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Empower U: Learn to Access Your Disability Rights Training on Canadian Human Rights, the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) and its Optional Protocol (OP) training aims to increase awareness of how to address discrimination using more familiar Canadian human rights laws such as Human Rights Codes and the newer international Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). This is training for persons with disabilities by persons with disabilities. The training is part of a project funded by Employment and Social Development Canada and implemented by the Council of Canadians with Disabilities (CCD) in collaboration with Canadian Multicultural Disability Centre Inc. (CMDCI), Citizens With Disabilities – Ontario (CWDO), Manitoba League of Persons with Disabilities (MLPD) and National Educational Association of Disabled Students (NEADS). Read more.
Litigation
CCD intervenes in test cases so that the judge/judges hearing cases will have the opportunity to benefit from the collective experiences of the disability rights community and the analysis of human rights by legal experts fully informed by disability experience. (A test case is one which is likely to lead to a legal precedent and alter a law or practice.) CCD has been involved in many of the landmark cases that helped to bring down barriers that were preventing the full and equal participation of Canadians with disabilities. For example, CCD has used the Canadian legal system to advance jurisprudence on the following issues:
- the accommodation of people with disabilities in employment (Bhinder, O'Malley, and Grismer cases)
- access to long term disability benefits (Gibbs case)
- how equality is defined under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Andrews case, Lovelace case)
- inclusive education (Eaton case)
- the right of deaf people to have interpreters in medical settings (Eldridge case)
- the application of the proscribed legal penalties when the victim of a killing is a person with a disability (Genereux and Latimer), and
- the equal protection of the law (Latimer case)
Recent Work
October 6, 2021
SIGNIFICANT VICTORY FOR NOVA SCOTIANS WITH INTELLECTUAL DISABILITIES
Nova Scotia lags well behind other Canadian provinces in providing community homes and supports for people with intellectual disabilities. Today’s ruling presents an opportunity to the new provincial government in Nova Scotia to acknowledge (1) that they have fundamentally wronged persons with disabilities for decades, (2) that systemic barriers to community inclusion for persons with disabilities are no longer tolerable in a free and democratic society, (3) that they stop fighting persons with disabilities in courts, and (4) that they will work with the community to address their human rights emergency. Read more.
January 25, 2019
COUNCIL OF CANADIANS WITH DISABILITIES APPLAUDS DECISION OF THE SUPREME COURT OF CANADA
The CCD is pleased by the Supreme Court's decision in S.A. v MVHC. Read more.
November 29, 2018
Update on the Charter Challenge to BC's Mental Health Act
In August 2018, the BC government brought an application to have the case dismissed, arguing that CCD did not have the legal status (“standing”) to defend the rights of people with mental disabilities in court. In October 2018, the BC Supreme Court decided that CCD did not have standing and dismissed the case before it got to trial. CCD has appealed the Court’s decision. Read more.
More on Litigation
April 24, 2018
S.A. v. Metro Vancouver Housing Corporation
February 27, 2018
MEDIA ADVISORY
September 22, 2016
Charter challenge of forced psychiatric treatment filed in BC Supreme Court
April 19, 2016
A Modernised Court Challenges Program of Canada: A perspective from the Council of Canadians with Disabilities
September 5, 2014
Factum in the Carter Case - August 2014
January 2, 2014
Affidavit of Michael Bach in Carter Case
Some members of the CCD team at the Supreme Court of Canada on April 25, 2018 to intervene in S.A. v. Metro Vancouver Housing Corporation. (L. to R. Bob Brown, CCD Human Rights Committee member, Dianne Wintermute, legal counsel (ARCH), Dahlia James, a second year JD candidate at U. of Ottawa and Prof. Ravi Malhotra’s Research Assistant and Luke Reid, legal counsel (ARCH) , and Prof. Ravi Malhotra, a member of the Human Rights Committee, Prof. Anne Levesque, Chair of the Human Rights Committee, and Erin Carr, a second year JD candidate.
The Latimer Case
The Latimer case directly concerned the rights of persons with disabilities. Mr. Latimer's view was that a parent has the right to kill a child with a disability if that parent decides the child's quality of life no longer warrants its continuation. CCD explained to the court and to the public how that view threatens the lives of people with disabilities and is deeply offensive to fundamental constitutional values. Learn more.