Ability New Brunswick is launching a new program to provide free accessibility reviews to small-and-medium size businesses and organizations for the next three years.
Three people have been hired, trained and certified to give the reviews in an effort to help workplaces, businesses, tourism spaces and post-secondary institutions develop insights on how to become more accessible.
“We’re getting inundated with requests for accessibility reviews and we’ve always done it off the corner of our desks,” Ability NB executive director Haley Flaro said. “This was an opportunity to expand that.”
She said that barriers exist in workplaces, the tourism industry, and even in higher learning, that leave people with disabilities behind.
New Brunswick has the second highest rate of people living with a disability, second only to neighbouring Nova Scotia.
Flaro said accessibility reviews open the world for more people, creating opportunities for employment, education and services for people living with disabilities.
Only 38 per cent of working-aged New Brunswickers with a mobility disability are employed, according to Ability NB.
Flaro said there could be 29,000 jobs created from the untapped labour market of persons with a disability.
“It has the potential to generate $1.38 billion in annual labour market income,” she said, “$1.97 billion in GDP and $220 million in additional tax revenue.
Flaro also noted examples of students who have a mobility disability being unable to attend some post-secondary institutions in New Brunswick because they are unable to get around.
“That breaks my heart and so we need to make a lot of improvement in our access to post-secondary education from a built-environment perspective,” she said.
The new program is also a critical piece in the process for creating a disability act in New Brunswick. Flaro has been working alongside other disability and inclusion groups to facilitate the development of legislation.
“We still have some work to do,” she said. “An act is so important and there will be an enforcement component of an act. However, this enables us to have some education, some upstream work.”
Work is also being done at the federal level. In February, the House of Commons passed Bill C-22 to help reduce poverty for those living with a disability.
In May 2022, MP Stephanie Cadieux was appointed Canada’s first chief accessibility officer to help advance accessibility legislation and policy.