lives, and the gap between the rescue and everything after it is where the policy failure sits. He returned to the same point in 2006, saying it was the contradiction that had brought him into public life, and again in 2015 in the line that best summarises it: there is a difference between existing and living.

The practical version is about barriers rather than sympathy. Care people can actually get, transport they can actually use, buildings they can actually enter, workplaces that will actually have them, and an insurance system that does not run out of money halfway through a life. He argued repeatedly that a flush entrance does not make a building accessible.

What changed because he was there

The House of Commons altered its own rules to accommodate him, and the rule outlasted him. Standing Order 1.1 provides that the Speaker may alter the application of any Standing Order or practice of the House in order to permit the full participation of any member with a disability. The House’s own Annotated Standing Orders explain its origin without ambiguity: the election in 2004 of a member with quadriplegia prompted its addition.

It has since done work nobody anticipated. When the House needed to sit remotely in 2020, the Speaker pointed to Standing Order 1.1 as the precedent. A rule written so that one member could take his seat became part of the basis on which the whole chamber could meet during a pandemic.

A smaller precedent came first. His personal care assistant sat with him on the floor of the House, the first unelected person in Canadian history to do so full time, and later in committees and in Cabinet.

Independent living

The most personal strand of the record concerns where and how disabled people are allowed to live. Leaving hospital after his 1996 injury he refused the institutional place he was offered and moved instead into a one-bedroom apartment with no accessible bathroom. He raised it in the House in 2006 as an argument for home care, on the grounds that it is usually cheaper and always better for the person, the family and the community.

The federal record

He arrived in 2004 as the first quadriplegic Member of Parliament in Canada, and the argument ran through work that was formally about other things: health care, home care, hepatitis C compensation, autism.

On autism he tabled three petitions in 2005 asking Parliament to amend the Canada Health Act to cover treatment, and in 2006 he co-wrote Motion No. 172 with the member for Fredericton. Later that year, by then Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Health, he set out the government’s position against a private member’s bill that would have amended the Act, on jurisdictional grounds. Both positions are on the record.

As a minister he set out the government’s disability record at the 2010 Paralympics: the registered disability savings plan, the enabling accessibility fund, social housing, and Canada’s ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities four days earlier. As Minister of State for Transport he defended accessibility investment at VIA Rail and answered a detailed written question on accessible rail service, including the number of cars fitted with wheelchair tie-downs and the complaints received over five years.

The fullest statements came at the end, on Bill C-643, a private member’s bill to establish a National Spinal Cord Injury Awareness Day sponsored by Manon Perreault, the member for Montcalm, who is also a wheelchair user. He spoke at second reading in February 2015 and seconded the motion at third reading in May. The bill passed the House 265 to nothing and then died on the Order Paper at dissolution.

Jordan’s Principle

One intervention from his time as Parliamentary Secretary for Health has had a longer life than most. On 31 October 2007 he spoke for the government in support of Jordan’s Principle, the child-first rule intended to stop jurisdictional disputes between governments and departments delaying services for First Nations children. He set out why the question bore particularly on disability, noting that the level of disability among First Nations and Inuit children is high and that access to care is impeded by geography and by limited services in rural, remote and isolated communities. He did not introduce the motion; it was brought by Jean Crowder, the member for Nanaimo-Cowichan. He spoke for it, and on 12 December 2007 he voted for it when the House adopted it 262 to nothing.

His words were later put to use he could not have anticipated. In its closing submissions to the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal in the First Nations child welfare case, the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society quoted him as one of three extracts from the debates demonstrating what it called the breadth of the vision for Jordan’s Principle, arguing against the much narrower reading the federal government had since applied. The submission attributes the passage to him by name and cites the Hansard of 31 October 2007.

Catastrophic injury and the cost of care

Elected to the Manitoba Legislature in 2016, he found a chamber he could not get onto the floor of. In June 2016 he rose on a matter of privilege, arguing that the physical inaccessibility of the Chamber obstructed him in his duties, and proposing a ramp rather than the mechanical lifts suggested. The Speaker ruled in October that there was no prima facie case, while stating that the layout was “simply not acceptable in 2016” and that work would continue. He challenged the ruling and lost on a recorded division, 36 to 18.

The substantive provincial work was on insurance. Three times, in three successive sessions, he introduced a private member’s bill to amend The Manitoba Public Insurance Corporation Act by removing the cap on personal assistance expenses and the limit on discretionary expenses payable to people with catastrophic injuries: Bill 225 in 2017, Bill 210 later that year, and Bill 208 in 2018. His argument was that the caps contradict the stated intent of Manitoba’s own no-fault legislation and fall hardest on the young, who live longest with the injury. None advanced past first reading. Introducing the last of them he told the House this was the issue that brought him into politics in the first place.

In Steven Fletcher’s words

These citations are as complete as the record now allows. More will be added as they are found, and these pages change as the facts do. Where a source is a recollection rather than a document, it is identified as such.