Beyond Obligation: How can cities embrace accessible infrastructure?

Full Panel
Transcript

Note to readers: This video session was transcribed using auto-transcribing software.  Questions or concerns with the transcription can be directed to events@canurb.org with “transcription” in the subject line.

Mary W Rowe Hi, everybody. Welcome to City Talk. It’s Mary Rowe coming in today from Toronto, traditional territory, a number of First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples, as is true across the country. We always ask people to come in on the chat and identify where you’re coming in from and the ancestral territory that you inhabit. As you know, in Toronto, we are the homeland of the traditional territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Haudenosaunee, the Chippewa, the Anishnabeg, and the Wendat peoples, home to diverse, diverse peoples. And here we are living with the legacies of exclusion which often are invisible to us. But in this particular case, we’re going to talk about physical accessibility, but also just accessible … How the city is accessible to everyone who may be dealing with some kind of an ability challenge. And, I’m very appreciative that we have people joining us from across the country who have expertise about this, and are going to share with us their own approach to this. And as you saw, the title of the session is Beyond Obligation. So this isn’t just what the law requires. This is actually what are we doing to ensure that our urban communities are accessible to everyone? Because we at CUI often say that urbanism is for everyone. And we have all these various barriers, some of which we see, some of which we don’t see, and we need others to tell us how they are experiencing exclusion and how do we actually remedy that? So that’s what this session is about. And we appreciate the Rick Hansen Foundation reaching out to us and saying, actually it was when we did the State of the City Summit last year in Ottawa, and I immediately got an email from the CEO there saying, “hey, Mary, what about the accessible city? Are you coming to terms with that? We need some help”. And as the population ages, and people continue to come from all sorts of places with all sorts of particular challenges, what are we doing collectively to address that? So I appreciate the people that have come on today, to inform that. As we always say, guys, this is a live discussion. We want as much candor as we can get. So, you know, what’s working, what’s not, what’s next is our mantra over here at CUI and CityTalk Canada is all about creating this kind of learning environment. So on the chat feel free to weigh in. I always say to people, if you’ve been observing CityTalks for the last four years – can you believe it? We’ve been doing it since April of 2020. That, if you haven’t ever come on the chat, come on the chat. Because there’s a whole world of people there with all sorts of experience asking questions and fielding answers. And, it has a whole robust life. And we always publish the chat, we publish the visual session here. And as you know, we’ve kind of moved into the podcast business too, so you can listen to these programs, when you’re doing your dishes or walking or whatever it is that you do when you’re, or rolling, depending on how you … What medium you prefer to actually inform yourself about how people are addressing these things across the country. So thanks for joining us. And we look forward to a really lively conversation about Beyond Obligation. How do we actually encourage accessibility and what does that look like? So I’m going to ask if I can, we’ve got several folks coming in, as it turns out they’re all in Toronto. This might be the first CityTalk we’ve done where people who actually are working on national issues and working from a national perspective are actually all within 100km of where I am. It’s very rare. So, one’s in Hamilton, that’s as far out as we go. But normally we have people who come in from different time zones, and we know we have listeners coming in from different time zones. So it may be lunchtime, midday, here in central Canada, but it’s just morning coffee time out west, and they’re almost verging into afternoon tea in the east. So, we always want to emphasize that we work in those five time zones and we bring people together across all sorts of geographies  and, specialties and sectors. So, so if I could ask Sarah McCarthy to come on first … In fact, we can have everybody put their cameras on just for a minute. So why don’t all the panelists come in so you can see. Yep. There we go. Here’s what’s ahead for you is to be able to hear from these smart folks about their particular approaches to the accessible city. And what does that mean? And we’re looking forward to their takes on what’s working, what’s not, and what’s next. So don’t sugarcoat it for us gang.  Tell us what’s really wrong. What are we doing well, where are we really falling short. And then we’re going to collectively talk about what are the steps that we need to take. So I’m going to go to Sarah first, who is with the Rick Hansen Foundation. We appreciate the leadership that RHF is doing on these issues in every way. And I, I have my own take on this, which is that, if you are temporarily laid up in a particular circumstance, as many of us have been and had a particular circumstance that constrained us, then you have this very, very brief window of what it’s like to try to navigate infrastructure – places, buildings, spaces and how ill equipped we are for this. And then there are others who live with some kind of a disability every day, all day, and live in that world. So, Sarah, just give us a glimpse of why the Rick Hansen Foundation is caring about this and what you see is working well, what’s not – in terms of municipal infrastructure, cities and communities across the country. So over to you. Thanks for prodding us to do this CityTalk, and it’s important for us to learn from you. So thanks for joining us.

