David Lepofsky
Bachelor of Law (University of Toronto)
Called to the Bar 1981
Masters of Law 1982 (Harvard University)
Volunteer Disability Rights Advocate
aodafeedback@rogers.com
www.aodaalliance.org
June 12, 2009
Back in 1980, Prime Minister Trudeau decided that Canada needs a new Constitution with a Charter of Rights, which was great. And he decided that that Charter of Rights should include a section that would guarantee equality rights, protection from discrimination and that's great, but the way they worded it when they introduced it into the Parliament wasn't great because it was written to protect people from certain kinds of discrimination like discrimination because of your sex or your race, your religion, but not disability. In fact, the way it was worded, it would be impossible to use the equality part of the Charter of Rights to raise issues of discrimination because of disability.
I was a law student then. I was quite upset about this. Many people with disabilities were upset about this and a number of us started a campaign when the Charter of Rights was before Parliament to get it amended to include disability equality. It was quite an exciting time because we didn't have faxes, we didn't have email, we didn't have most of the technology that we would now use. If you wanted to write a letter to your Prime Minister you had to do it on a machine called a typewriter and if you wanted to send the same letter to different people you had to retype it every single time.
But we launched a campaign, a whole bunch of us working on our own. I had the privilege of representing the Canadian National Institute for the Blind as a volunteer spokesman on this and, on very short notice, I got a chance to actually appear before a committee of the Parliament that was looking into the Charter of Rights and what it should look like and when I was only 23 years old and just out of law school and before I had finished taking all my Bar exams I got to appear on 36 hours notice, that's the biggest or toughest experience I have ever had for cramming for a test that I wasn't prepared for. But I went and I presented and a number of other groups presented and after tireless efforts by a number of us, the government decided that we were right, and they amended the Charter before they passed it, before it became law to include equality rights for people with disabilities. In fact if you look at the history of the Charter, that is the only right that didn't exist in the Charter when it was first proposed, but which was added during the debates in Parliament.
We said that to get the disability amendment we said that you can't just have equality for some people. You can't say that equality for women or racial minorities means equality for everybody. Obviously equality for women and racial minorities is very important. But we said that equality for some is wrong. It's got to be equality for all. We also said that 1981, which was the year the Charter was going to be passed had been declared by the United Nations to be the International Year of the Disabled Person. And it was supposed to have the theme of full participation for people with disabilities. Canada seconded the motion in the UN to declare 1981 the International Year of the Disabled Person and it would be cruel irony if Canada would fight to get the UN to make this the International Year of the Disabled Person, to have the theme of full participation and full inclusion, and yet Canada would pass a Constitution which would make sure that people with disabilities wouldn't be guaranteed equality rights in our Constitution.
The morning that it passed I called the Justice Minister who was responsible for this in the Trudeau government was a young, well not-so-young politician named Jean Chrétien. He later went on to be Canada's Prime Minister for, for almost a decade. And I called Mr. Chrétien's office to talk to one of his assistants to try to press for them to agree to the disability amendment. We were, you know, there is any number of us doing this all over the country, but we are all doing it on our own. We didn't have email to keep each other contacted and it was all happening very, very quickly. I was told that morning that it was going to pass that night.
