CCD Annual Report 2024-25

Dedication

This year’s Annual Report is dedicated to Laurie Beachell and Ellen Cohen. Laurie Beachell was CCD’s National Coordinator from 1984 until 2015. Laurie passed in December 2024. Ellen Cohen was a long-term member of the CCD National Council and she was one of the key leaders involved in the Charter challenge to the BC Mental Health Case. In the appendix, you will find a write up about Laurie that was published in the Winnipeg Free Press and a write-up about Ellen Cohen.

We also acknowledge the passing of the Hon. Marc Garneau, a Minister of Transportation in the Justin Trudeau Government.  It was Minister Garneau’s leadership that led to the Accessible Transportation for Disabled Persons Regulations (ATDPR).

Chairperson’s Report for the CCD Annual Report

The work of the Council of Canadians with Disabilities (CCD) is guided by a framework of three pillars, which are:
1) Disability justice litigation work,
2) Community-led research work,
3) Convening groups on issues of the day, including working with other groups when they convene to discuss issues of the day.

The activities that come under pillars one and two contribute to the development of policy and position papers to be used by ourselves and the greater community and used to inform government and work for change.

We are committed to our three pillars which fit very well within the disability justice movement as it is now. Working within these 3 pillars we remain true to our human rights mandate and contribute to the creation of a more accessible and inclusive Canada. 

The Council has passed a five-year plan, and we have completed year two of a three year funding project from Employment and Social Development Canada. We are hopeful that ESDC will renew that funding. Meanwhile, we have been developing funding proposals in support of our ongoing work.

Members of the Executive Committee have been very active in developing new projects for CCD. Executive members, Elliot Dewhirst, Ingrid Palmer and Nicole Diakite formed the proposal development committee to guide our work and applications for funding. Ian Young continues to work, meeting with individuals and organizations keeping track of what policies and programs are working and not working.

Our proposal development work has been successful. Since the creation of our five year plan, CCD has had positive responses to its project proposal to the Law for the Future Fund, 2 additional proposals to ESDC, and 4 proposals to Accessibility Standards Canada.

CCD participated along with a number of other organizations in the development of an expression of interest to the Oral Health Access Fund for a project that would empower oral health providers to adopt inclusive treatment strategies and create accessible dental environments cost-effectively. We are still waiting to hear back about the success of this proposal

We are also looking at becoming more involved with private sector donors. With this in mind, we have developed a guideline for accepting gifts in an ethical manner.

There have been other supports and we sincerely thank the Alan Simpson Memorial Fund for their donation this year.

We continue to record videos where past and present leaders of CCD and our allies, discuss the issues that they worked on while involved with CCD. This puts us in a position to tell our own history. The following have been recorded: Catherine Frazee, Steve Estey, Mary Ennis, Mary Reid, Nancy Reid, Marie Ryan, Bob Brown, Vangelis Nikias, Francine Arsenault, Irene Feika, Laurie Beachell, Yvonne Peters, Pat Danforth, Michael Prince, Maureen Hann, Paul Young and Louise Gillis. We are on the Road to 50, with next year being our 50th anniversary.

We are very proud to report that the Council that makes up CCD has grown over the last year. The following organizations have become members: The Thunder Bay and District injured Workers Support Group, Realize, and the Canadian Council on Rehabilitation and Work (solidarity member). We are in discussions with other organizations that have expressed an interest in joining the Council.

The Council and the Executive Committee have met regularly throughout the year, meeting monthly with a break for summer and December holidays. The Council meetings have been opportunities for information sharing and capacity building among members. Of particular significance was the two meetings that we had with Dino Zuppa and his team from Accessibility Standards Canada. We have requested to have an in-person meeting with the Board of Directors of Accessibility Standards Canada (ASC). We have been working to decolonize ASC’s approach to research so that increasingly the research funded by ASC is community-led research that is empowering and capacity building.

The Council also had a very important session where we looked at emergency preparedness through a disability lens with Jen McEachen.

Another important component of our Council meetings has been to have regular exchanges among members, where representatives share the important and innovative work that they are doing in their organizations.

The following served on the CCD Executive Committee during 2024-25:
• Chairperson – Heather Walkus
• 1st Vice Chair – Ingrid Palmer
• 2nd Vice Chair – Elliot Dewhirst
• Secretary – Ian Young
• Treasurer – Nicole Diakite
• Member-at-Large – Fran Odette (Resigned before completion of term.)

The following served on Council during 2024 -25:
• Heather Walkus (Chairperson),
• Ingrid Palmer (Member-at-Large from the community of racialized persons with disabilities),
• Elliot Dewhirst (Member-at-Large from the community of 2SLGBYQA+ persons)
• Noah Papatsie (Member-at-Large from the community of Indigenous persons with disabilities),
• Carly Fox (Member-at-Large from the community of youth with disabilities), Alan Bridgeman (Alternate)
• Ian Young (Member-at-Large),
• Julia Lamb (Disability Alliance BC (DABC) r), Liss Cairns (DABC alternate), 
• Brenda Edel (Barrier Free Saskatchewan),
• Teresa Makarewich (Voice of Albertans with Disabilities),
• Laurie Helgason (Manitoba League of Persons with Disabilities)
• Dianne Wintermute (Citizens with Disabilities Ontario), Pat Seed (alternate),
• Nicole Diakite/Pierre Essoh (Nunavummi Disabilities Makinnasuaqtiit Society (NDMS))
• Michel Gaudet (COPHAN)
• Deborah Wood Salter (PEI ResourceAbilities)
• Shaun Clark (NS League for Equal Opportunities)
• Nancy Reid (Coalition of Persons with Disabilities Newfoundland and Labrador (CDONL)),
• Frank Folino (Canadian Association of the Deaf (CAD)),
• Leslie Yee (Canadian Council of the Blind), Jim Tokos (alternate)
• Janet Hunt (Coalition of People Who Use Guide & Service Dogs),
• Rabia Khedr (Disability Without Poverty), Janet Rodriguez (alternate)
• Rohini Peris (Environmental Health Association of Canada (EHAC)),
• Katia Newman (National Educational Association of Disabled Students) Frank Smith (alternate) Chloée Godin Jacques (alternate),
• Ellen Cohen (National Network for Mental Health) (Resigned during the year.)
• Steve Mantis (Thunder Bay and District Injured Workers)
• Gregor Wolbring (Thalidomide Victims Association of Canada (TVAC)),
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Thank you to everyone for the work that you have been doing at the CCD table, in your own organizations and in the community. The work that we are doing together is helping to eliminate the barriers encountered every day by persons with disabilities in Canada.

We recognize that that our community has lost some key leaders this year. Our Annual Report is dedicated to Laurie Beachell and Ellen Cohen, who passed this year. Our movement was strengthened by the contributions of these two leaders. May the memory of them be a blessing, and may we continue the work they so passionately dedicated their lives to.

In this year’s Annual Report, we are sharing with you some of the highlights of the many activities that the people, who make up CCD, have been engaged in to help make Canada a more accessible and inclusive place for people with disabilities. In the Highlights section we share key activities we have undertaken, addressing our three pillars: Disability Justice Litigation, Community-Led Research, and Convening.

In light of the many armed conflicts taking place in the world today and acts of genocide, we are working to amplify the Disabled Peoples’ International (DPI) Peace Statement and to build on that work stared by early leaders in the international disability rights movement. (Please see the appendix for the DPI Peace Statement.)

CCD’s Highlights for 2024-25

Disability Justice Litigation

Yvonne Peters and Anne Levesque are the co-chairs of the Disability Justice Litigation Initiative (DJLI). Co-chair Joelle Pastora Sala is on maternity leave. Morgan Rowe from Raven Law and Raji Mangat from West Coast Leaf are also part of the DJLI.

Cases this year

At the Supreme Court of Canada: International Air Transport Association et al v. Canadian Transportation Agency et al – On October 4, 2024, the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) upheld the Air Passenger Protection Regulation (the Regulation). The Supreme Court of Canada granted intervener status in this case to CCD in coalition with the National Pensioners Association and the Public Interest Advocacy Centre (the Coalition).

You may be wondering why CCD was concerned about the Regulation. As we all know, people with disabilities in Canada experience significant obstacles as air passengers. Getting stranded while on route because of delays or cancelations can create further difficulties and expenses if alternative travel plans need to be made. CCD argued in favor of the Regulation as it provides a simple method of claiming compensation. Given the many barriers that people with disabilities often experience when flying, being able to access needed compensation through a non-adversarial process offers a small step towards improving our travel experience.

What led up to Supreme Court case? The CTA introduced regulations to make it easier for air passengers to obtain compensation if their flight was delayed, disrupted or cancelled, or if they were denied boarding. It provides a standardized system of compensation for passengers who experience disruptions to their air travel plans. The International Air Transport Association objected to these regulations arguing that they conflict with the Montreal Convention. Passengers wishing to obtain compensation under the Convention must make their claim to a tribunal or court which can be complicated and time-consuming. Under the Regulation affected passengers simply need to apply to the relevant airline and if eligible, they will receive a standard amount of compensation. The Coalition argued that the two regimes can coexist and that a simplified compensation process was one step towards reducing transportation barriers for passengers vulnerable to discrimination.

CCD was represented by lawyers from the Public Interest Law Centre (PILC) in Winnipeg and legal experts from the University of Ottawa.

Travel Barriers - On March 21st, the Federal Court of Appeal issued its decision in Air Canada v Timothy Rose, a case where CCD intervened.

At issue was the failure of Air Canada to accommodate Mr. Rose, a motorized wheelchair user. Air Canada argued that the cargo hold of the flight Mr. Rose wished to take cannot accommodate his power chair. A hearing held by the Canadian Transportation Agency (CTA) determined that it was possible for Air Canada to implement solutions for accommodating motorized wheelchairs. Air Canada appealed this ruling arguing that CTA did not properly apply the undue hardship test. CCD intervened because we are concerned that the rigorous test for undue hardship could be undermined by Air Canada.

The Court dismissed Air Canada's appeal and found in favor of Mr. Rose.  The Court affirmed the Canadian Transportation Agency's undue hardship analysis and its application of Via Rail. The Court also rejected Air Canada's proposed balancing exercise that would have pitted Mr. Rose's interests against its own, which was one focus of CCD’s arguments.

Importantly, the Court also rejected Air Canada's proposed financial justification for failing to accommodate Mr. Rose. The Court made clear that as established in Via Rail, financial considerations will only constitute undue hardship when the costs amount to "substantial interference" in the Respondent's business enterprise. The decision is a win for Mr. Rose.

CCD achieved its goal of preserving the essential Via Rail undue hardship analysis.

PILC and RavenLaw were the legal team on this case.

The decision is available here: https://decisions.fca-caf.gc.ca/fca-caf/decisions/en/item/521588/index.do

Accommodation for Deaf Prisoners - In April of 2024, the CCD Executive gave the Disability Justice Litigation Initiative approval to proceed with preparing an application to participate in a complaint at the Canadian Human Rights Commission involving a Deaf complainant incarcerated in the federal prison system who experienced discrimination because Corrections Services Canada failed to implement real accommodations to provide accessible services. On March 14, 2025 the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal heard the complaint. CCD and the Canadian Association of the Deaf (CAD) were interested parties in this case.

In this case, the CCD/CAD focused on:
• providing context about the diversity of experiences and needs of the Deaf community,
• how there is no one-size-fits-all approach to accommodation,
• how national and international accessibility standards such as the Accessible Canada Act and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities should inform the Tribunal’s remedies.
•
We are interested in this case because we wanted to ensure that the Tribunal was informed by a disability justice perspective on how to implement accommodation.

CCD v. AGBC (BC Mental Health Act) – We continued our work on the BC Mental Health Act ase, which is a challenge under s. 15(1) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. CCD has been involved in this case since 2016. We have already been in the Supreme Court of Canada to address procedural issues. After that win, we were able to move on to the real issues we are concerned about. The case is slated for trial in May – June 2025.

This case seeks to ensure that when psychiatric care is forced, it is delivered with dignity, oversight, and the involvement of trusted supporters in accordance with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. CCD is represented by Kevin Love from CLAS BC and lawyers McCarthy Tetrault. The late Ellen Cohen was a leading member of the Sub-Committee formed at the beginning of the case to guide our work on this important issue. 

Human Rights Complaint against Cogeco, a Quebec TV Broadcaster - Jan Cawilski who is blind and lives in Quebec brought a human rights complaint against Quebec TV broadcaster Cogeco, for failing to provide on demand video description. CCD sought interested party status before the Tribunal and had the pro bono services of Sarah Claude, a lawyer with Goldblatt and Partners. The complaint concerns the broadcaster’s failure to provide video description. CCD became involved to: provide the Tribunal social context on why video description is a vital service, to argue for broad and systemic remedies that can help establish a precedent that will impact other broadcasters.

Disability Tax Credit (DTC) – The DTC is very important to community members because eligibility for it has become a gateway for accessing other tax measures and government benefits and programs, such as the Canada Disability Benefit (CDB).  We are working on this issue to remove barriers in the DTC that prevent people with disabilities from accessing government benefits and programs.

The Income Tax Act established the DTC as a non-refundable tax credit. The credit is intended to provide greater tax fairness by allowing relief for the unavoidable costs incurred by persons with disabilities. To qualify for the DTC, a person must experience a prolonged impairment which markedly restricts their ability to perform a basic activity of daily living.

Canada Revenue Agency (the “CRA”) statistics suggest that DTC applications made on the basis of impairment to mental functions are consistently rejected at a higher rate than for any other impairment type. Parliamentary reports, advocates and academics suggest that this higher refusal rate is due to to built-in problems with the language of the legislation, and with the CRA’s interpretive practices which do not account for the realities and needs of persons with mental disabilities.

Lawyers Katrine Dilay (Public Interest Law Centre (PILC)) and Morgan Rowe (Raven Law), counsel for our DTC legal challenge, attended an Executive Committee meeting to provide an update on the work that is being done on this case. Based on the case development work that was done in 2023, CCD applied for and was granted litigation funding from the Court Challenges Program to initiate a legal challenge concerning the DTC. CCD retained the Public Interest Law Centre (PILC) to assist with the legal challenge and PILC retained Morgan Rowe to work on the challenge.  PILC, with CCD’s instruction, has started a statement of claim in Federal Court concerning the discriminatory barriers created by the way the law constructs the DTC under the Income Tax Act and the way that CRA has formalized interpretation of the DTC.

We also discussed with Katrine and Morgan advancing in the political arena recommendations for reforms to the DTC. As a result, in advance of the Federal Election, CCD wrote to all party leaders about the DTC. We asked for commitments on the following points:

(1) Reforming the discriminatory eligibility criteria for the Disability Tax Credit (DTC); and
(2)  Engaging with the disability community on concrete actions to make the DTC more inclusive.

In our letter to the political parties, we explained that,
The current language of the Income Tax Act, combined with the Canada Revenue Agency’s interpretive practices, do not account for the realities and needs of persons with episodic disabilities. The result is that many people with episodic disabilities are denied and found ineligible for the DTC.