Sarah McCarthy And thanks so much for having us. We’re thrilled, thrilled, thrilled to be here. On the Toronto note, I’m a new Torontonian.

Mary W Rowe So there you go. Welcome …

Sarah McCarthy It’s actually that much funnier. So the Rick Hansen Foundation does operate nationally. Our main office is in Vancouver. We also have an office in Toronto, and we have staff located all the way across the country so that we can really serve all of the provinces. The Rick Hansen Foundation is committed to a vision of an inclusive world where people with disabilities are living to their full potential. A huge component of that is in regards to the built environment. So we have a much more aligned vision or mission, sorry, where we say that we want to be able to deliver innovative solutions that lead to a global movement to remove barriers and liberate the potential of people with disabilities. Eight-ish years ago, we came to the realization that although there were lots of standards, in regards to accessibility in the built environment, there wasn’t an ability for us to be able to measure accessibility in the built environment. We know that code is not enough, that our cities are not accessible in many ways, in regards to our community spaces, our commercial spaces. And we knew that there was a gap between where we were and where we needed to be. And so the foundation became committed to really looking at accessibility, within the built environment in order to address that gap. We figured that if people with disabilities can literally not get in the building, then their potential is significantly reduced. And so that is where we focus, as a foundation and in our programs. A note on disability before I hand it off to the next person. The most recent stats can show shows 25% of Canadians have a disability. And depending on what province you’re in, especially when you start looking at the East Coast provinces, that only increases from there. When we did a little bit more research on what that means for how much it affects people, half of the population say that it affects them because of course, someone with a disability is in their family. And so the percentage of people that the built environment matters to is huge.

Mary W Rowe You know, it’s as you suggest, it’s all encompassing, isn’t it? And I think that’s the interesting point, is that the, the, challenge that you’re putting to us, is in all of our capacities as city builders, whatever our role is in terms of creating communities, but also as neighbors and as inhabitants of shared spaces, and how do we actually … You know, I often say that, cities are about demonstrating collective empathy. We live in proximity with other people, and it’s a constant reinforcement of the empathy that we require to do that task. And I think that one of the concerns that a number of people are registering, I was just in Ottawa this week for the City Building Summit there, and the head of downtown Vancouver, Jane Talbot, who came in by zoom to sort of share her experience said she worries that we’re losing our empathy, that we’re losing our capacity to appreciate the experience of the other. And I think that’s fundamentally what you’re talking about here is inclusion, is about appreciating the experience of the other. Can I just encourage people who are encouraging my encouragement to get out of the chat to make sure you’re toggle, at the bottom there is to everyone, not just hosts and panelists as much as the host and panelists, host being me, panelists being Sarah and company are delighted to hear your comments. What we really want is for you to share with everybody. So if you posted a comment, just go back and check to make sure you send it everyone. And if not, send it back to everyone. Let’s keep going. I used to go west to east, but doesn’t work because you’re all here. So, I think next, though, I want to hear specifically, I think from, maybe we’ll go to you, Gelare, we’re going to go to you … because you’re in a position to actually affect change. You’re actually in … You actually hold the keys to making buildings and places more accessible. So give us your perspective. Can you as a designer … In terms of what is possible, I guess, or how do you approach this in a way that would be different from someone who wasn’t thinking the way you think?

