| Summary: | The term “accessibility rights” refers to the right of disabled people to benefit from
the provision of goods and services generally available to the public without
discrimination because of physical disability caused by providing the services from a
location which people cannot physically access.
Historically, disabled people in Canada have been stigmatized and marginalized.
This social position has been changing since the disabled consumer movement arose and
placed disability rights on the political agenda. Current official policy is to integrate
disabled people into all aspects of society. A major barrier to this policy is the failure to
effectively implement accessibility rights. This thesis examines the nature of accessibility
rights and their legal protection and offers proposals for improving the implementation
of these rights.
The major sources of legal protection for the rights of disabled people are human
rights statutes and the Charter ofRights. For this reason these laws are considered in
detail to determine how effectively they protect accessibility rights.
This thesis concludes that the current protections are inadequate and
fundamentally incapable of guaranteeing accessibility rights. Three proposals for
improvements are made. First, legislatures should set out detailed policy directions for
the implementation of these rights. Second, the agencies which impact on the
implementation of accessibility rights should be required to coordinate their activities to
ensure that the work of each agency complements that of the others. Third, three new
implementation strategies should be adopted.
First, self-regulating professions should adopt into their professional standards a
duty to implement the principles of barrier free design into every aspect of their
professional activities. Second, existing regulatory agencies should have their
responsibilities and powers augmented so they assume a greater role in the enforcement of accessibility rights. Third, human rights legislation should be amended to add a
regulatory enforcement strategy to the existing complaints based strategy. This additional
strategy should be based on the concept of adaptation planning. This concept would
allow for the orderly and cost-effective transformation ofthe physical structure of society
so that disabled people no longer experience discrimination in the provision of services due
to physical barriers. === Law, Peter A. Allard School of === Graduate
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