Importantly, the DTC also functions as a gateway to several other credits and entitlements, including the new Canada Disability Benefit. Because of this, persons who do not qualify for the DTC are not only losing the economic benefit of the DTC, but also potentially losing other significant economic supports.

For over 20 years, Parliamentary and Senate reports, advocates and academics have consistently raised these built-in problems with the legislation and interpretive practices and have recommended change. Most recently, in 2024, a report from an interdisciplinary team of experts called for changes, based on evidence from prior government reports, academic literature and key informant interviews.

Regrettably, none of the parties made a commitment to us in response to our correspondence.

Our work on the DTC was not restricted to our legal efforts.  For example, in March 2025, we were in discussions with Marcel Saulnier, a health policy consultant, working for the Canadian Medical Association. We had a conversation about the role of doctors in the implementation of the Canada Disability Benefit (CDB). The CMA is concerned that using the DTC application process to determine CDB eligibility could potentially create a significant new administrative burden on physicians at a time when millions of Canadians are unable to access primary care.

Canadian Human Rights Act Complaint -  CCD joined the Guide Dog Users of Canada, the Canadian Council of the Blind and the National Coalition of Persons who Use Guide and Service Dogs (the Complainant Organizations) to file a complaint against the Human Research Standards Organization, The Canadian Foundation for Assistive Animal Support Services and the Standards Council of Canada. At issue are draft service animal standards which were made public in May 2023 and which could not be accessed by blind persons who use screen readers to access electronic information. The complaint was accepted by the Canadian Human Rights Commission and an investigation has been underway. Our organizations are represented by lawyers from ARCH Disability Law Centre. The Complainant Organizations and the Standards Council of Canada participated in mediation. The complaint is still in process concerning the actions of the Human Research Standards Organization and the Canadian Foundation for Assistive Animal Support Services.

Challenge to MAiD – CCD is part of a community coalition (the Coalition) that is challenging MAiD Track Two. Inclusion Canada is the lead organization. DAWN Canada and the BC Aboriginal Network on Disability Society (BCANDS) are also part of the Coalition, as are two affected individuals.

Why is this case important to us? Track 2 MAiD has resulted in early deaths of people with disabilities and an increase in discrimination and stigma towards people with disabilities across the country. While we are not challenging MAiD Track 1 in this case, we recognize that it too can pose significant problems for people with disabilities. Track 2 MAiD has had a direct negative impact on the lives of people with disabilities.

The Coalition is urging the court to strike down Track 2 of Canada’s MAiD law, arguing that providing assisted death solely on the basis of disability is unconstitutional. We contend that MAiD should only be available to people whose natural death is reasonably foreseeable.

CCD has been sought out by the media for comments on the case. Heather Walkus participated in a Coalition media conference, which took place in September 2024 when the case was filed with the Ontario Superior Court of Justice. In the appendix there is a MacLean’s article on MAiD, which included comments from Heather Walkus.

Human Rights Education – Educating people with disabilities is part of the work that we do under our disability justice litigation pillar.

Video Series: Making Human Rights an Everyday Tool for Persons with Disabilities - This year we have been very active in the area of human rights education. In November, Yvonne Peters and her team completed our Law for the Future fund project.  Through the project titled, “Making Human Rights an Everyday Tool for Persons with Disabilities in Canada” a series of four educational videos was produced. The videos are titled: So What Exactly Are My Rights?, Using My Rights, Different Kinds of Discrimination and Taking Action!. The content is conveyed by people with disabilities in plain language in a user-friendly format with full accessibility – ASL interpretation, captioning, video description and plain language. There is an accompanying study guide to assist users reinforce the learnings presented in the webinar videos. The videos were developed by Yvonne Peters, Debbie Patterson and Erick Nettle.  Highlights from the videos were presented to the Executive Committee and Council.

GBA + - The CCD Council approved the Gender-Based Analysis Plus Quick Resource Guide, which was developed by Yvonne Peters and Katja Newman. This resource is available to everyone to use in their organizational work.

Human Rights Tool Kit – Yvonne Peters is developing a human rights took kit for us. Currently, she is working on a piece which will help people think about how and when to disclose about their disability to an employer.

Community-led Research

In April of 2024, CCD was funded by Accessibility Standards Canada for a 3-year community-led research project, titled Identifying and Resolving Barriers to Upgrade Existing Transportation Accessibility Standards and Their Implementation.  Wavefront Centre for Communication Accessibility and ARCH are partnered with CCD on this project.

In summary the project’s objectives are as follows:

• Develop and test an emancipatory community-based methodology for identifying and clustering travel barriers and identifying needed standards/regulations to address these barrier.
• Create new knowledge, as determined by people with disabilities, about transportation barriers and how to remedy these barriers through accessibility standards.
• Engage disability/Deaf communities…
• Develop a national accessible transportation community forum…
• Develop a national transportation provider reference group
• Identify barriers to address in the near term through standard development that is inclusive of persons with disabilities
• Recommend amendments to existing standards/regulations
The following are currently engaged with us in this project: Dr. Ruth Warick, Dr. Brenda Poon, Chris Atchison (Wavefront Centre), Dr. Jutta Treviranus (OCAD University), Elliot Dewhirst, Ilinca Stefan (ARCH). More community members will be joining our various teams in the coming year.

In April of 2025, CCD was funded by Accessibility Standards Canada for a three-year community-led research project, titled “Community-Led Research for an Accessible Canada”.

The project’s overarching goal is for the enhancement and growth of more organizations of people with disabilities, people with disabilities, and allied organizations and individuals to undertake research on accessibility using a community-led and human rights focus.

Objective 1: To build capacity within community groups to take a leadership role in research. The goal is to transition from research being conducted "on" communities to being led "by" and "for" communities. This involves extensive training and mentorship activities to equip communities with the skills necessary to engage effectively in community-led research processes.

Objective 2: To support communities to develop fundable research designs and proposals. The project aims to take communities through the entire research development process—from identifying research questions to writing grant proposals. The intention is to leave participants with clear and viable research proposals that can secure further funding and move into actual implementation. This aligns with the overall aim of fostering autonomy among the intersectional cross-disability and Deaf communities to independently initiate and lead research projects to promote barrier identification, removal, and prevention.

Objective 3: To foster inter-community and intra-community collaboration on community-led accessibility standards research through the development of a cross-community network at a research symposium. Through the network, participants will share resources, learnings, and best practices. The research symposium will be a venue for organizations of people with disabilities, people with disabilities, allied organizations and individuals and experts/mentors in community-led research to share and exchange knowledge about intersectional cross-disability and Deaf community-led research specific to accessibility standards development.

The following are engaged with us in this project: Dr. Ruth Warick, Dr. Brenda Poon, Chris Atchison (Wavefront Centre), Dr. Jutta Treviranus (OCAD University), Dr. Tess Sheldon (Faculty of Law, University of Windsor), Nicole Diakite (NDMS), Ingrid Palmer (Realize), Raihanna Hirji-Khalfan (Race and Disability Canada), Maureen Haan (CCRW).

Convening groups on issues of the day including working with other groups when they convene to discuss issues of the day

System Navigation - In July 2024, CCD began discussions with Employment and Social Development Canada to develop a one year project for a Community of Practice for system navigators who will be assisting people with disabilities apply for the Canada Disability Benefit. Our proposal was successful and we began developing the Community of Practice in January. Yutta Fricke was hired to coordinate this project.  In January of 2025, we submitted a proposal to continue the project for another two years and this proposal was successful.

In March, Heather Walkus, Yutta Fricke and April D’Aubin participated in a number of networking meetings in British Columbia related to our work on the community of practice for system navigators. Meetings were held with: Sam Turcott A/Deputy Minister Disability and Pat Danforth; Michael Prince; Neil Belanger (BCANDS); Helaine Boyd (Disability Alliance BC), Plan Institute, and Ella Huang (Richmond Centre for Disability).

Social Policy - Michael Prince and Michell Hewitt are working on the social policy work concentrating on the Disability without Poverty work on the Canada Disability Benefit. Michael Prince is working on two position papers for CCD, one paper situates the Canada Disability Benefit in the context of other benefit programs in Canada and the other summarizes General Comment Number 7 (2018) on the participation of persons with disabilities, including children with disabilities, through their representative organizations, in the implementation and monitoring of the Convention: Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. You can use this link to access the Comment online: General comment No. 7 (2018) on the participation of persons with disabilities, including children with disabilities, through their representative organizations, in the implementation and monitoring of the Convention :

National Disability Network - CCD has been active in the work of the National Disability Network, which came out of a Collective Impact Project, where CCD served on the Steering Committee.  This year, CCD has supported many of the policy initiatives developed through the National Disability Network’s Government Relations Community of Practice.  Most recently we supported a letter to Prime Minister Carney which provided advice on how Cabinet Ministers should be addressing disability issues in their portfolios and also calling for a minister to be designated to address disability.

With the assistance of Peter Tonge Consulting, we have developed a study guide for the series of videos that were produced for the National Disability Network’s Collective Impact project.

Transportation – Janet Hunt and Robin East co-chair CCD’s Transportation Portfolio.

We continue to participate on the Canadian Transportation Agency’s Accessibility Advisory Committee.

We met with Kerianne Wilson, Air Canada Director, Customer Accessibility,  and Tom Stevens, Air Canada Vice President, Canadian Airports and Customer Experience Strategy, concerning: Inconsistencies in the travel experience, The purchase and leasing of accessible equipment by Air Canada, Staff training, What constitutes a dignified travel experience, Air Canada’s Accessibility Plan, Working on a CCD reference group. We discussed the importance of treating accessibility as a customer service issue rather than a regulatory compliance issue and how this attitude shift can improve the travel experience in a positive manner for travelers with disabilities.

On May 9th , 2024, the Minister of Transport the Hon. Pablo Rodriguez held a Summit on Transportation and People with Disabilities. Bob Brown, Richard Belzile and Carly Fox represented CCD.

CCD participated in a discussion with the Canadian Airports Council (CAC) concerning their Accessibility Roadmap and Strategy.

In May 2024, the CCD Transportation Team was engaged in advocacy with the CATSA and/or with CBSA about a tactile booklet that was being developed to assist passengers with vision impairment when going through security at airports.

In August 2024, CCD engaged with the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority (CATSA), the Canadian Crown Corporation responsible for security screening of people and their baggage at airports nationwide. CATSA has now designated staff members to assist people with disabilities and other travelers have a barrier-free experience when moving through security screening.

Members of CCD’s Transportation Team played a role in the development of BC’s Office of the Human Rights Commissioner education resources on guide and service dogs for servers and taxi drivers, which were launched in September.

Human Rights - Carly Fox, who is the chair of CCD’s International Portfolio, represented CCD at the meeting with members of the Continuing Committee of Officials on Human Rights (CCOHR) on June 5, 2024, in Ottawa. The meeting discussed an approach related to engagement and United Nations (UN) treaty-body related matters.

We also participated in the development of the Canadian disability community’s parallel report for the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. On March 10 and 11, 2025, Canada appeared before the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in Geneva and presented its combined second and third periodic reports under the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). Representatives from the disability community also had the opportunity to meet with the UN Committee. Following the review, the Committee issued 72 Concluding Observations (COs) including more than 90 recommendations. The Concluding Observations have also been included in the Appendix. We will continue working at community tables on the implementation of the concluding observations and recommendations.

Global Disability Summit – Carly Fox participated in the Global Disability Summit which was held in Berlin in April 2025. 

Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) - In December, we participated in an ESDC meeting in Ottawa focused on a Knowledge Exchange on the draft Accessible Canada Roadmap.

Canada Post – We are participating on the Canada Post Accessibility Advisory Committee.

All Standards With Us – We are a partner in the All Standards With Us project, which is funded by Accessibility Standards Canada/Government of Canada. The project goals are to: Identify barriers that disabled and Deaf people and disability organizations find when trying to take part in the standards processes. This is being done through co-design, a literature review, and a jurisdictional scan; the creation of guidelines on how to make the standards development process more inclusive to disabled and Deaf people, and pilot them with Standards Development Organizations; the creation of capacity building resources for disability organizations and people with disabilities who want to take part in the standards development process.

Employment – CCD continues to participate in a project led by the National Educational Association of Disabled Students on employment, titled Building Employment Pathways for People with Disabilities.  The project partnership includes: organizations of people with disabilities (Manitoba League of Persons with Disabilities, l'Association québécoise pour l'équité et l'inclusion au postsecondaire (AQEIPS) and the Council of Canadians with Disabilities), 4 post-secondary institutions (Ontario Tech University, Durham College, Nipissing University and York University), and the private sector (Canada Post) and Sustainable Livelihoods Canada.

The goals of the project are: to increase disability representation in the postal and courier services sector, and to improve capacity to address barriers to inclusion for persons with disabilities in the postal and courier services sector.

The project will be meeting its goals by undertaking the following five core activities: identifying barriers, needs, and best practices for accessible employment in the postal/courier services sector; working on best practices for recruiting, hiring and supporting persons with disabilities and developing disability-related employment tools and resources; capacity building with people with disabilities; linking job seekers with disabilities with employment; and evaluation.

National Access Ability Week  -We conducted two webinars in celebration of National Access Ability Week in 2024. In one webinar, participants learned about environmental health from Rohini Peris and her team at Environmental Health Association of Canada (EHAC). In the second webinar, participants learned about viewing accessibility through an ethno-cultural and disability lens. Dr. Zephania Matanga was the keynote speaker for this event. We partnered with the Manitoba League of Persons with Disabilities and the Nunavummi Disabilities Makinnasuaqtiit Society (NDMS) to hold these educational sessions.

Accessible Canada Accessible World - CCD participated in the Accessible Canada, Accessible World conference. The conference had 4 themes: accessible and equitable communications, inclusive decision-making, Innovation in standards and policy, who and what are we missing? In attendance from CCD were: Heather Walkus, Ingrid Palmer, Carly Fox, April D’Aubin.

Partnerships for Financial Inclusion – We are participating on the advisory board for the Partnerships for Financial Inclusion project.

Starbucks – Heather Walkus did a fireside chat for Starbucks partners, who are interested in disability and accessibility.

Federal Election Candidates Debate - COPHAN invited CCD and ARCH to join them in holding a debate for candidates running in the Federal Election that was held on Zoom. Both CCD and ARCH agreed to participate. Paul Claude Berube was the moderator.

Commonwealth Disabled Persons Forum – We have been participating in meetings of the re-launched Commonwealth Disabled Persons Forum (CDPF).The re-launch happened at the Conference of States Parties at the United Nations in 2019 and Steven Estey and Yutta Fricke attended that meeting on behalf of CCD. The CDPF has as its aim the ratification and implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and the Sustainable Development Goals in every Commonwealth country and the development of inclusive policies. We have also had meetings with Rebekah Kintzinger, Autism Alliance of Canada, who is the CDPF’s Executive member representing Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand and Malta.

Transportation Team Report – 2024/2025

Transportation remains a key focus area in CCD’s advocacy work, and over the past year the Transportation Team has been actively working to move the accessibility agenda forward.

In May of 2024, we met with Kerianne Wilson, Air Canada Director, Customer Accessibility and Tom Stevens, Air Canada Vice President, Canadian Airports and Customer Experience Strategy, to discuss their accessibility plan and strategy going forward. In particular we emphasized that if accessibility was treated as a customer service issue, it would improve the travel experience for passengers with disabilities.