Gelare Danaie Thanks, Mary, I’m delighted to be here. So, I would actually say the perspective of, like, I’m trying to bring the perspective of a practitioner because we are dealing with projects, especially public projects, every day. So just to give you a little bit of background, so dexd, which is my company, we started five years ago to think that we want to bring the camera down and design with empathy. And maybe the need for that, that we kind of realized that that’s the need to actually build a practice around customer experience design, was that we were engaged in this kind of larger scale of buildings, facilities, transit projects, airports, hospitals, you name it, as an architect. And sometimes you kind of realize that, you know, we don’t either have time or there are not that many tools to actually think of how are bringing, you know, that kind of empathic lens, thinking of designing for everyone, designing for all, and how can we actually sort of question that, you know, pause on that, build some tools so that we can do it in a better way. So that’s what we are really trying every day to do. And I would love to actually hear everyone in the room and like how they’re actually trying to do that. I would like to share our experience, projects that we are doing with Metrolinx, Pearson Airport now, like these kind of different projects that we’re engaged on. Our role is customer experience designers. Just to finish off the introduction, I would say that what we are trying to do is that when we design personas or when we do the customer experience journey maps, we don’t think of inclusivity as a separate layer that you can deal with it after. Or is it like you’re designing and then you kind of do a check mark of like, okay, so is it kind of accessible? We do it in a way that like our people or personas that are experiencing the place, they all have something, like a layer. And we know that, you know, when we talk about access and inclusivity, we’re not just talking about mobility issues, we’re talking about anxiety, we’re talking about pain, we are talking about like vision, you know, like all of those layers. And it’s really important to kind of talk about that. And to Sarah’s point, and we have actually did like, we have a good relationship with Rick Hansen Foundation to just think about all those layers and not just like one layer, which is always kind of the case in terms of built environment. Everybody’s talking about ramps and stuff like that. That’s not about it. This is like another layer that we have to all kind of think about.

Mary W Rowe You know, it’s interesting that … Thank you … Mike Greer’s put a comment on the chat here that he’s in a wheelchair and he’s saying, “actually, I’m not the person who’s disabled. The built environment disables me from participating in it.” And it’s interesting, important for us to understand the language here and understand who’s disabling who. And what we’re saying is the city actually puts … The designs of cities and buildings, put people into a position of disability, which is an interesting perspective. I want to come back to you, Gelare and talk a little bit about the economics of this. But before we do that, let’s go to Benjamin from BOMA. And then I’m going to come to you Sunil and Heela. So Benjamin, just talk to us a little bit about what the industry response is and how building owners confront this. And have you found resistance in your ranks? I suspect you have. How do you overcome that? So give us a perspective from your side.

Benjamin Shinewald Sure, sure. Thanks for having me. And, happy to talk about it. And I’ll just say, off the bat, your suspicions are incorrect. Actually, I think that … [Good] Yeah, I’m very proud of that. That isn’t to say that the job is done. It is still day one or day zero, but there is a growing awareness among my members. So I represent an organization whose name is the Building Owners and Managers Association of Canada. And that really is a good description of who we are. If the asset managers, the property managers, the building operators, and then the vendors of goods and services to those three categories … Not developers as much, not brokers as much, not leasing as much. The people who take care of the building that I’m sitting in and that many of you are sitting in. And you know, when, when Sarah and her colleagues, came to us, to me, I don’t know how many years ago it’s been right now. I don’t think it took too much. Maybe Sarah disagrees … before we kind of … The penny dropped. This is a very progressive industry. It was already chasing sustainability aggressively. And there’s very healthy competition and very ambitious goals for carbon in particular. So it was not a big job to sort of say, “okay, there are other areas where we can also improve”. The challenges are huge and I’m happy to talk about those. I don’t want to absorb too much time. But collaborating with the Rick Hansen Foundation, you know, working through our … some of you may have heard of our BOMA Best Program, where with our partners at the Rick Hansen Foundation, we have incorporated some of the elements of their certification into ours and kind of cross refer. We give out an award every year at our conference for the building that has achieved the highest score in the Rick Hansen Foundation certification. So there is … we’ve crossed that threshold of this is new and it’s now this sort of maturation process of how to figure out how to weave this into everything that we do day in, day out.

Mary W Rowe Is there a jurisdiction that you look to? Benjamin. That was the model. Are you able to if you ever do have a naysayer, I hear your membership is perfect. But if you ever have a naysayer in there, do you ever point them to a place where they actually this has advanced more quickly?

