Premier McGuinty says people living with disabilities don’t deserve human rights until 2025

Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, officially approved discrimination

PR Log (Press Release) – Jan 02, 2010 – Residents of Ontario living with disabilities are the only minority that has its human rights restricted by law until 2025 when Ontario is supposed to be fully accessible.

CBC News reported, “A new law took effect Friday in Ontario regulating how public bodies provide customer service to people with disabilities, part of a broader push to have the province be completely accessible by 2025.”

Women have their rights without abridgment. Racial, religious and sexual discrimination are against the law both by Charter Right and statute in Canada. Despite being enumerated in Section 15 of the Canadian Charter, people with disabilities are getting their rights doled out piece-meal on the government’s timetable.

It’s a step forward in Ontario now that the Province has issued a manual for public sector employees and organizations to treat the disabled with consideration for their human rights. Businesses will have to provide disability sensitive services by 2012.

However, full accessibility will not happen until 2025.

That will be 25 years after the Province of Ontario enacted the Ontarians with Disabilities Act, 20 years after McGuinty was elected on a platform to fix the problem and 43 years after the Charter was enacted by the Federal and Provincial governments.

Only the Province of Quebec refused to sign the Charter which makes Ontario a signatory to the Charter for 27 years.

Why are Canadians so averse to granting rights to 14% of the population?

Are rights for the disabled more contentious than, say, Gay rights? Gays have same sex marriage rights, pension rights and hate crime laws to protect them. The disabled have a patchwork quilt of laws that leave them literally out in the cold. They are de facto barred from public buildings, housing, jobs and education.

The irony is Canada has looked down it’s nose at the United States which previously practiced human rights discrimination against the disabled.

The 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (Amended 2009) provides a legal framework for equality and accessibility for the disabled. The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission or EEOC provides enforcement to ensure the weak and the poor don’t have to enforce their own protection from discrimination.

Canada’s record of disability discrimination goes beyond anything perpetrated against immigrants, natives or blacks. We have be imprisoned without trial, sterilized, euthanized and impoverished. McGuinty is another in the long line of Canadian politicians who perpetrate more abuse on Canadians with disabilities.

The Canadian House of Commons is considering ratifying the United Nations Convention on Persons with Disabilities.

We are laggard on human rights. 76 countries having already ratified the Convention including the United Kingdom of Great Britain who ratified the Convention and Optional Protocol.

Continued abuse of Canadians with disabilities make Canada a human rights pariah while it attempts to lecture human rights reform to other countries like China.