In May of 2024, we met with CATSA after learning of their joint request with the Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) for an exemption concerning tactile signage under the Accessible Transportation for People with Disabilities Regulations (ATPDR) and a proposed Braille booklet. We had several concerns regarding the booklet, but our primary concern was that no effort was made to consult with the actual passengers who would use the booklet, and none of the organizations that were consulted represented blind and low vision passengers. Since our initial meeting, we have built a collaborative relationship with CATSA and are seeing a positive shift towards meaningful engagement with the disability community, leading to the successful implementation of initiatives based on this feedback. In November of 2024, We were invited by CATSA to participate in the creation of videos to be used in staff training, and in June of 2025, we participated in an engagement session to provide feedback on potential procedural changes and updates to the physical environment of the pre-board screening checkpoint design, and possible solutions to barriers experienced throughout the security screening process.

We continue to participate on the Canadian Transportation Agency (CTA) Accessibility Advisory Committee (AAC) and cultivate partnerships with the industry organizations at the table. In a CTA meeting of January 31, 2025, we were updated on the following research projects and initiatives.

- The CTA is launching a Train the Trainer initiative for small transportation service providers, and we are pleased that the initiative will use the expertise of people with disabilities to train employees who will then be equipped to train their colleagues.

- In a pilot project to assist in the development of a program to conduct future inspections and investigations, CTA enforcement officers shadowed passengers who travel using mobility aids in order to better understand the issues concerning passenger injuries during transfers, and delayed, lost, damaged and destroyed mobility aids. It is expected the awareness gained from this project will bring positive changes in the way inspections and investigations into these incidents are conducted.

- In a symposium on accessibility in civil aviation that was co-hosted by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), Canadian and international Representatives from Government, disability organizations and the air industry met to discuss international collaboration around accessibility for passengers with disabilities. ICAO has proposed a strategic plan for Accessibility and inclusivity for international travel that we hope will eventually allow us to bring forward 1 seat – 1 fare internationally and eliminating the “taxes” on the duty to accommodate portion.

- The National Research Council (NRC) has created a quick reference Job Aid for ground handlers who deal with mobility aids that includes stickers with symbols for mobility aids; a reference card with symbol meanings; and posters with instructions for display in common areas. We believe this is a useful tool to help ensure mobility aids are appropriately stored and safely returned (in the same condition). 

- Accessibility Standards Canada (ASC) is funding scientists and engineers with the University Health Network to conduct research into walkway or bridge connections for passengers getting on and off marine vessels. The recommendations and technical guidelines from this project will be used to develop accessibility standards in this area and we hope that the findings will be transferable to the entire federal transportation industry.

- Air Canada reported progress with their Accessibility Plan that includes an increase in the availability of equipment such as Eagle Lift hoist devices, and engaging suppliers to identify hoists that have fewer restrictions, as well as initiatives like the sunflower program for people with hidden disabilities, tagging mobility devices with a brightly colored overlay to signify its importance, a mobile tracking app for passengers to monitor devices in cargo, and staff videos on the proper handling of mobility devices. We support Air Canada’s shifting from the “medical” model closer to the “social” model, and the rebranding of the Air Canada Medical Desk to Air Canada Accessibility Services.

-  The National Airlines Council of Canada (NACC) announced a common medical form has been developed in collaboration with medical experts, disability advocates and NACC member airlines following discussions at the summit on transportation and People with Disabilities held on May 9, 2024. The purpose of this form which will soon be available on NACC member airline websites, is to simplify travel for passengers “with medical needs”, standardize collection and assessment of medical information, and ensure consistent accommodations across all NACC airlines. We welcome any positive change that will improve the travel experience for people with disabilities, although it is disappointing that this form was not put to community in a meaningful way and remains focused on the “medical model” rather than the “social model”.,

- The Canadian Air Transport Security Authority (CATSA) is responsible for screening passengers and their belongings prior to boarding. Based on feedback from the disability community, they have created a Facilitator position to help people with disabilities to lift and sort belongings into bins; provide sighted guide; provide physical support; retrieve and repack belongings after screening; advise of available facilities, accessible washrooms and dog relief areas etc. We advised CATSA representatives at the meeting of the positive feedback we have already received and congratulated them on the success of this initiative.

Submitted by Janet Hunt and Robin East, Co-chairs of the Transportation Team

Appendix

Laurie Beachell: Advocacy giant for people living with disabilities

Laurie Beachell was one of the giants in advocacy for people living with disabilities in Canada.

Laurie, who was 73 when he died on Dec. 6, was the longtime head of the Council of Canadians with Disabilities.

For more than 30 years, Laurie worked to improve the lives of people living with disabilities. He served on advisory committees on everything from Elections Canada, the Canada Revenue Agency, and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.

There were successes. Laurie served on a panel that reported to the federal finance minister, and out of that came the Registered Disability Saving Plan.

But there were other hopes and dreams that are still hopes and dreams. Laurie served five years on a disability advisory committee on tax reform and disability and I know — having spoken to Laurie at that time — he was pushing to have people living with disabilities receive old age pension and the Canada Pension Plan years before the general population because many, both cognitively and physically, exhibit characteristics of being senior citizens much earlier.

In the end, though, Laurie’s advocacy on that committee did result in something else: the Disability Tax Credit.

Laurie also headed the CCD’s campaign fighting VIA Rail for years after it bought used rail cars in 2000 that could not be made accessible for people with physical disabilities, instead of purchasing new ones that were already accessible, in violation of accessibility provisions in the Canada Transportation Act.

The cars were actually far narrower than standard cars — being only three seats wide instead of four — because they were designed to go through the Chunnel between England and France and only came on the market to be sold because of construction delays on the tunnel. And no other country with mandatory accessibility standards bid on the cars.

Laurie took the case all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the CCD by ordering VIA to renovate the cars to make them accessible.

But the six years of fighting also came at a cost to the CCD. Laurie told the Globe and Mail at the time his office had to lay off two staff members to save the $125,000 it needed to continue the battle.

“For a small, non-profit organization to have to come up with the money to fight this sounds ridiculous — and it was,” he said.

“Instead of trying to accommodate those who want to go on trains, they try to beat them into submission with litigation. But we will fight this to the end, even if our organization has to go belly-up.”

It’s bittersweet that years later, just three days after Laurie died, VIA Rail announced in a news release it was taking its first steps in replacing its entire fleet of locomotives and rail cars with ones that would “enhance the passenger experience and accessibility.”

Laurie also coordinated the CCD’s decade-long efforts to look for ways that the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities could improve the daily lives of people living with disabilities.

Even after retiring, Laurie continued to advocate for people living with disabilities. He was sitting on the board of the Interlake Association for Community Living when he died.

Earlier in life, Laurie grew up on a farm in Rosser. He graduated from the University of Manitoba, armed with a BA in Political Science, and began working at the Children’s Home of Winnipeg.

Laurie next went to the Society for Manitobans with Disabilities (now Manitoba Possible), followed by what was then called the Manitoba Advisory Council on Recreation for the Handicapped, and then the province’s culture, sport and recreation department.

Then, in 1984, he found what his family said was “his true calling” with the CCD.

Outside his regular work, Laurie also volunteered with his church and its refugee sponsorship ministry, sang in the choir, and played on the organ and piano.

For all of the work Laurie did, he was honored with the Patrick Worth Award from People First of Canada and the National President’s Award from the Canadian Mental Health Association.

And, in 2019, Laurie received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Carleton University “in recognition of his transformative leadership in advancing the equality rights of Canadians with disabilities.”

His family says Laurie’s life, career and accomplishments mirrored his favorite passage from the Bible.

“He has shown you O Mortal what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with your God?”

Laurie is survived by his wife, a brother and sister, and many nieces and
nephews.
 

Ellen Cohen

Dear members of the community,

It is with deep sadness that we must inform you of the sudden passing of Ellen Cohen, a longstanding advocate and leader on mental health and disability issues. Throughout her lifetime, Ellen made significant and long-lasting contributions to the promotion and protection of the rights of persons with disabilities, including as a member of the Federal Minister’s Disability Advisory Group. She worked tirelessly to ensure that the unique perspectives and experiences of persons with disabilities were considered and included in all aspects of society.

At the time of her passing, Ellen was in Geneva, Switzerland as part of a Canadian Civil Society Organization group participating in the United Nations’ review of Canada’s implementation of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Please find attached the statement issued by the Canadian Civil Society delegation, which we are sharing on its behalf.

We were honoured to have known and worked with Ellen over the years. Her loss will be profoundly felt for years to come.

Lorraine Pelot
Director General
Office for Disability Issues
Income Security and Social Development Branch
Employment and Social Development Canada / Government of Canada

MacLeans Article

They’re Suing the Government for the Right to Die

The ethics are muddy, the country is divided and the world is watching Canada’s next move. Inside the crusade for psychiatric MAID.

By Luc Rinaldi

February 24, 2025

Claire Brosseau first fantasized about dying when she was in kindergarten. She was a dramatic child, prone to throwing tantrums and screaming until she passed out. When her parents admonished her, asking why she wasn’t more like her sister, she imagined eating peanut butter, to which she was allergic, until she asphyxiated. It’d be better for everyone if I was gone, she thought.

Brosseau’s malaise intensified as she got older. When she was 11, her family moved from Toronto to Montreal. There, as a teenager, she began cycling between exuberant highs and all-consuming lows. She quit sports and student council, skipped classes, started drinking and smoking heavily and put on 50 pounds. She grew envious of her friend’s mother, a woman with schizophrenia who’d killed herself by jumping in front of a train. So, one day, Brosseau walked to the railroad tracks on her way home from school. She tried to psych herself up—if someone else was brave enough to end their suffering, she thought, she could be too. But as train after train passed, Brosseau reconsidered. She was terrified of the pain she’d suffer if she survived and of the heartache she’d cause her family if she didn’t.

Brosseau’s parents took her to a psychiatrist, who diagnosed her with manic depression, now known as bipolar I disorder, a condition characterized by extreme mood swings. With therapy and medication, she coped, and found that throwing herself into a career as an actor helped. “I became a performer because I figured, if I’m going to suffer, I want to get paid for it,” she jokes. In her 20s, she studied acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse, the storied New York theatre school that trained Jeff Goldblum and Diane Keaton. She acted in musicals and sang in a Times Square cabaret bar. Eventually she moved back to Toronto, where she branched into stand-up comedy. She appeared on The Strombo Show and Entertainment Tonight and landed supporting roles in mid-tier film and TV projects with actors including James Franco and Daniel Stern (of Home Alone fame).

But as Brosseau’s career blossomed, her well-being withered. One week she’d be a booze-and-cocaine-fueled whirlwind, stealing prescription pills from her mother’s medicine cabinet, hooking up with strangers at sex clubs, posting nonsensical rants online and blacking out at parties. The next she’d crash, locking herself in her bedroom for days with the blinds drawn and the lights off, crippled by melancholy and regret about her latest bender.

In 2016, Brosseau attended the Canadian Screen Awards. She knew some of the show’s writers and producers, so she hung out backstage pounding back free drinks and using cocaine. When she stepped out drunkenly for a cigarette, she stumbled and smashed her face into a curb. The next morning, she looked in the mirror—face bruised, teeth missing—and vowed to turn her life around. She went to AA and eventually entered the intensive psychiatric care unit at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Hospital. She stopped using drugs and alcohol and doubled down on treatment (anti-depressant, anti-psychotic and anti-anxiety medication) and therapy (cognitive behavioral, dialectical, art, family, electroconvulsive).

The intervention helped—until it didn’t. In 2021, her mother, MaryLouise Kinahan, called 911, worried that her daughter was again in a suicidal crisis. The police brought Brosseau to a Toronto hospital, where she says she was forcibly restrained. The experience was terrifying and exacerbated her already deteriorating mental state. Brosseau lodged a formal complaint and won, but remained shaken. She briefly moved to a seaside village in Nova Scotia, thinking the peace and quiet and ocean air might help her heal.

One night in early 2023, back in Toronto, Brosseau tried again to kill herself. She overdosed on Benadryl, slashed her wrists and—in an echo of the suicide strategy she’d devised as a child—plunged her hand into a jar of peanut butter. She survived, but by that point it was clear to her that, in spite of all her years of treatment, there had been one constant throughout her life: “All I’ve ever wanted, even on my best of days, is to die.”

At the time it seemed like Brosseau would soon be able to fulfill that wish. In 2016, Canada legalized medical assistance in dying for people with reasonably foreseeable deaths, usually terminally ill patients with months to live. The country was set to begin offering MAID to people with incurable and unbearable mental illness in March of 2023. Brosseau had followed news of the program’s expansion closely and planned to apply as soon as she was able. To her mind, suicide was violent and isolating but MAID, administered by a professional with loved ones by her side, would be peaceful and pain-free.

In the summer of 2022, Brosseau hosted farewell dinners with her closest friends and former collaborators, explaining her intention to receive MAID once it became available. She had long, tearful conversations with her parents and her sister. They didn’t want her to die, but they came to understand her choice. “It was shredding my heart,” says Kinahan. “I don’t want to lose her. But I want what Claire needs for herself. She is so continually, excruciatingly ill that MAID for mental illness is the only way that she is going to get peace. It’s taken me a while to get there as a mother, but I know that at this point.”

As March of 2023 approached, however, the federal government delayed its plans by a year, saying that it needed more time to ensure the health-care system was ready to assess applicants responsibly and consistently. Brosseau was disappointed, but she was willing to wait. She marked her calendar for March 17, 2024, the day she could apply to die.

She had everything planned: who would be at her bedside, who her pallbearers would be and even what song would play at her funeral (she swore me to secrecy because she wants it to be a surprise). Then, in February of 2024, the government deferred again, this time by three years. Brosseau would have to wait until 2027—or maybe forever. What was to stop them from pushing it again, or scrapping the idea altogether? Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre had already vowed that, if he were to become prime minister, his government would put a stop to the planned expansion.

As the federal government stalled, debate erupted within Canada and beyond. Proponents praised MAID as an enlightened and compassionate offering for those with the worst mental suffering. But a broad coalition of critics, including bioethicists, disability-rights advocates, conservative politicians and people of faith, condemned it as simply state-sanctioned suicide, or even something closer to eugenics. And some of those who support psychiatric MAID in principle have unanswered questions about how the health-care system can provide it safely and ethically.

“She is so continually, excruciatingly ill that MAID for mental illness is the only way that she is going to get peace,” says Claire Brosseau’s mother, MaryLouise Kinahan. “It’s taken me a while to get there as a mother, but I know at this point.”

Underpinning these concerns was a deeper, more diffuse unease over what it means to legally legitimize the act of killing oneself. Allowing a physically healthy person to opt out of life—and to make the state an enabler of that choice—is for many people a moral, philosophical and legal leap into a dark, discomfiting place.