Benjamin Shinewald So I didn’t say perfect either. Just to be clear, there’s leaders and followers in any organization. I don’t I don’t really look at it jurisdictionally. And one of the things I’ve learned from, from my own journey in this area with Sarah and her colleagues is that, code is often insufficient, sometimes woefully so. One of the things that I did, years ago was I was with, the Rick Hansen foundation at the Vancouver airport, and they did a simulation for me. They put me in a wheelchair for a couple of hours and said, okay, you know, go out and buy a coffee, take the Skytrain, and get your kids a toy at the gift shop. And then they put me into very low vision goggles and gave me a white cane. By sheer coincidence, my family used to be in the white cane business, believe it or not. And said, do the same things. And by the way go to the bathroom with both those things. And we might want to talk about that because going to the washroom is just core to the experience that we need to improve on for the people who are disabled. Anyway, that experience and seeing how YVR in particular does it was clarifying because they it so well. And so there are buildings and there are places that are excellent and there are others that are not … As opposed to Manitoba or Pennsylvania or Singapore or something like that.

Mary W Rowe I guess I was curious whether countries where the population is older, so in Japan, for instance, where there’s just … They’re ahead of us on this because they aged more quickly.

Benjamin Shinewald I can tell you, I was … Last week, I mean, less than last week, five days ago, I was in Jerusalem and I was staying in a little boutique hotel. And there was a warning, a little disclaimer, you know, these rooms … If you book these rooms, you must climb stairs, which I thought was kind of interesting on the one hand. But then I got to the hotel and there were 2 or 3 stairs to get in the door. So they didn’t think about the fact that some people couldn’t get in the front door, but they did think about the fact that some people presumably would overcome those three stairs, but not be able to ascend the full flight for that extra floor of stairs elsewhere.

Mary W Rowe Yeah. I mean, we just want this to … we we’re going to learn the hard way. We keep making the mistakes and CUI’s guilty of this too. You put something together and then you realize you just didn’t think. You just didn’t think it through. Thanks, Benjamin. Okay, Heela, let’s hear from you in terms of a particular experience from a developer’s perspective, and the, huge portfolio that Daniels is involved with and all your aspirations there in terms of what you’ve been trying to do –  build inclusion of different kinds into the developments that you work on. So give us a perspective of how you approached this.

Heela Omarkhail Thanks. Mary. And I might be … Usually I’m quite an optimist but I might be less optimistic than Benjamin in this case, to say that the residential development sector hasn’t really taken up accessibility yet as a priority. And it’s something that we’re certainly pushing from the Daniels perspective, as a builder-developer based in the GTA. So not just something we’re doing ourselves, which I’ll talk about, but something we’re really trying to catalyze, you know, in partnership with Rick Hansen Foundation and other accessibility organizations … Really catalyze in our industry across the country. But for Daniels, you know, we realize that our mission is not just about building homes. It’s building inclusive and sustainable communities. And a big part of inclusion, you know, we’ve worked for 40 years now on affordable housing. It’s accessible housing. And so, we were hearing, you know, what we’ve already heard several times already that the building code just doesn’t go far enough. And we were building homes that, you know, we had understood under the Ontario Building Code, to be, you know, quote unquote, “barrier free” at 50% of the units in our multi-residential buildings, and then getting feedback from our homeowners and tenants that, in fact, these homes were not barrier free and full of barriers for them. And when we sought to work with them to make those changes, you know, it was often very difficult, if not impossible to, you know, move concrete or core through concrete, but very cost prohibitive. And so working with the accessibility sector, working with individuals with lived experience, as well as architects and designers, we developed a new specification. We call it the Daniels Accessibility Design Program. And we’ve been rolling this out since 2017, and we actually take a percentage of our units in the building and build them to a higher standard of accessibility at no additional cost other than, you know, very specific customization should, individuals and families look for that. And, you know, the feedback we’re getting is tremendous. We’re certainly not there yet. It’s not a perfect spec. We’re learning, we’re evolving. But it’s been really critical for us to partner with accessibility organizations who are leasing these homes or purchasing these homes from us – individuals … And now we’re saying, okay, great that Daniels is doing this. How do we get other builders, developers on board, especially with this call of, you know, 2 to 3 million homes needed across the country. So in 2022, we worked with folks like the Rick Hansen Foundation, Access Now, the Urban Land Institute in Toronto, to launch the Accelerating Accessibility Coalition which is effectively a first of its kind community of, now close to 50 real estate development and accessibility leaders, that work to create a more accessible Canada. And that coalition is really underpinned by the belief that accessible housing benefits everyone and is a sign of an inclusive and prosperous country. And so what we’re trying to do is say, “hey, developers, meet accessibility organizations and individuals, the people who have the expertise and the experience” and all of these new homes that we’re building, let’s not use the building code as the lowest common denominator. We can do better than that.

