DDA Talks to Author and Professor Deborah Stienstra About the Current Disability Rights Landscape in Canada

Rights are usually a foregone conclusion in Canada, however, when it comes to people with disabilities, their rights are sometimes overlooked, or, at best, not really taken into consideration. Accessibility matters, inclusion matters, but making sure these things are enforced and protected takes an entire population to shift its collective outlook. That shift starts with people like Deborah Stienstra, author of About Canada: Disability Rights, Second Edition. Where are we right now, and how far do we have to go?

 

TRANSCRIPT

Evan Kelly  0:04   Welcome to DDA's Encouraging Abilities podcast. I'm your host again DDA communications manager Evan Kelly. Today's podcast we are joined by Deborah Stienstra. Miss Stienstra is a professor at the University of Guelph in Ontario, where she holds the Juris Loski chair in families and work and is the director of live work well Research Center and Professor rather of political science. Now for many years, she has also been working with the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women, and FEM North net, or the feminist northern network, which includes working with a diverse group of women and women who identify as having a disability. With having said all that, she's also the author of the recently published about Canada disability rights, the second edition, not, of course, to mention the first edition that was published in 2012. So thank you for taking the time today to talk to us about Canada and the current landscape of disability rights. So just, when I read all that, what do you think, that seems like an awfully large impressive body of work?

Deborah Stienstra  1:11   Okay, so thanks for that. But really, my work in disability comes from a very different place than sort of the academic and literature pieces that you're talking about. And it comes because I was married, my first husband, partner was a man named Patrick Kellerman, who lived with multiple sclerosis. And together, we had two children and raised two children. And we, I was somebody who worked in women's organizing and thinking and research. And he worked in the disability community, for Disabled Peoples' International in Winnipeg. And as his MS progressed, there were more and more barriers, challenges, creativities required to live the life we wanted to live together as a family. And I finally got to the point where I thought, How come I'm separating what I think and research about from what I live day to day as a family member with this, you know, of somebody with disabilities. And so we first started working together on some research, and then when he retired as a result of the escalation of his MS. I kept going in disability rights and research. And it's been a passion for me, and as my body has become more... as I've lived with more impairment, and had to adjust myself to living with disabilities. You know, it's, it's very personal. So yes, I do a lot of things. But really, this is deeply personal. As it is for many of us, I know.

Evan Kelly  3:17   Yeah, that's, you know, once I, when I started, you know, working at Developmental Disabilities Association here in Vancouver, about, I think I've been here for about three years now. Is, is just how many people in Canada actually identify with a disability. It's somewhere around 25%, I believe, and it's just, that's, that's a very large piece of our audience, or just a very large piece of the country. And that, and that's where, obviously, rights need to be more clearly defined and understood. Now, about Canada disability rights that was published in 2021. Now, since the first edition you've seen, have you seen substantial changes in government policy supports or even just some some of the prevailing attitudes in the public? I guess, in a nutshell, have the past 10 years accomplished anything.

Deborah Stienstra  4:04   I think in general, the reason I wanted to write a second edition is because some things had changed. And they were, in my view, substantive changes. So I'm not sure that we could see substantive changes in the number of people who live with poverty, or who are unemployed, or you know, who experienced violence in their lives. And we've seen all of that exacerbated through the COVID pandemic. But what we have seen, I think, is an increasing recognition and awareness of experiences, of the importance of including experiences of women, men and gender diverse people with disabilities, as well. I think we're seeing an increasing response by some governments in Canada, through legislation, so obviously, you know, Ontario has had the Ontarians With Disabilities Act for more than a decade and a half, Manitoba and Nova Scotia have come on, the federal government came on, and you folks in British Columbia have your own Accessibility Act. And while they're not perfect, I think they show something really, really important about our level of awareness and structural change happening, and I see it