And so Canada has become the focus of outrage and moral alarm around the world. Last October, the U.K.’s Telegraph newspaper ran a story headlined “Poor, depressed or lonely in Canada? Why not let us kill you.” A misinformation-riddled video by Jordan Peterson, “The Horrifying Truth Behind MAID They Aren’t Telling You,” has racked up millions of views, drawing comparisons between MAID, capital punishment and the Holocaust. The government’s next steps, therefore, are critically important. The lives of Canadians—and the reputation of the entire nation—hang in the balance.

Brosseau does not want her future to hinge on disinformation campaigns, timid politicians and slowly evolving public mores. She’s taken to the courts. In August of 2024, she and the end-of-life rights lobby group Dying With Dignity Canada launched a constitutional challenge against the attorney general of Canada, arguing that withholding MAID from the mentally ill violates the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The case seeks to definitively answer the most fundamental question in the debate around MAID: who has the right to die?

Suicide is perhaps the world’s oldest and most enduring taboo. The idea of killing oneself, even as a way to end suffering, has divided philosophers and physicians for thousands of years. Hippocrates inveighed against it, while Socrates seemed to support it. Most religions oppose mercy killing, reasoning that only a higher power can give and take life. But throughout the 20th century, as secularism spread, medicine improved and lifespans grew, lengthy end-of-life illnesses became more common, and MAID evolved from a mostly conceptual question to a pressing and practical one. Many boomers, particularly those who witnessed their own parents’ long and agonizing final days, began campaigning for control over how and when they would die.

That fight entered the Canadian courts in 1993, when a 42-year-old British Columbia woman named Sue Rodriguez, suffering from ALS, asked the courts to strike down parts of the Criminal Code that explicitly prohibited assisted suicide. The Supreme Court narrowly dismissed her case. The following year, she took her life anyway, with the help of an anonymous doctor.

In 2015, facing another legal challenge by plaintiffs with degenerative diseases, the Supreme Court ruled differently: it decided preventing people with a “grievous and irremediable” condition from dying on their own terms was cruel. In 2016, Parliament passed Bill C-14, legalizing MAID for people whose deaths were reasonably foreseeable. This is what we now call Track 1 MAID.

Over the next few years, provincial courts in Quebec and Alberta ruled that limiting MAID to the terminally ill was discriminatory and unconstitutional. So, in 2021, the federal Liberals passed Bill C-7, introducing MAID for those with debilitating, incurable but not imminently fatal conditions such as fibromyalgia or other diseases causing chronic pain. This is Track 2 MAID.

There are guardrails, of course. For both tracks, applicants need to be approved by two assessors—trained doctors or nurse practitioners, who must make their assessments independent of one another. The applicant also has to be able to withdraw their request up to the last moment. Track 2 MAID comes with extra precautions: assessments must take at least 90 days, involving additional evaluation, and they must be informed of other ways to alleviate their suffering.

From the beginning, Track 2 was intended to include people whose only complaint was chronic mental suffering. But the government split Track 2 down the middle and decided that people solely afflicted by mental disorders would have to wait two more years, until 2023, before accessing MAID. This bought them some time to develop safeguards, train assessors and navigate a thicket of knotty questions: how can an assessor reliably determine that a mental disorder is really incurable and intolerable? How many other treatments, over what period of time, should applicants have to try before they can access MAID? Should applicants be approved even if they refuse a treatment that could work? What if the applicant can’t afford a treatment?

To answer these questions, the government assembled two groups in 2021. There was a 15-member committee comprising MPs and senators with expertise in the subject, as well as people with mental illness. There was also a 12-member panel of psychiatrists, lawyers, ethicists and MAID practitioners. The groups had similar but distinct mandates: the committee was to determine if Canada was prepared to safely provide psychiatric MAID, and the panel was to recommend guidelines and safeguards for its rollout. Neither was intended to rehash whether psychiatric MAID should be offered—only how and when to do so.

That was a lot to ask of two dozen government appointees, particularly as they began receiving a raft of irreconcilable expert opinions. Many of the dozens of witnesses who were invited or volunteered to testify—chiefs of psychiatry, university professors, MAID providers, suicide-prevention specialists and palliative-care physicians—told the committee and panel that it would be difficult, if not impossible, for MAID assessors to predict whether a mental disorder is truly incurable. Mark Sinyor, a suicide-prevention expert at Sunnybrook Hospital, told the committee, “There is absolutely no research on the reliability of physician predictions of the irremediability of illness or suffering in psychiatric conditions.” Karandeep Sonu Gaind, a University of Toronto professor and Sunnybrook’s head of psychiatry, put it more bluntly: “You’re better off flipping a coin.”

Several years ago, Gaind was the physician chair of the MAID team at Toronto’s Humber River Hospital, where he says he saw patients get approved for MAID, only to regain their will to live after reconnecting with family. “MAID allows us to pretend we’re providing death for an illness we can predict won’t get better,” he told me, “but we’re not actually able to make that prediction. Every psychiatrist has had patients who are convinced they will never improve.”

Other participants vehemently disagree with that perspective. Stanley Kutcher is an independent senator from Nova Scotia, and professor emeritus of psychiatry at Dalhousie University. He sat on the special joint committee. He rejects the idea that patients should suffer today because they may, in some hypothetical future, get better. “We tell that to nobody except for people with mental disorders,” he says.

The groups also tried to assess the impact of MAID for mental illness by determining how many people might use it. Kutcher cited statistics from Belgium and the Netherlands, which have offered MAID for mental illness for decades, albeit with robust safeguards. In 2021, 24 Belgians and 115 Dutch citizens died by euthanasia on psychiatric grounds—less than 0.001 per cent of their countries’ respective populations. Those numbers may not be perfectly applicable to Canada, however. The vast majority of Dutch psychiatric MAID requests are rejected, and Canadian eligibility criteria are poised to be more permissive than the Netherlands’. Canadians seeking Track 2 MAID can reject all treatment options and still qualify, for example. Whether this should also be the case for those seeking psychiatric MAID is still a matter of debate. If so, the number of mentally ill Canadians dying by MAID every year could, hypothetically, reach into the thousands. John Maher, a psychiatrist and anti-MAID advocate based in Barrie, Ontario, told the committee, “Do you seriously believe that you can prevent abuses by the 100,000 MDs and nurse practitioners in Canada who now have a license to kill?”

Beneath all of these fears was a much deeper anxiety. Canada’s MAID laws are premised on the idea that patients can pursue assisted death after sober, rational reflection. A person with chronic, incurable mental suffering might rationally seek to end that suffering. Yet suicidal ideation is a symptom of many of the mental illnesses for which people could seek MAID. Does that symptom undermine the patient’s rational decision-making capacity? Untying that knot became a fixation of the panel and committee.

“There is no tool at the moment that would allow me to distinguish a suicidal person from someone who is requesting assisted suicide,” said Georgia Vrakas, a psychologist at the Université du Québec, in a submission to the joint committee. Others pushed back. Alison Freeland, the chair of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, defended her profession by saying that psychiatrists have the training to make that distinction.

The expert panel released its final report in May of 2022, concluding that Canada was ready to offer psychiatric MAID. It included 19 recommendations for rolling out the practice, including establishing methods to assess a patient’s decision-making capacity and gauge whether an illness really is incurable. But it also acknowledged the difficulty of doing so beyond the shadow of a doubt, stating that “no system of safeguards, protocols and guidance will satisfy everyone.” In fact, two members of the panel resigned in protest, including Jeffrey Kirby, a bioethicist at Dalhousie University. He argues that Canada needs an official definition of irremediability, mandating that those seeking psychiatric MAID try at least some of the suitable treatment options, for a number of years, before they can be approved.

As if to underline the impossibility of reaching consensus on the issue, the special joint committee came to the opposite conclusion—that Canada wasn’t ready to expand MAID. Its report, released in February of 2023, pointed to all the concerns that had divided the experts: the difficulty of separating MAID requests from suicidality, the need to protect vulnerable people who may be seeking MAID due to external circumstances and the maddening complexity of trying to determine whether a condition is incurable. Reinforcing how divided the committee had become, the report contained three dissenting opinions. One complained that the committee had given too much weight to anti-MAID ideologues and that it ended up relitigating whether Canada should offer psychiatric MAID in the first place—which was not its mandate. Another opinion, written by several Conservative politicians, including Senator Yonah Martin and MPs Shelby Kramp-Neuman, Michael Cooper and Ed Fast, complained that the committee’s final report should have more decisively opposed psychiatric MAID. They implored the Liberals to “permanently abandon this expansion.”

These fractures were reflected nationwide. In late 2022, the Association of Chairs of Psychiatry in Canada, an organization that includes the heads of psychiatry at the country’s 17 medical schools, called on the government to delay MAID for the mentally ill. In 2023, more than 30 law professors signed an open letter arguing that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms does not require Canada to offer MAID for mental disorders. They were rebutted months later by another group of lawyers, at the Canadian Bar Association, who insisted the opposite is true and that further delays would be unconstitutional. The public was divided, too: in a recent Leger survey, 42 per cent of Canadians supported MAID for mental illness, and 28 per cent opposed it. The rest didn’t know where they stood.

John Scully is a New Zealander by birth who spent decades as a journalist, reporting from dozens of war zones for the BBC and other broadcasters. He has frequently cheated death—once, a Serbian militiaman shoved the barrel of a shotgun into his stomach and pulled the trigger, but the gun jammed. He had always been able to shrug off his experiences and move on to the next assignment. But in retirement, the horrors caught up with him. He was eventually diagnosed with depression, generalized anxiety disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Scully, now 84, lives in Toronto. He has unbearable nightmares that borrow imagery from his years in the trenches—of being hacked to death with a machete, of attack dogs chewing off his face, of lying paralyzed on a conveyor belt carrying him to a crematorium. The resulting insomnia exacerbates his depression, which intensifies his thoughts of suicide. He’s tried twice to take his own life.

John Scully is a former war correspondent who is tormented by memories of the horrors he witnessed throughout his career. He hopes MAID will be easier for his family than a violent suicide.

He’s also tried, over and over, to get better. Scully has seen more than a dozen psychiatrists and undergone shock therapy 19 times. He takes 30 pills a day, the side effects of which include dizziness, leg spasms, cognitive impairment and slurred speech. “I’ve tried everything, and nothing has worked,” he says.

Scully thinks about suicide every day. But he can’t bear the idea of dying alone, violently and suddenly, only to have his wife or his adult children find his body and wonder what his last moments were like. “Suicide is brutal for families,” he says. “The grief is unbearable.” He believes MAID will allow him to say farewell, to explain his decision, to answer loved ones’ questions. It will be a quiet, dignified end, for which Scully considers himself a perfect candidate. When the federal government pressed pause on psychiatric MAID for the second time last year, it seemed as if the opportunity might slip away forever.

At the same time, a charity called Dying With Dignity Canada, which advocates for end-of-life rights, was preparing a court challenge to the delay. Scully had already become something of a poster child for psychiatric MAID due to his outspokenness, and he came on board as one of two plaintiffs in the court challenge.

The other was Claire Brosseau. The day the government announced that it was delaying the expansion of MAID until 2027, she spent the afternoon pacing around her apartment, fuming and ranting, wondering if she could last three more years. Her mother tried in vain to calm her. Within weeks Brosseau too had connected with Dying With Dignity, which arranged for two MAID practitioners to assess her and decide whether she would qualify for psychiatric MAID if it were made legal. They interviewed her several times between May and July of last year, asking detailed questions about her suicide attempts, courses of treatment and reasons for wanting MAID. They reviewed more than a thousand pages of her medical records and spoke to her loved ones, including her mother, who admitted to conflicting feelings. “I have two daughters, and I can’t imagine not having them around,” Kinahan says. “But with all that she’s gone through, I realized that I have to help her with what she wants, not what I think should be.”

Last August, Brosseau’s assessors concluded that her condition was indeed irremediable, and she would qualify for MAID, if it were available. She was suffering intolerably and had exhausted all treatment options. She also made a good plaintiff for a high-profile lawsuit, being no stranger to the spotlight. Shortly thereafter, Dying With Dignity Canada filed its suit, arguing that depriving people with irremediable mental disorders of access to MAID—forcing them to choose between suicide and endless suffering—violates their right to life, liberty and the security of the person, as provided by Section 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The challenge also invokes Section 15, contending that providing MAID to one group (the physically ill) but not another (the mentally ill) violates individuals’ rights to be treated equally under the law. Brosseau and Scully hope to get their day in court sometime this year.

While she waits, Brosseau lives in limbo. She spends almost all her time within a tastefully but cheaply decorated apartment in midtown Toronto, often watching Golden Girls reruns on a cream-coloured sectional couch or stationed at a high-top writing desk by a window. Her mom and sister visit occasionally, but she’s no longer in touch with friends or colleagues. After the goodbyes she made in 2022, she says it would be too gut-wrenching to re-engage, only to have to do it all over again. In a day, Brosseau might have 75 tolerable minutes. During those brief reprieves, she takes online courses and writes jokes, most of them related to her planned demise. The rest of the day is filled with invasive thoughts about suicide and existential anxieties about how she’s lived her life. “You know that terrible feeling when you’re so nervous that you either want to puke or shit your pants?” she says. “I have that 75 per cent of the day.”

Apart from taking out the trash, doing the laundry and going to medical appointments, she rarely leaves her home. “I’m trapped in this 600-square-foot apartment,” she says. “I’m very grateful for the roof over my head, but I never wanted this.”

Shortly after Scully and Brosseau filed suit, another group asked the courts to intervene. Last September, a number of disability advocates—four non-profits and two individuals—launched their own Charter challenge, with a very different interpretation of whose rights were being infringed upon.

The case argues that a person with an irremediable condition is, by definition, a disabled person. Offering MAID to such people is therefore, the argument goes, discriminatory against the disabled. “By transforming death into a form of medical treatment for persons with disabilities,” the notice of application asserts, “Parliament has legitimized the idea that death is an appropriate response to feeling like, or being perceived to be, a burden on the health-care system or one’s family.”

Heather Walkus chairs the Council of Canadians with Disabilities, one of the groups behind the suit. She says this idea of death as remedy is already taking root in Canada—and that she’s seen it herself. In 2022, she was in hospital with pneumonia when a nurse handed her a brochure about MAID and said, “Older people like to know their options.” Last year, she fell while getting out of a taxi and dislocated her hip. The wait to see a physiotherapist was months long, so she went to a private sports-medicine clinic, where a young, able-bodied staffer asked about her health. She told him that she was 69, with impaired vision and multiple sclerosis, and that she used a wheelchair. He asked, “Have you heard of MAID?”

Walkus says she believes assisted dying can be an appropriate, compassionate choice in the right circumstances. But she thinks it is perverse to seek health care and be offered death instead. She worries what will happen when millions of Canadians—the 27 per cent with disabilities, the 18 per cent diagnosed with mental disorders, the enormous cohort of baby boomers facing normal age-related decline—are not only provided with but nudged toward the option. It feels, she says, like a form of eugenics.

Psychiatrist John Maher, who testified before the federal government’s MAID committee, was one of many witnesses who feared that mentally ill Canadians might seek death not strictly due to their disorder but because other circumstances—poor housing, lack of health care, poverty—exacerbate their suffering. Another witness, Leonie Herx, the chair of Queen’s University’s palliative medicine division, lamented that physicians were already seeing in their own practices examples of people receiving MAID due to a lack of basic life supports, such as palliative and disability care.