Mary W Rowe Your segue is beautiful to Sunil, but to talk about codes, you know, it’s such an interesting thing too, is for us to always look at and say, where does the innovation come from? Where does the best practice come from, and what is the role of rules, codes, that that set a standard versus private enterprise or designers who say, I can actually do better than that, and that the code might in fact, you know, that old thing about how we used to teach to the test. And we realize now that actually sometimes setting those standards ends up … you get the lowest common denominator and people … You kind of disincentivize (is that the right word?) You discourage innovative practice by setting rules at least we find that with pollution numbers. You know, if you said, well, you can you can put this much mercury in, then that’s all they did versus actually creating an incentive where they could actually reduce, reduce, reduce. So it’s a curious thing, Sunil, you’ve been in this racket a long time. You have a sense of the role of rules and standards, and you’ve seen it from all sides. Tell us how you’re approaching this and what you think. How do we think we can catalyze change most effectively?

Sunil Johal Yeah. First, thanks, Mary, for having me on the panel. So I am with the Canadian Standards Association, but I’m not a standards person, so I always make that very clear to people. I’m sure there’s 100 of 190 people on line who know more about standards than I do, but I’m in charge of a new public policy center at CSA. So we’re really looking at issues like disability, inclusion and a number of other issues from a broader policy. But I will talk a little bit about standards, having said that. So just a couple of observations for me in terms of like, what are the big policy levers we need to think about pulling a little bit harder on? Maybe when we’re thinking about driving inclusion, we’re thinking about driving accessibility in our city. So I mean, one I think Sarah alluded to in her comments is the is the notion of data and measurement. I mean, how many spaces are currently accessible in our cities and how do we start creating a data base, an inventory of where is accessibility working? Well, how are we tracking that? What are the trajectories over time. We don’t have a great handle on that across the country right now. I think Access Now and some others in this space are doing some good work on surveys. I think they put out a survey back in November that said, or that found rather 60% of public facing spaces in Vancouver, Calgary and Ottawa not fully accessible. So I mean that’s kind of a good snapshot of where we’re at in some of our larger cities, right now. So that’s one lever. I think another one is on the legal mandates and the enforcement, the expectation setting. So leveraging building code standards, legislation to mandate certain expectations around accessibility is critical. And we can talk about that more later, I’m sure. But we also need to think about enforcement. I mean, it’s one thing to have expectations and legal requirements but we know from experience with the AODA here in Ontario that the best laid plans kind of don’t mean much if we’re not enforcing expectations for businesses and other stakeholders. And in the case of the AODA, I mean, when you look at the audits and the kind of reports on how businesses are faring in terms of filing compliance, or accessibility plans, rather, it’s very low and there’s not much in the way of penalties or sanctions for those that don’t follow their legislated requirements. So that’s another big lever we need to think about. I think another … a third one is this notion of awareness. I mean what’s the general public perception and understanding of disability? What are some of the misconceptions around disability inclusion? And we really need to start thinking about how do we change the conversation from what’s the cost of being accessible, which is what a lot of people focus on, to what are the societal costs and lost opportunities from not being accessible? I mean kind of like how do we reframe this to … we’re losing out on so much human capital and human potential by not having accessible spaces and, and employers and employment spaces in our cities. And then the last piece, I mean, I’m sure, Mary, I know you’re very interested in this one. What is the funding piece. I mean, our cities are already constrained in terms of the resources they’ve got available to them, especially compared to the senior orders of government. So how do we think about funding for cities? How do we think about funding for property owners to retrofit or to make some of their existing spaces more accessible? So hopefully we can dig into some of those, as we go.

