The province’s newly appointed Accessibility Advisory Board met in Halifax on Friday, marking a significant milestone in Nova Scotia’s journey to greater accessibility.
The 12-member board is comprised of disability advocates, academics and medical professionals, at least half of which have a disability themselves.
Their job is to develop a strategy and implementation plan that will be presented to justice minister Mark Furey later this year. What they come up with is intended to serve as a roadmap to Nova Scotia’s goal of achieving accessibility by 2030 as per the goals outlined in Bill 59.
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“I think that there’s a lot of things that we can do immediately that can be identified, and we don’t have to wait around coming up with complex standards,” said board chair Douglas Foster.
“There’s always room for making things better and I think we know what a lot of those things are and I expect that members of the board are going to put their own priorities forward from their own point of view.”
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Foster said although the board has ambitious targets and a short timeline, he’s confident they’ll be able to put forwards simple, yet effective, recommendations that will improve people’s quality of life.
“In a lot of cases, people just haven’t thought about it. If you identify things that would improve things for the hearing impaired, for example, there are a lot of things that aren’t terribly expensive. It’s just a matter of thinking it through,” said Foster.
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Board vice-chair Rosalind Penfound says once completed, their plan will go beyond just structural accessibility, touching on everything from the way people with disabilities are treated to transportation and the delivery of goods and services.
“The big push is it’s the law. We now have an accessibility act which requires institutions to move forward and requires us to come up with a plan.
“It’s about access to services, access to education. It’s about making everything in our province accessible,” said Penfound.
“The more disabled persons can participate fully in our society in terms of our economy, going to restaurants, getting educated, all those things are positive for the whole province. It’s part of how we’ll move forward.”
Nova Scotia is only the third province in Canada to pass accessibility legislation when Bill 59 passed in April 2017.
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