So far, however, there’s little evidence that this kind of scenario is becoming widespread. To date, roughly 60,000 Canadians have died by MAID. The vast majority of them were Track 1 cases—that is, they had reasonably foreseeable deaths. More than 95 per cent of that cohort were white, and they were generally wealthier than the average Canadian.

But among the 1,319 people who accessed Track 2—the 2.2 per cent of MAID recipients who did not have reasonably foreseeable deaths—the demographic picture is slightly more complicated. In Ontario, for instance, the 290 people who died by Track 2 between 2021 and 2023 were more likely to be women, to live alone and to reside in poorer neighborhoods. Being poor, lonely or unable to access necessary health care doesn’t qualify someone for MAID, of course. But many people in those circumstances also have chronic illnesses, disabilities and mental disorders that could qualify them for assisted death—even if it’s their circumstances, rather than their diagnoses, that exacerbate their suffering and drive their desire to die. In July of 2024, the medical journal the Lancet published an editorial raising concerns about psychiatric MAID. “Persons can be eligible for MAID even if there are reasonable, standard treatments or resources that would make their suffering tolerable but are inaccessible due to lack of availability, extended wait times, financial insecurity or other reasons,” the authors wrote. “For many persons in Canada, therefore, MAID will be more accessible than standard treatments and remedies.”

Walkus is glad the courts will have to contend with two competing interpretations of the Charter’s bearing on Track 2 MAID. “Can our Constitution be used to harm? Can it be used to support? Can it do both?” she asks. “It’s not black and white. It’s not, ‘This group is right and this group is wrong.’ It’s a matter of public discussion about what we want Canada to be. It’s not an easy topic. We tend to not want to go there—but we’re there.”

Sometime in the next year or two, Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice will hear both challenges. There’s a fair chance that, whatever is decided, the cases will head to the Court of Appeal and, in time, the Supreme Court of Canada. It’s also possible that the courts will consolidate them into one matter—an ultimate arbitration on who can and cannot choose to die. If the final decision upholds the constitutionality of MAID for mental disorders, two things could happen: the government could strike down the section of the Criminal Code prohibiting it, or Parliament could design new legislation. Even under a Conservative government led by Pierre Poilievre, a Supreme Court precedent would effectively decriminalize the practice.

Madeline Li, a University of Toronto professor and psychiatrist, says that Canada needs to prepare for that possibility. Li developed the MAID program at Toronto’s University Health Network. She has overseen hundreds of cases, trained dozens of providers and administered MAID herself. She has regretted providing it in one case, to a young person with decent chances of recovery who turned down treatment. She also sometimes regrets that her own mother, who died intubated in an ICU, didn’t receive MAID.

She considers herself to be in the “muddy middle” of the debate. Unlike militant expansionists, she does not believe that patient autonomy should be the principal deciding factor. And though she is not categorically opposed to the idea of providing MAID for chronic illness, she says stricter conditions must be implemented to mitigate harms.

Li says that because many MAID safeguards are often unclear, the outcome of assessments lean too heavily on the subjective opinions of patients and assessors. And because there are no limits on how many MAID requests a person can make, or rules about how much time has to elapse between them, patients can shop around until they get the answer they want. To Li’s mind, the government needs to clarify through the Criminal Code whether or not MAID can be granted if an applicant’s suffering stems less from their medical condition and more from the consequences of that condition, such as the inability to work, pay rent and live independently. She also wants the law to define what incurable and irreversible really mean—is it up to the patient, or should there be a formal clinical definition?

Perhaps most crucially, Li believes MAID assessors should have to discuss with patients why they’re requesting MAID, and agree that it’s the best choice—something practitioners are not currently obligated to do. “I get MAID assessors saying to me, ‘That’s not my job. I’m not a therapist,’ ” says Li. “But it is our job. Who else is going to do that if not the person evaluating whether we should medically sanction ending a life?”

The U.K., Germany and other jurisdictions currently debating and designing their own MAID regimes are watching Canada closely, hoping to emulate our successes and avoid our missteps. These may seem like minute details, Li says, but we can’t afford to get them wrong. Lives—and Canada’s international reputation—are on the line.

The last time I visited Claire Brosseau’s apartment, there was a package at her door. As I entered, I handed her the box, which contained a new pair of jeans. “Maybe this will turn things around,” she joked. When she opened it, she was disappointed. They weren’t quite the right colour. No, she quipped; she still wanted to die.

Brosseau is witty, gregarious and a joy to be around. I couldn’t help but feel gutted by the idea that soon she might be gone. “She’s such a giving person, and she has so many talents,” her mother told me. “It’s such a waste to the world.” Kinahan says that standing by her daughter has meant distancing herself from friends and family who disapprove of her decision, or who think it’s about attention-seeking or dramatics. Kinahan admits that she used to see it that way. “But in the past 10 years,” she says, “I have come to an understanding of just how horrific it is for her.”

Even as I came to the same understanding, a part of me instinctively sought to problem-solve Brosseau’s illness. I wondered aloud whether, if she took it slow, she might benefit from trying to re-engage in the world—going out for dinner, taking on a writing project. What was she afraid would happen? “People—my doctors, my family, most everybody—say that this is a choice I’m making,” she says. “And maybe it is. I know I could start with calling one friend and start with going to one coffee shop. I know what I could do, theoretically, to make my life a life again.”

But it felt impossible, she said. She feared that the emotional intensity of being in public would send her spiraling back into mania and depression, that she’d inevitably melt down and prove she’s as crazy as everyone thinks she is. “I can’t just be a tornado that rips through everybody’s lives,” she says. “It’s not like, as I get older, I’m getting a better handle on it. It’s just growing worse and worse.”
Working was also out of the question. She’d tried writing a TV series about her life, but consecutive rounds of electroconvulsive therapy had zapped her memory and focus. She couldn’t keep up, so she spiked the project. Brosseau was considering another therapy involving electromagnetic brain stimulation, which would involve daily clinic visits for up to six weeks. But she worried it would only make things worse. “I’ll lose my memory. I won’t be able to write or finish a sentence,” she predicts. “I’m very hopeful for the future of psychiatric treatment, and I absolutely think people can get better. It’s just that, with my diagnosis and where I am at this point in my life, I’m so beyond expired. I was supposed to go long ago. The only reason I’m still here is for the lawsuit.”

Later, she amended that statement. There were actually two reasons: the lawsuit and Olive, the Maltese poodle who zoomed around the apartment during my visits. Her mother had bought her the dog. “It’s a huge expense that she can’t afford,” Brosseau explained, “but my mom’s trying to keep me alive.” It was not lost on Brosseau that if Olive were to ever get sick and suffer, no one would think twice about putting her down.

This story appears in the March 2025 issue of MacLean's.

DPI Peace Statement

On 24 June 1982, Disabled Peoples' International (DPI) adopted its Peace Statement at the Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima Japan. The CCD Council adopted the Peace Statement at a National Council Meeting on 19-20 January 1985.

In October 2002, DPI held its World Assembly in Sapporo, Japan. Once again peace was an issue on the agenda of the international cross disability rights movement and others. The delegates included a statement on peace in the Sapporo Platform, one of the documents arising out of the World Assembly.

As the Canadian member of Disabled Peoples' International, CCD is sharing the following information on peace with the Canadian disability rights movement. CCD encourages Canadians to share this information in any upcoming forums where there are discussions about the possibility of war.

DPI Peace Statement

Disabled people all over the world know from their deepest personal experience, the capacity of war to cast its mantle of death and destruction over life and limb. The ability of modern weapons of war to devastate a people, to sear human memory with permanent scars of personal tragedy, to shatter the dreams and hopes of children, to maim and injure, is nowhere more eloquently proclaimed than here, the Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima.

Everyday the absolute sanctity of human life is asserted by the aspirations of this planet's 500 million disabled people. The creation of disability and the ending of life by the waging of war is an abomination. Yet the accumulation of the engines of war gains pace.

The talents of human kind are turned from the satisfaction of people's needs to the invention of more and more horrific devices of destruction.

The products of human labors, wrested from the earth with all the ingenuity of generations of men and women, are dissipated in gigantic stockpiles of armaments which are of benefit to no one. The power of cooperation amongst individuals and the organizing capability of the human race are squandered in the creation of gigantic war complexes whose sole intent is the destruction of people.

HOW LONG CAN THIS OBSCENITY CONTINUE?

We, the representatives of the world's disabled people, have come to Hiroshima to make known our resolute condemnation of the arms race. We affirm, in the strongest terms, our determination to join with others and take our rightful place in the forefront of the worldwide movement for disarmament.

Disabled Peoples' International says:

LET ALL OF US JOIN TOGETHER IN A WORLDWIDE MOVEMENT FOR PEACE.

LET US CALL FOR ALL NATIONS' ECONOMIES TO BE TRANSFORMED FROM WAR ECONOMIES TO PEACE ECONOMIES.

LET US INSIST THAT THE $600 BILLION NOW SPENT ON ARMAMENTS IS DIVERTED TO SOCIALLY USEFUL PROJECTS.

LET US DEMAND THAT THE WORLD LEADERS NOW, IN THIS MOMENTOUS EPOCH, WHERE WE HAVE THE POWER TO DESTROY AND CRIPPLE, BEGIN THE ENORMOUS TASK OF REDIRECTING OUR RESOURCES, OUR PRODUCTIONS, OUR TALENTS AND OUR ABILITIES FROM THE CREATION OF THE WEAPONS OF WAR TO THE CREATION OF INSTRUMENTS OF LIFE.

The Disabled Peoples' International calls on all people to affirm this movement.

(Disabled Peoples' International, Peace Memorial Park, Hiroshima, Japan, June 24, 1982.)

From the DPI Sapporo Platform

October 2002

Peace

As disabled people we are opposed to wars, violence and all forms of
oppression.

Daily, men, women and children are being disabled by land and personnel mines, and forms of armed destruction and torture.

We must work for a world where all people can live in peace and express their diversity and their desires.
 

Concluding observations on the combined second and third periodic reports of Canada

Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

Concluding observations on the combined second and third periodic reports of Canada*

I. Introduction
1. The Committee considered the combined second and third periodic reports of Canada  at its 768th and 769th meetings,  held on 10 and 11 March 2025. It adopted the present concluding observations at its 779th meeting, held on 18 March 2025.
2. The Committee welcomes the combined second and third periodic reports of Canada, which were prepared in accordance with the Committee’s reporting guidelines and in response to its list of issues prior to reporting,  and the additional information submitted by the State Party.
3. The Committee appreciates the constructive dialogue held with the State Party’s delegation, which included representatives of the relevant government ministries. The Committee also expresses its appreciation for the active participation of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, in its capacity as the national human rights institution and independent monitoring mechanism pursuant to article 33 (2) of the Convention.
II. Positive aspects
4. The Committee welcomes the measures taken by the State Party to implement the Convention in the light of the recommendations contained in the previous concluding observations,  issued in 2017. The Committee notes with appreciation the ratification by Canada, in 2023, to the Violence and Harassment Convention, 2019 (No. 190) of the International Labor Organization and, in 2018, its accession to the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, as well as:
(a) The adoption of the National Strategy Respecting Environmental Racism and Environmental Justice Act, in 2024;
(b) The adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, in 2021, and its corresponding action plan;
(c) The adoption of an act respecting equal access to employment in public bodies, which prohibits discrimination against employees and potential employees with disabilities;
(d) The adoption of the Accessible Canada Act, in 2019;
(e) The adoption of the Poverty Reduction Act in 2019;
(f) The adoption of the National Housing Strategy, in 2017; and adoption of the National Housing Strategy Act, in 2019;
(g) The adoption of the Act respecting First Nations, Inuit and Métis children, youth and families, in 2019;
(h) The amendment of the Canada Business Corporations Act, in 2018, to require federally incorporated corporations to disclose diversity information to their shareholders, including with respect to representation of persons with disabilities on their boards of directors and senior management teams;
(i) The amendment of the Elections Modernization Act, in 2018, creating financial incentives for registered parties and candidates to accommodate persons with disabilities during an election period;
(j) The establishment of the Advisory Committee on Accessibility and Systemic Ableism, in 2022;
(k) The establishment of the Ministerial Advisory Board on Dementia, in 2018;
(l) The adoption of the Employment Strategy for Canadians with Disabilities, in 2024;
(m) The adoption of the National Autism Strategy, in 2024;
(n) The adoption of the federal strategy entitled: “It’s Time: Canada’s Strategy to Prevent and Address Gender-Based Violence”, in 2017;
(o) The adoption of the federal strategy entitled: “Opportunity for All – Canada’s First Poverty Reduction Strategy”, in 2018;
(p) The establishment of the COVID-19 Disability Advisory Group, in April 2020, to apply a disability lens to the Government’s emergency response, and the establishment of similar groups in the provinces of British Columbia and Québec;
(q) The publication of the final report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, which set out 231 calls for justice, in 2019; and the issuance of the 2021 Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA+ People National Action Plan: Ending Violence against Indigenous Women, Girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA+ People;
(r) The inclusion of measures for students with disabilities in the Canada Student Financial Assistance Program;
(s) The endorsement of the Charter on Inclusion of Persons with Disabilities in Humanitarian Action, in 2017.
III. Principal areas of concern and recommendations
A. General principles and obligations (arts. 1–4)
5. The Committee reiterates its concern about the State Party’s interpretative declaration under article 12 and reservation to article 12 (4) of the Convention.  The right to equal recognition before the law is of foundational importance for the exercise of all rights guaranteed by the Convention. Reservations seriously curtailing that right may well be deemed against the object and purpose of the Convention.
6. Recalling its past concluding observations,  the Committee invites the State Party to withdraw its declaration under article 12 and reservation to article 12 (4) of the Convention.
7. The Committee is concerned about:
(a) Significant disparities in the implementation of the Convention across jurisdictions and branches of government in the State Party, which result in the highly unequal enjoyment of the rights of persons with disabilities;
(b) The rudimentary incorporation of the Convention into domestic law, and its limited normative significance as a mere interpretative tool;
(c) The lack of close consultation with and active involvement of persons with disabilities, through their representative organizations, including Black and other racialized persons with disabilities, First Nations, Inuit and Métis persons with disabilities, and non status and off-reserve Indigenous persons with disabilities.
8. Recalling its general comment No. 7 (2018) on the participation of persons with disabilities, including children with disabilities, through their representative organizations, in the implementation and monitoring of the Convention, the Committee recommends that the State Party take all measures necessary to ensure full implementation of the Convention at the federal level and in all provinces and territories, and:
(a) In close consultation with and with the active involvement of persons with disabilities, through their representative organizations, including Indigenous persons with disabilities and Black and other racialized persons with disabilities, establish legally defined mechanisms to ensure compliance with the Convention by all provinces and territories, and condition fiscal transfers from the federal level to provinces and territories on adherence to the Convention;
(b) Require that statutes and regulations in all jurisdictions be interpreted in a manner consistent with the Convention and ensure, in particular, that the principles and standards of the Convention underpin the implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act and the associated action plan and that self-determination, sovereignty and culture, including for non-status and off reserve Indigenous persons with disabilities, are respected;
(c) Develop legally entrenched mechanisms at the federal level and in the provinces and territories for close consultation with and the active involvement of persons with disabilities, through their representative organizations, including Indigenous persons with disabilities and Black and other racialized persons with disabilities.
B. Specific rights (arts. 5–30)
  Equality and non-discrimination (art. 5)
9. The Committee notes with concern the persistent discrimination against persons with disabilities, in particular: greater socioeconomic marginalization of Indigenous persons with disabilities, including higher rates of unemployment, mental health-related detentions and forced treatment, and inadequate access to healthcare; persistent ableism against 2SLGBTQI+ persons with disabilities, particularly in healthcare; high rates of discrimination against Black and racialized persons with disabilities; discrimination against and stigmatization of persons with dementia, multiple chemical sensitivity and fetal alcohol syndrome/disorder; exclusion of persons with intellectual and/or psychosocial disabilities, particularly from public spaces, recreational activities and cultural events; and persistent discriminatory attitudes towards people with Down’s Syndrome;
10. The Committee, recalling its general comment No. 6 (2018) on equality and non discrimination and targets 10.2 and 10.3 of the Sustainable Development Goals, recommends that the State Party, in close consultation with and with the active involvement of persons with disabilities, through their representative organizations:
(a) Conduct a comprehensive and intersectional study on disability discrimination cases across all jurisdictions and branches of government, identifying trends and root causes, and develop a plan to address them, with clear timelines, targets and indicators of progress;
(b) Develop intersectional, comprehensive and cross-sectoral strategies and statistics to implement the right to equality and non-discrimination for persons with disabilities, including Indigenous persons with disabilities, 2SLGBTQI+ persons with disabilities, Black and racialized persons with disabilities, persons with dementia, multiple chemical sensitivity or fetal alcohol syndrome/disorder, persons with intellectual and/or psychosocial disabilities and persons with Down’s Syndrome, at the federal level, in the provinces and territories and in all branches of government, and remedy the effects of colonialism within Indigenous communities.
  Women with disabilities (art. 6)
11. The Committee notes with concern that women with disabilities:
(a) Experience disproportionate rates of poverty, barriers to accessible housing, homelessness and lack of access to financial resources, and that First Nations, Inuit and Métis women with disabilities and off-reserve and non-status Indigenous women with disabilities are particularly affected;
(b) Are insufficiently represented in political, advocacy and leadership positions in public life, private enterprises and medium-sized and small businesses.
12. The Committee, recalling its general comment No. 3 (2016) on women and girls with disabilities and targets 5.1, 5.2 and 5.5 of the Sustainable Development Goals, recommends that the State Party, in close consultation with and with the active involvement of persons with disabilities, including women and girls with disabilities, through their representative organizations:
(a) Mainstream gender and disability into all poverty and homelessness laws, policies and strategies, including the Poverty Reduction Act and the National Housing Strategy, and ensure that they address the requirements of women with disabilities, including women with disabilities and intersecting identities;
(b) Take concrete action to achieve the participation and representation of women with disabilities in decision-making positions in all areas of political and public life, private enterprises and medium-sized and small businesses, on an equal basis with others.
  Children with disabilities (art. 7)
13. The Committee is concerned that:
(a) The legal and institutional frameworks for children do not mainstream disability, and that significant disparities in policies and across the federal, provincial and territorial levels hinder the effective protection of children’s rights;
(b) The State Party’s daycare and early childhood programmes do not sufficiently address the requirements of children with disabilities, of parents of children with disabilities or of parents with disabilities;
(c) Policies for children with disabilities do not incorporate the requirements, experiences and cultural contexts of Indigenous children with disabilities and of Black and other racialized children with disabilities, and that a lack of support for the families frequently forces those children to be placed into residential care or long-term care institutions;
(d) Disability is not mainstreamed into the Child Rights Impact Assessment;
(e) The State Party lacks procedures and supports for children with disabilities to freely express their requirements and their views on all matters affecting them, and for those requirements and views to be given due weight in accordance with a child’s age and maturity;
(f) Eligible supports for First Nations children with disabilities covered under Jordan’s Principle have been restricted; that there are plans to defund the Inuit Child First Initiative; and that there is no equivalent measure for the provision of supports for Métis children with disabilities.
14. Recalling its previous concluding observations  and its joint statement with the Committee on the Rights of the Child on the rights of children with disabilities, the Committee recommends that the State Party, in close consultation with and with the active involvement of persons with disabilities, through their representative organizations, including organizations of children with disabilities:
(a) Mainstream the rights of children with disabilities into all its laws, public policies, action plans and strategies, at all levels and branches of government, including in Bill C-35, on early learning and childcare in Canada, and collect disaggregated data and develop indicators to measure how effectively the rights of children with disabilities guaranteed by the Convention are protected;
(b) Allocate sufficient human, technical and financial support to ensure that children with disabilities have access to daycare and early childhood programmes, on an equal basis with other children, and provide support to caregivers and early learning centres to stimulate and teach children with disabilities, including children with disabilities requiring more intensive support, such as children with multiple disabilities or who are deafblind;
(c) Ensure that all policies and programmes affecting Indigenous and Black and other racialized children with disabilities are fully responsive to the requirements, experiences and cultural context of those children;
(d) Amend the Child Rights Impact Assessment to mainstream disability therein and render the assessments reached with that tool publicly accessible;
(e) Establish accessible mechanisms to enable children with disabilities to freely express their requirements and their views in all matters affecting them, and ensure that those requirements and views are given due weight in accordance with the child’s age and maturity in all legislative and administrative processes, at the federal level and in the provinces and territories;
(f) Review decisions to restrict eligible supports covered under Jordan’s Principle, reconsider plans to defund the Inuit Child First Initiative, ensure that First Nations and Inuit children with disabilities receive adequate and timely support, and establish an equivalent programme for Métis children with disabilities.
  Awareness-raising (art. 8)
15. The Committee is concerned about:
(a) The lack of information about ableism and intersectionality in awareness raising initiatives, and the failure of those initiatives to address all rights covered in the Convention, and about the limited knowledge of the rights of persons with disabilities demonstrated in many public and private entities;
(b) Negative perceptions and stereotypes perpetuated in government entities and society about persons with Down’s Syndrome and other impairments, which result in a lack of accurate information being given to expectant parents in relation to prenatal screening programmes, resulting in high rates of pregnancy termination.
16. Recalling its previous concluding observations,  the Committee recommends that the State Party, in close consultation with and with the active involvement of persons with disabilities, through their representative organizations:
(a) Review, amend and adapt awareness-raising programmes to address the stigmatization of and ableism against persons with disabilities, and ensure that all related materials are accessible to all persons with disabilities;
(b) Ensure that prospective parents undergoing prenatal screening are provided with comprehensive information and non-directive counselling that does not promote stereotypes about persons with disabilities, including persons with Down’s Syndrome, or values associated with a medical model of disability.
  Accessibility (art. 9)
17. The Committee notes with concern:
(a) That the Accessible Canada Act does not provide for the duty to accommodate as a legal obligation, that that Act’s accountability mechanisms for non-compliance are ineffective and that there are persistent delays in the implementation of the Act;
(b) The lack of implementation of the accessibility obligations and rights enshrined by the Convention in many provinces and territories;
(c) The lack of close consultation with and active involvement of First Nations, Inuit and Métis persons with disabilities and off-reserve and non-status Indigenous persons with disabilities in the implementation of accessibility requirements;
(d) The insufficient availability of experts in universal design, reasonable accommodation and accessibility in public administration and the private sector;
(e) The scarcity of information on the implementation of the Accessible Procurement Resource Centre and how it has served to ensure accessibility across the State Party;
(f) The lack of involvement of persons with disabilities, including children with disabilities, through their representative organizations, in the development, implementation and monitoring of accessibility.
18. Recalling its general comment No. 2 (2014) on accessibility, and Goal 9 and targets 11.2 and 11.7 of the Sustainable Development Goals, the Committee recommends that the State Party, in close consultation with and with the active involvement of persons with disabilities, through their representative organizations:
(a) Amend the Accessible Canada Act and other domestic laws to explicitly incorporate the duty to accommodate as a legal obligation, with accountability mechanisms for non-compliance, and set a timeline for the issuance of regulations and their implementation, with clear indicators of progress;
(b) Ensure that all provinces and territories enact and implement accessibility legislation in conformity with the Convention;
(c) Ensure that the Accessible Canada Act is applicable to First Nations, Inuit and Métis territories, and provide the support necessary to implement the Act in those territories;
(d) Develop educational and training programmes on universal design, reasonable accommodation and accessibility to ensure the further development of expertise in government and in the private sector in those areas;
(e) Ensure that information on the performance and results of the Accessible Procurement Resource Centre, and on how it has served to ensure accessibility, is made publicly available;
(f) Ensure that persons with disabilities, including children with disabilities, are involved in the development, implementation and monitoring of universal design, reasonable accommodation and accessibility policies, and in the evaluation of the effectiveness of those policies.
  Right to life (art. 10)
19. The Committee is extremely concerned about the 2021 amendments to the State Party’s Criminal Code made through Bill C-7, which expanded the eligibility criteria for obtaining medical assistance in dying, by removing the “reasonably foreseeable death” criterion and thus creating what is referred to as “Track 2” for requests for medical assistance in dying. The Committee notes that similar concerns about Track 2 have been addressed directly to the State Party by the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, the Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and during the universal periodic review. The Committee further notes that the Special Rapporteur on the rights of persons with disabilities, the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights and the Independent Expert on the enjoyment of all human rights by older persons have stated that disability is not a reason to endorse medical assistance in dying. The Committee also notes with concern:
(a) That the federal Government did not challenge the decision by the Supreme Court of Québec in the Truchon and Gladu v. Canada case, which fundamentally changed the whole premise of medical assistance in dying – from one restricted to cases in which natural death is reasonably foreseeable to one that establishes the possibility of medically assisted dying for persons with disabilities – on the basis of negative, ableist perceptions of the quality and value of the life of persons with disabilities, including the view that “suffering” is intrinsic to disability, without recognition that inequality and discrimination cause and compound “suffering” for persons with disabilities;
(b) That the concept of “choice” creates a false dichotomy, setting up the premise that if persons with disabilities are suffering, it is valid for the State Party to enable their death without providing safeguards that guarantee the provision of support, and on the basis of ableist assumptions that de-emphasize the myriad of support options that could allow persons with disabilities to live dignified lives, and about the systemic failure of the State Party to address the social determinants of health and well-being with regard to poverty alleviation, access to healthcare, accessible housing, prevention of homelessness, prevention of gender-based violence, and the provision of community-based mental health support and employment support;
(c) That evidence from the Office of the Chief Coroner for Ontario and data compiled by the federal Government indicate that Track 2 medical assistance in dying is disproportionately accessed by women with disabilities and persons with disabilities in marginalized situations, and that there is an upward trajectory in the number of persons with disabilities killed through Track 2;
(d) About the expansion of Track 2 in 2027 to persons whose “sole underlying medical condition is a mental illness” (through Bill C-62) and the proposed expansion of medical assistance in dying to include mature minors and advance requests for such assistance;
(e) About the inadequacy of the process of consultation with Indigenous Peoples, including non-status and off-reserve Indigenous persons with disabilities, in relation to medical assistance in dying;
(f) About the absence of a federal independent oversight mechanism to monitor, regulate and handle complaints in relation to medical assistance in dying.
20. To ensure the right to life for persons with disabilities, the Committee recommends that the State Party, in close consultation with and with the active involvement of persons with disabilities, through their representative organizations:
(a) Repeal the Track 2 medical assistance in dying provision, including the provision to, in 2027, Track 2 for persons whose “sole underlying medical condition is a mental illness”;
(b) Not support proposals for the expansion of medical assistance in dying to include mature minors and advance requests;
(c) Significantly invest in and implement, at the federal, provincial and territorial levels, comprehensive measures to ensure that the systemic failures in relation to the social determinants of health and well-being are addressed, with regard to poverty alleviation, access to healthcare, accessible housing, prevention of homelessness, prevention of gender-based violence, and the provision of community based mental health support, care services at home and personal assistance, and employment support;
(d) Strengthen distinctions-based, community-led consultation processes with Indigenous Peoples, including non-status and off-reserve Indigenous persons with disabilities, respecting the principle of self-determination;
(e) Establish and provide resources for a federal independent oversight mechanism to monitor, regulate and handle complaints in relation to medical assistance in dying.
  Situations of risk and humanitarian emergencies (art. 11)
21. The Committee is concerned that:
(a) Policies and action plans to address situations of risk and humanitarian emergencies, including in relation to climate change, the opioid crisis, disaster risk reduction and emergency management, do not provide extensive guidance and concrete measures for the protection and safety of persons with disabilities, and that there are barriers to emergency responses, access to emergency management information and early warning systems;
(b) First Nations, Inuit and Métis communities and Black and other racialized communities experience environmental racism, such as disproportionate exposure to polluting industries and hazards that have detrimental health impacts causing or exacerbating impairment and secondary impairments, including life-threatening illnesses.
22. Recalling the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030, the Guidelines on the Inclusion of Persons with Disabilities in Humanitarian Action, the Charter on Inclusion of Persons with Disabilities in Humanitarian Action and the Committee’s guidelines on deinstitutionalization, including in emergencies,  the Committee recommends that the State Party, in close consultation with and with the active involvement of persons with disabilities, through their representative organizations:
(a) Review federal, provincial and territorial plans and policies to ensure that preparation and response measures to address situations of risk and humanitarian emergencies, including measures concerning climate change, environmental action, the opioid crisis and public health, are disability inclusive, and establish protocols to ensure the provision of accessible information, communications and early warning systems and training for members of public bodies and emergency service staff in those protocols;
(b) Ensure that the implementation of the National Strategy Respecting Environmental Racism and Environmental Justice Act is disability inclusive and addresses the intersection between environmental racism and ableism.
  Equal recognition before the law (art. 12)
23. The Committee is concerned about:
(a) The prevalence of substitute decision-making regimes across all jurisdictions, and the lack of national leadership in promoting and advancing well-established supported decision-making models throughout Canada;
(b) The Mental Health Act of British Columbia, which explicitly overrides mental health care consent and supported decision-making rights through the “deemed consent” provisions that go beyond the terms of the State Party interpretative declaration and conditional reservation under article 12 of the Convention;
(c) The systemic flaws within the designated representative mechanism under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, including a lack of proper assessment in the appointment of representatives, the broad and contested scope of their role, the inadequacy of the training of such representatives, the limited extent of their competence to support persons with disabilities, and the extent of their power to make substitute decisions.
24. Recalling its previous concluding observations  and its general comment No. 1 (2014) on equal recognition before the law, the Committee recommends that the State Party, in close consultation with and with the active involvement of persons with disabilities, through their representative organizations:
(a) Take leadership in collaborating with provincial and territorial governments to eliminate substitute decision-making by creating and implementing a nationally consistent framework for supported decision-making;
(b) Ensure the repeal of all legislation, including the Mental Health Act of British Columbia, that overrides personal, free and informed consent and supported decision-making rights and ensure that federal, provincial and territorial mental health frameworks respect the legal capacity of persons with disabilities;
(c) Address the systemic flaws within the designated representative mechanism under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act by establishing mandatory policies and procedures, training and compliance measures to ensure that designated representatives serve as a supported decision-making mechanism on the basis of the will and preference of persons with disabilities and respect for the universal standard of legal capacity.
  Access to justice (art. 13)
25. The Committee is concerned about:
(a) Jurisdictional differences in eligibility and the issues covered by legal aid;
(b) Regional inconsistencies in protocols and processes for accessing procedural and age-appropriate accommodation in the justice system, the overreliance on medical documentation for requests for procedural accommodations, the disclosure of private medical records in decisions, and insufficient sign language interpretation in courts, tribunals and police interactions;
(c) Significant delays and backlogs in resolving disability discrimination complaints in many human rights tribunals.
26. Recalling the International Principles and Guidelines on Access to Justice for Persons with Disabilities, the Committee recommends that the State Party, in close consultation with and with the active involvement of persons with disabilities, through their representative organizations:
(a) Establish principles and guidelines for funding agreements with provincial and territorial governments to ensure broad legal aid eligibility criteria, to expand the issues covered and to ensure that legal aid services are nationally consistent;
(b) Develop nationally consistent protocols and guidelines for the request and provision of procedural and age-appropriate accommodation for persons with disabilities in all legal proceedings, including to prevent overreliance on medical documentation, to ensure respect for privacy and in relation to the provision of sign language interpretation in courts, tribunals and police interactions;
(c) Increase resourcing for human rights tribunals in order to expedite disability discrimination complaints and eliminate backlogs.
  Liberty and security of the person (art. 14)
27. The Committee is concerned about:
(a) Legislative and policy frameworks for mental health and the treatment of substance use that allow for involuntary detention and treatment; increased support for drug treatment courts; the increase in involuntary hospitalization; and release and access to housing and services that is conditional on community treatment orders;
(b) Overpolicing and complex court practices, which have an adverse impact on and effectively criminalize Indigenous, Black and racialized groups, persons with disabilities in situations of homelessness and persons with psychosocial disabilities, leading to frequent contact with the criminal justice system and incarceration;
(c) The overrepresentation of persons with disabilities in the criminal justice system and prisons, in particular Indigenous women with disabilities, Black and other marginalized persons with disabilities, persons with intellectual and/or psychosocial disabilities and persons with fetal alcohol syndrome/disorder;
(d) The lack of culturally appropriate, gender-sensitive and age-specific individualized supports, accessible infrastructure, disability-related supports and health services, including mental health and drug-treatment support options, within prisons;
(e) Indefinite detention in the context of outpatient community treatment or in mental health facilities, and the lack of access to procedural guarantees for persons with disabilities who are declared “unfit” to stand trial or not criminally responsible.
28. Recalling its guidelines on the right to liberty and security of persons with disabilities,  the Committee recommends that the State Party, in close consultation with and with the active involvement of persons with disabilities, through their representative organizations:
(a) Ensure the repeal of federal, provincial and territorial mental health and substance-use treatment laws and policies allowing for involuntary detention and treatment, including under the auspices of drug treatment courts and through community treatment orders;
(b) Invest in rights-based, culturally appropriate, voluntary community based mental health and substance-use supports and treatment options, including peer-led options; ensure regulatory oversight and human rights monitoring; and ensure harm-reduction and safe-supply programmes that respond to the intersecting identities of persons who use drugs;
(c) Take all legislative, policy, judicial and administrative measures to address the overrepresentation of persons with disabilities in the criminal justice system and prisons, including by addressing the social determinants of incarceration, such as poverty, ableism, racial injustice and gender inequality, and by reforming policing practices and complex court processes;
(d) Implement laws and policies to ensure that prisoners with disabilities have access to culturally appropriate, gender-sensitive and age-specific individualized supports, accessible infrastructure, disability-related supports and health services, including mental health and drug treatment support options;
(e) Amend or repeal legislation that restricts the legal capacity of persons with disabilities and that allows for measures to be imposed on persons with disabilities, such as indefinite detention, that are harsher than those imposed on defendants convicted of the same crimes, and guarantee access by persons with disabilities to justice on an equal basis with others throughout judicial proceedings.
  Freedom from torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment (art. 15)
29. The Committee is concerned about:
(a) The lack of ratification of the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, despite commitments made by the State Party during the fourth cycle of the universal periodic review;
(b) Structured intervention units, which perpetuate solitary confinement conditions, disproportionately affecting prisoners with psychosocial disabilities, predominantly those who are Indigenous, Black or from other racialized groups, the wide discretion of Correctional Service Canada in the use of such units and the lack of substantive improvements made to address the concerns, expressed over many years, of the Structured Intervention Unit Implementation Advisory Panel and the Office of the Correctional Investigator;
(c) The significantly high prevalence of women with psychosocial disabilities, in particular Indigenous women with psychosocial disabilities, in women’s prisons and the higher rates of placement of those women into maximum security and highly restrictive environments, which often leads to chronic self-injurious or suicidal behaviour;
(d) The prevalence of seclusion, restraint and restrictive practices in residential institutions, psychiatric institutions, hospitals, prisons and schools; the focus on authorization rather than elimination in seclusion and restraint policies and guidelines; and the provisions in the Mental Health Act of British Columbia that authorize staff to discipline persons undergoing involuntary mental health treatment;
(e) The absence of an independent monitoring and oversight mechanism for the mental health system.
30. The Committee recommends that the State Party, in close consultation with and with the active involvement of persons with disabilities, through their representative organizations:
(a) Accelerate efforts to ratify the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment and to designate a disability-inclusive and accessible national preventive mechanism to ensure independent oversight and monitoring of all places of detention;
(b) Address the concerns, and implement the recommendations, of the Structured Intervention Unit Implementation Advisory Panel and the Office of the Correctional Investigator, and ensure the provision of culturally appropriate, gender sensitive and age-specific mental health supports within correctional facilities;
(c) Address the preconditions that result in the high prevalence of women with psychosocial disabilities, in particular Indigenous women with psychosocial disabilities, being placed in maximum security and highly restrictive environments in prisons;
(d) Establish a nationally consistent legislative and policy framework for the elimination of seclusion, restraint and restrictive practices in residential institutions, psychiatric institutions, hospitals, prisons and schools and ensure the repeal of the provisions in the Mental Health Act of British Columbia that authorize staff to discipline persons undergoing involuntary mental health treatment;
(e) Designate an independent monitoring and oversight mechanism for the mental health system based on the principles and standards of the Convention.
  Freedom from exploitation, violence and abuse (art. 16)
31. The Committee is concerned about the prevalence of gender-based violence against women and girls with disabilities, particularly Indigenous women and girls with disabilities, in both family and institutional settings, and the lack of accessible women’s shelters and services for persons with disabilities who are victims/survivors of gender-based violence.
32. The Committee recommends that the State Party, in close consultation with and with the active involvement of women with disabilities, through their representative organizations:
(a) Ensure that issues and concerns of women and girls with disabilities are integral to the implementation of the recommendations set out in the final report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls;
(b) Ensure that audits of accessibility of shelters are conducted regularly as part of the implementation of the Disability Inclusion Action Plan and the National Action Plan to End Gender-based Violence and that they result in comprehensive measures to address gaps in the provision of accessible and culturally appropriate shelters and services for persons with disabilities who are victims/survivors of gender based violence.
  Protecting the integrity of the person (art. 17)
33. The Committee is concerned about the historical and ongoing practice of forced and coerced sterilization of persons with disabilities, including Indigenous, Black and racialized women and girls with disabilities, intersex children and institutionalized persons.
34. The Committee recommends that the State Party, in close consultation with and with the active involvement of persons with disabilities, through their representative organizations:
(a) Take all legislative, policy and administrative measures necessary to prohibit the imposition of sterilization procedures and contraceptive measures on persons with disabilities without their free, informed and personal consent;
(b) Implement, as a matter of urgency, the recommendations of the Standing Senate Committee on Human Rights to end forced or coerced sterilization and ensure redress, justice and support for survivors.
  Liberty of movement and nationality (art. 18)
35. The Committee is concerned that asylum-seekers and refugees with disabilities, in particular those with intellectual and/or psychosocial disabilities, are more likely to be in immigration detention, can be detained in correctional facilities and subjected to solitary confinement on the basis of suicidal ideation they have expressed psychosocial disabilities, and are subjected to onerous conditions for release in the community, such as requirements to enrol in residential treatment facilities where treatment and confinement is non-consensual.
36. The Committee recommends that the State Party end the use of immigration detention by increasing community-based, independent alternatives that provide access to holistic support, including housing, healthcare, mental health services, legal representation, disability-related supports and children’s services.
37. The Committee is concerned that section 38 (1) (c) of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act can preclude persons with disabilities, including persons living with HIV, from obtaining permanent or temporary residency status.
38. The Committee recommends that the State Party repeal section 38 (1) (c) of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act.
  Living independently and being included in the community (art. 19)
39. The Committee is concerned that:
(a) Deinstitutionalization efforts are inconsistent and slow, with many persons with disabilities forced to live in institutions, such as nursing homes, group homes, specialized long-term care facilities and other institutions, because they are unable to obtain support;
(b) Many Indigenous children and adults with disabilities must leave their communities and cultural connections to obtain accessible housing and appropriate support;
(c) Funding and programmes for support for community living have long wait lists, require co-payments and are not portable throughout Canada.
40. Recalling its general comment No. 5 (2017) on living independently and being included in the community and its guidelines on deinstitutionalization, including in emergencies, the Committee recommends that the State Party, in close consultation with and with the active involvement of persons with disabilities, through their representative organizations:
(a) Implement a coordinated deinstitutionalization strategy across federal, provincial and territorial governments, with timelines and targets, that is applicable across all institutional settings, such as nursing homes, group homes, specialized long term care facilities and psychiatric institutions;
(b) Establish comprehensive distinctions-based policies and plans to urgently address the lack of accessible housing and community supports within Indigenous communities and for non-status and off-reserve Indigenous persons with disabilities;
(c) Develop, at the federal, provincial and territorial levels, a nationally consistent, rights-based legislative and policy framework for the provision of community-based supports and services, including accessible housing, home support and personal assistance, that respects self-direction and individual control, that eliminates wait lists and co-payments for self-managed funding programmes and that allows for the portability of such programmes throughout Canada.
  Freedom of expression and opinion, and access to information (art. 21)
41. The Committee notes that some progress has been made by recognizing, in the Accessible Canada Act, American Sign Language, Quebec Sign Language and Indigenous sign languages as the primary languages for communication by deaf persons. However, it is concerned about:
(a) The lack of recognition of sign languages as official languages;
(b) Persistent communication barriers and disparities in access to information and technology for persons with disabilities across jurisdictions, the limited reach of the Video Relay Service across the country and the insufficient compliance with the Policy on Communications and Federal Identity;
(c) The lack of comprehensive measures to ensure that all information is available in modes and formats accessible for blind persons, deafblind persons, persons with vision impairment and persons with intellectual and/or psychosocial disabilities, and the insufficient implementation of closed-captioning by Canadian English- and French-language broadcasters;
(d) The shortage of sign language interpreters, particularly in First Nations, Inuit and Métis territories, and disparities in training and accreditation programmes across provinces and territories.
42. The Committee recommends that the State Party, in close consultation with and with the active involvement of persons with disabilities, including Indigenous persons with disabilities, through their representative organizations:
(a) Recognize sign languages, including American Sign Language, Quebec Sign Language and Indigenous sign languages, as official languages;
(b) Exercise federal leadership to ensure equal access to information for persons with disabilities throughout its territory and in First Nations, Inuit and Métis territories, nationwide access to the Video Relay Service for all persons who are deaf and the implementation of the Policy on Communications and Federal Identity;
(c) Implement laws and policies to ensure the accessibility of information, communications, including digital technology, and public services for persons with disabilities, taking into account their diversity, in all provinces and territories, including in formats such as Braille, deafblind interpretation, Easy Read, plain language, audio description, captioning and subtitles, and ensure that all programmes aired by English- and French-language broadcasters are closed-captioned for persons who are deaf or hard of hearing;
(d) Allocate sufficient funding and resources to develop a pool of qualified sign language interpreters, including for Indigenous sign languages.
  Respect for privacy (art. 22)
43. The Committee is concerned about the insufficiency of information on measures to protect the right to privacy of persons with disabilities, including migrants, asylum-seekers and refugees with disabilities, in the processing of personal data in migration and cross border contexts.
44. The Committee recommends that the State Party, in close consultation with and with the active involvement of persons with disabilities, through their representative organizations, establish privacy protection procedures and develop policies to guarantee that the processing, in migration and cross-border contexts, of the personal data of migrants, asylum-seekers and refugees with disabilities respects their right to privacy.
  Respect for home and the family (art. 23)
45. The Committee notes with concern:
(a) The inconsistencies in federal, provincial and territorial legislation on the legal capacity of persons with intellectual and/or psychosocial disabilities to enter into marriage and to adopt children, as well as discrepancies in judicial interpretation on the legal capacity of persons with psychosocial disabilities to enter into marriage and proceed with divorce;
(b) The insufficiency of the support provided to children with disabilities and their families, and the support provided to parents with disabilities to carry out their parental responsibilities, especially in First Nations, Inuit and Métis territories.
46. The Committee recommends that the State Party, in close consultation with and with the active involvement of persons with disabilities, through their representative organizations:
(a) Recognize the legal capacity of persons with disabilities to ensure their right to enter into marriage, proceed with divorce, and adopt and raise children;
(b) Adopt policy measures to ensure adequate support for children with disabilities and their families and for parents with disabilities and to prevent the separation of children from their families based on the disability of either the child or one or both of their parents, including in First Nations, Inuit and Métis territories.
  Education (art. 24)
47. The Committee is concerned about:
(a) The prevalence of segregated educational systems, inconsistent access to inclusive education across provinces and territories, the lack of culturally appropriate inclusive education for Indigenous persons with disabilities, the insufficient provision of funding and qualified personnel for educational services for persons with disabilities, and the lack of adequate pedagogical approaches to guarantee inclusive education;
(b) Unequal access to post-secondary education for persons with disabilities, with official numbers indicating that only 19.6 per cent of persons with disabilities have a university or higher level degree.
48. Recalling its general comment No. 4 (2016) on the right to inclusive education and targets 4.5 and 4.a of the Sustainable Development Goals, and recalling its previous concluding observations,  the Committee recommends that the State Party, in close consultation with and with the active involvement of persons with disabilities, through their representative organizations, establish a national inclusive education action plan to transition from segregated education to quality, inclusive education, including measures that:
(a) Ensure consistent policies on inclusive education throughout the provinces and territories, track the implementation of inclusive education across provinces and territories, including through the establishment of a database to capture comprehensive data on students with disabilities at the pre-primary, primary, secondary and tertiary levels;
(b) Ensure that inclusive education policies include and address the distinctions-based needs, experiences and cultural context of Indigenous persons with disabilities, including regarding their representation in school curricula;
(c) Include strategies to increase the enrolment of persons with disabilities at the secondary and tertiary levels of education.
  Health (art. 25)
49. The Committee is concerned about:
(a) The lack of comprehensive access to quality healthcare for persons with disabilities, including the inaccessibility of medical infrastructure and equipment;
(b) The limited access to medicines and culturally appropriate health services for First Nations, Inuit and Métis persons with disabilities, and the lack of inclusion of traditional medicine within the health system;
(c) The ableism, prejudice and stigmatization displayed by health professionals and intrinsic within the health system in relation to dementia diagnosis, treatment and support, including for persons with early onset dementia, and in relation to persons with intellectual and/or psychosocial disabilities;
(d) Gaps in access to age-appropriate and gender-specific information and education on sexual and reproductive health and rights, including on family planning and access to essential menstrual hygiene products.
50. Recalling targets 3.7 and 3.8 of the Sustainable Development Goals, the Committee recommends that the State Party, in close consultation with and with the active involvement of persons with disabilities, through their representative organizations:
(a) Exercise federal leadership to develop a nationally consistent approach to disability-inclusive healthcare for all persons with disabilities across the provinces and territories, including policies to ensure the accessibility of medical infrastructure and equipment;
(b) Strengthen measures provided for in the action plan to implement the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act in order to ensure culturally appropriate healthcare services, including by ensuring that health policies incorporate and address the needs of Indigenous persons with disabilities and include traditional medicine and health-related practices that are culturally relevant for those persons;
(c) Develop a comprehensive national action plan to implement the national dementia strategy in coordination with the provinces and territories, with targets on ensuring rights-based training for health professionals, on providing dementia care pathways through the health system, including with regard to access to the full range of services and supports, and on promoting and respecting personal autonomy and the right to independent living.
(d) Strengthen policies to provide women and girls with disabilities with age appropriate and gender-specific, accessible information and education on sexual and reproductive health and rights, including on family planning, and ensure access to essential menstrual hygiene products.
  Habilitation and rehabilitation (art. 26)
51. The Committee is concerned about:
(a) The medicalized approach to habilitation and rehabilitation programmes; disparities in access to and funding for assistive technology and devices, including prosthetics, across jurisdictions; the complexity of procedures for accessing such devices; and long wait times to receive rehabilitation, including for children with disabilities;
(b) The lack of culturally appropriate habilitation and rehabilitation services for First Nations, Inuit and Métis persons with disabilities, including off-reserve and non-status Indigenous persons with disabilities.
52. Recalling the link between article 26 of the Convention and target 3.7 of the Sustainable Development Goals, the Committee recommends that the State Party, in close consultation with and with the active involvement of persons with disabilities, through their representative organizations:
(a) Work with provinces and territories to ensure national consistency in access to and funding for habilitation and rehabilitation services, programmes and technology, with a focus on living independently and being included in the community and to streamline procedures for accessing assistive and prosthetic devices, to ensure that access assessments address the individual needs of persons with disabilities and to reduce wait times, in particular for children with disabilities;
(b) Strengthen the distinctions-based measures provided for in the action plan to implement the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act in order to ensure culturally appropriate habilitation and rehabilitation.
  Work and employment (art. 27)
53. The Committee welcomes the establishment of the Employment Strategy for Canadians with Disabilities, the Indigenous Skills and Employment Training Program, the Canadian Apprenticeship Strategy, the Sectoral Workforce Solutions Program, the Youth Employment and Skills Strategy, the Skills for Success programme and the Disability Inclusion Business Council. However, it notes with concern:
(a) That despite legal protections and existing policies, persons with disabilities, particularly women with disabilities, continue to encounter systemic barriers to employment and in the workplace, and face higher unemployment rates compared to their counterparts without disabilities, and that there are disparities across the provinces and territories regarding policies on work and employment for persons with disabilities;
(b) The lack of nationally consistent, longitudinal indicators aimed at measuring progress in guaranteeing the right to work, and the employment of, persons with disabilities, and the lack of disaggregated data on persons with disabilities employed in the public and private sectors;
(c) The lack of comprehensive policies to address the situation of persons with work-acquired disabilities and to counter societal stigma associated with the long-term use of employment injury benefits;
(d) The absence of a centralized disability fund to assist small enterprises and micro-enterprises in providing reasonable accommodation for employees with disabilities;
(e) The continued use of sheltered workshops to employ persons with disabilities.
54. Recalling its general comment No. 8 (2022) on the right of persons with disabilities to work and employment, and in line with target 8.5 of the Sustainable Development Goals, the Committee recommends that the State Party, in close consultation with and with the active involvement of persons with disabilities, through their representative organizations:
(a) Exercise federal leadership to identify systemic barriers to employment for persons with disabilities and ensure national consistency in all work and employment policies and programmes across jurisdictions;
(b) Create specific indicators to measure progress in the implementation of programmes on employment for persons with disabilities across provinces and territories, in both the public and private sectors, and strengthen measures on disaggregated data collection;
(c) Develop comprehensive measures to address the situation of persons with work-acquired disabilities, and carry out awareness-raising campaigns to counter societal stigma regarding the long-term use of employment injury benefits;
(d) Establish a centralized fund to assist small enterprises and micro enterprises in providing reasonable accommodation for employees with disabilities;
(e) Develop a strategy with specific timelines and measurable outcomes to transition from segregated employment, such as sheltered workshops, to employment that is open to, inclusive of and accessible to persons with disabilities.
  Adequate standard of living (art. 28)
55. The Committee notes positively the adoption of the Canada Disability Benefit Act, the Poverty Reduction Act, the Poverty Reduction Strategy and the National Housing Strategy. However, it remains concerned that:
(a) Persons with disabilities, in particular women with disabilities, are more likely to experience homelessness and face inadequate living conditions or high housing costs and are disproportionately affected by the housing crisis in Canada;
(b) The laws and policies on social entitlements, tax exemptions, housing and poverty strategies across jurisdictions are not disability-inclusive;
(c) The disability benefit is woefully inadequate to address the living expenses of persons with disabilities, the procedures to access social entitlements related to disability benefits and tax benefits are bureaucratic and complicated, and disparities inherent in those procedures lead to unequal coverage;
(d) The current system of income-testing requirements for disability allowances in British Columbia, and similar practices in Alberta and Ontario, affect the autonomy, life choices and right to family of persons with disabilities, by reducing the amount received by persons with disabilities if they have a full-time job, live with a partner or spouse, join a rehabilitation facility for treatment or travel outside of their province.
56. Recalling the links between article 28 of the Convention and target 10.2 of the Sustainable Development Goals, which are aimed at empowering and promoting the economic inclusion of all persons, irrespective of disability status, the Committee recommends that the State Party, in close consultation with and with the active involvement of persons with disabilities, through their representative organizations:
(a) Ensure that the issues and concerns of persons with disabilities, including women with disabilities, are included in the National Housing Strategy;
(b) Ensure that all laws and policies on social entitlements, tax exemptions, housing and poverty strategies across jurisdictions are disability-inclusive;
(c) Exercise federal leadership to ensure that all disability entitlements, including those stemming from the Canada Disability Benefit Act, support an adequate standard of living and alleviate poverty for persons with disabilities, as well as streamline procedures for accessing entitlements and tax benefits across jurisdictions;
(d) Review the income-testing requirements for disability allowances in British Columbia and similar practices in Alberta and Ontario to ensure that they do not discriminate against persons with disabilities and that such requirements allow persons with disabilities to exercise their autonomy, life choices and right to family on an equal basis with others.
  Participation in political and public life (art. 29)
57. The Committee commends the State Party on its policies on voting accessibility for persons with disabilities. However, it is concerned about:
(a) Disparities in election processes across jurisdictions that affect accessibility for persons with disabilities, including for blind persons and persons with vision impairment; insufficient sign language interpreters for deaf persons; a lack of alternative methods of voting and registering to vote; and a lack of procedures to ensure the right to vote for persons of disabilities in institutions, including in psychiatric facilities and prisons;
(b) The lack of procedures to ensure that persons with disabilities can cast a secret ballot;
(c) Laws that deny legal capacity and thereby prevent persons with disabilities from exercising their right to vote, in particular persons with intellectual and/or psychosocial disabilities;
58. The lack of education and capacity-building measures to ensure that persons with disabilities are aware of their right to vote and participate in politics and public life, and the lack of measures to address the underrepresentation of persons with disabilities in political and public life, including in decision-making positions at the federal, provincial and territorial levels.
59. The Committee recommends that the State Party, in close consultation with and with the active involvement of persons with disabilities, through their representative organizations:
(a) Exercise federal leadership to ensure national consistency in the accessibility of election processes for persons with disabilities, including by ensuring accessible election materials and information and establishing procedures to ensure that persons in institutions can exercise their right to vote;
(b) Develop processes and procedures to ensure that persons with disabilities can cast a secret ballot;
(c) Repeal laws that deny legal capacity and prevent persons with disabilities from exercising their right to vote;
(d) Establish education and capacity-building programmes on voting rights and participation in public and political life for persons with disabilities, and specific policies to facilitate the participation of persons with disabilities in public and political life, including with regard to being politically active, standing for elections and participating in decision-making forums.
C. Specific obligations (arts. 31–33)
  Statistics and data collection (art. 31)
60. The Committee notes that the State Party implements the Washington Group short set of questions on functioning, and that it participates actively in high-level data collection on the status of the National Dementia Strategy through the Global Dementia Observatory of the World Health Organization. However, the Committee remains concerned that:
(a) The State Party’s existing surveys, including those providing data concerning the indicators used to monitor the implementation of Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, are not based on the human rights model of the Convention and do not mainstream disability, hindering the gathering of comprehensive and intersectional information on persons with disabilities, and that the Canadian Survey on Disability does not gather information about children with disabilities under 15 years of age, although the Canadian Health Survey for Children and Youth collects disability information for those 1 to 14 years of age;
(b) There is insufficient participation of persons with disabilities, through their representative organizations, in the design and monitoring of data collection for the effective implementation of the Convention.
61. The Committee recommends that the State Party, in close consultation with and with the active involvement of persons with disabilities, through their representative organizations:
(a) Conduct a review of its statistics and data-collection tools at the federal, provincial and territorial levels, in order to mainstream disability and intersectionality into information gathering systems, including into the Disaggregated Data Action Plan;
(b) Develop and improve the design and monitoring of the collection of data on compliance with the Convention at the federal, provincial and territorial levels.
  International cooperation (art. 32)
62. The Committee commends the State Party for devoting between 6 and 10 per cent of its international development assistance to projects in which the main focus is the rights of persons with disabilities, and on the use of the disability policy marker introduced by the Development Assistance Committee of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development to monitor inclusivity in development assistance. However, the Committee remains concerned that despite assurances by the State Party that its arms exports and control regime policies are compliant with international and humanitarian law, the exemption of certain export permits for items, parts and components shipped to the United States of America to integrate into larger weapons systems, which are then exported to other countries, may facilitate the violation of the rights of persons with disabilities and jeopardize their access to humanitarian assistance.
63. In the light of the report issued by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in 2025 on the impact of arms transfers on human rights,  the Committee recommends that the State Party:
(a) Ensure that all its arms exports and control regime policies are compliant with the obligations of the State Party under the Arms Trade Treaty, international humanitarian law, the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and other international human rights instruments, and incorporate into its domestic legislation mandatory human rights due diligence legislation for all arms exports;
(b) Conduct a comprehensive analysis of its current policy on exports of arms, items, parts and components to identify and cease any Canadian military exports used to facilitate or commit – through the export of items to other countries, including to the United States, for their integration into larger weapons systems, indirect exports or re exports – grave human rights violations against persons with disabilities;
(c) Implement the 2024 recommendation of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women on transparency and accountability on arms exports.
64. The Committee notes with concern that the State Party does not closely consult with and actively involve persons with disabilities, through their representative organizations, in the design, approval and tracking of development and humanitarian projects in the area of international cooperation.
65. The Committee recommends that the State Party develop mechanisms to ensure the close consultation with and the active involvement of persons with disabilities, through their representative organizations, in all its humanitarian, reconstruction, development and post-conflict projects with international, regional and local partners.
  National implementation and monitoring (art. 33)
66. The Committee welcomes the appointment of the Canadian Human Rights Commission as the independent body responsible for monitoring the Government’s implementation of the Convention, pursuant to article 33 (2) and (3) of the Convention, and commends the Commission for its important contributions in that capacity. It also notes the designation of the Office for Disability Issues as the federal focal point on disability, pursuant to article 33 (1) of the Convention. The Committee is nevertheless concerned about:
(a) The lack of a permanent and specialized intergovernmental mechanism to coordinate the effective implementation of the Convention in the State Party across jurisdictions, and the lack of clarity of how existing mechanisms, such as the federal, provincial and territorial forum of deputy ministers responsible for social services and the national mechanism for implementation, reporting and follow-up on human rights, mainstream disability;
(b) The end, in March 2024, of the funding designated for the Canadian Human Rights Commission to carry out its mandate as an independent mechanism to promote, protect and monitor the implementation of the Convention, which limited the Commission’s monitoring activities to a few selected rights under the Convention, and about information, provided by the State Party during the constructive dialogue, that further funding is contingent upon a request by the Commission;
(c) The lack of information on the performance of the federal focal point on disability.
67. The Committee recommends that the State Party:
(a) Establish an intergovernmental mechanism to coordinate the effective implementation of the Convention at the federal level and in the provinces and territories, publicly report on progress and ensure that existing mechanisms of intergovernmental cooperation mainstream disability;
(b) Provide continuing funding for the Canadian Human Rights Commission that is sufficient for the promotion, protection and monitoring of the implementation of all rights under the Convention, in close consultation with and with the active involvement of persons with disabilities, through their representative organizations;
(c) Ensure effective functioning of the federal focal point in all areas of government.
IV. Follow-up
  Dissemination of information
68. The Committee emphasizes the importance of all the recommendations contained in the present concluding observations. With regard to urgent measures that must be taken, the Committee would like to draw the State Party’s attention to the recommendations contained in paragraphs 8, on general obligations, 20, on the right to life, and 56, on an adequate standard of living.
69. The Committee requests the State Party to implement the recommendations contained in the present concluding observations. It recommends that the State Party transmit the concluding observations for consideration and action to members of the Government and Parliament, officials in relevant ministries and local authorities, to members of relevant professional groups, such as education, medical and legal professionals, and to the media, using modern social communication strategies.
70. The Committee strongly encourages the State Party to involve civil society organizations, in particular organizations of persons with disabilities, in the preparation of its periodic report.
71. The Committee requests the State Party to disseminate the present concluding observations widely, including to non-governmental organizations and organizations of persons with disabilities, and to persons with disabilities themselves and members of their families, in national and minority languages, including sign language, and in accessible formats, including Easy Read, and to make them available on the government website on human rights.
  Next periodic report
72. The combined fourth and fifth reports are in principle due on 11 April 2032, under the simplified reporting procedure. The Committee will establish and communicate the exact due date of the combined periodic reports of the State Party in line with a future clear and regularized schedule for reporting by States parties  and following the adoption of a list of issues and questions prior to reporting for the State Party. The combined periodic reports should cover the entire period up to the time of its submission.

End of Document