Mary W Rowe Right. Thanks, Sunil. Let’s put everybody up on the screen. And everybody open your mics so that we don’t have to correct anybody and tell you you’re muted. Everybody is open and on and let’s have everybody on the screen. So we can just have a bit of a back and forth on this. You know, this notion of the cost of doing nothing, I guess is the question. Right? What is the cost of doing nothing? And if we actually … are we in fact, putting ourselves in a position where we’re going to constrain the economy, we’re going to create more kinds of social challenges as people are more isolated. How do we measure the cost of doing nothing? Who wants to weigh in on that? Has anybody run a study on this about what it’s costing us in terms of accessibility? Do we have anything like that Sarah?

Sarah McCarthy So yeah, yeah. Not enough. But we do have some. So we worked with Conference Board of Canada a few years ago to look at unemployment and underemployment. And so what we found is that 57% of Canadians with disabilities are currently … Who are currently unemployed, believe that they would be able to work if their workplace was accessible. And of course this is changed since Covid. This was pre-COVID. But if you start looking at the gap in GDP, if you were to be able to ensure that workplaces were accessible and this is aligned with the aging population to of course. So as people age and we have an aging population, we also have an aging employee population. We can get our GDP to increase by 16.8 billion. And if we look at real spending – so just pure spending – so aside from an employee workspaces, because of the aging population and as the percentage of people with disabilities grows into more and more of the consumer market, we know that by 2030, another 316 billion would be added if people could access spaces to be able to spend that money. So we know there’s a really significant gap there that if spaces are not accessible to people with disabilities, then they’re not able to spend their money there. Yeah. And there not … We talked a little bit about why they are, it’s an interesting example or case study when we think about that concept of spending money, because we need to make sure that people with disabilities are able to travel through the airport. And part of how an airport operates is by being able to sell things. That’s how an airport operates. And so that’s another example of that significant gap in GDP that could be could be increased if spaces were accessible. So it’s quite a loss.

Mary W Rowe If people could … Anybody on the chat there’s lots of curiosity about do we have data, do we have studies? So panelists, if you have a minute and you know of something popped it in. My staff will be now running around trying to find good research to put in. Also, people on the chat yourselves, if you know of studies that have been done. I mean, again, of all of this is what are the metrics, what’s the case that we’re building? How do we actually, you know, we have to do evidence based …  Always ask about evidence. So whatever evidence we’ve got, let’s make sure we’re collecting that in some way. And I want to go to – feels to me like we’re almost exclusively talking about physical disability, but how do we actually broaden our perspective to different kinds of disabilities? How do we do that? I’m going to go to Gelare first. If you could talk us through that as a designer, how do you do that? How do you make it a universal design?

Gelare Danaie I think actually that’s the part that is the most exciting part about, customer experience design, that you have to change your point of view. And I think it starts with change of point of view. And then when you say that we are … Yeah, you used to think of like the, even the categories of disability. And I don’t like the word disability because I think we are all kind of disabled somehow, but … Because if you’re anxious, like, sometimes, like you’re disabled. I actually, personally experienced, kind of three months of, being in a cast because I broke my ankle skiing. And I actually tried to use our public transit system, airports, everything to kind of really feel what’s going on. And then I think that point of view, this change of point of view that I’m talking about, is to actually reach out to people and have listening sessions, understand what is the pain, and kind of do the research based analysis before going to the design board, because … and that’s the part that we think that is sometimes missing because we always, of course, in a rush, like our clients will come to us and they say, “oh we need a project yesterday” and we have to like …. But if you want to do it right, you have to really do this kind of steps to understand what are the customer types,  who are we actually designing for? Who’s the client? The client is people. The client is not like any client, it’s everybody. Yeah. So if I’m not responding and I love that term “nothing for us without us”. And I realize after actually my personal experience that that’s so true. Like, if you don’t know, even, like turning with the knee scooter is difficult, then you don’t know 900 is not enough. Like it has to be more because the scooter doesn’t change to kind of turn in that, you know, space. So those are the lived the experience moments. I think it’s super, super important. And broadening the perspective of different types of things that we have – pain related issues or vision. We talked about vision. I always think about anxiety and people that they have any type of mental health, that they are in this big public places, and they want just the quiet corner, you know, are we giving that to them? Like, what are those options? Like airports? They talk about airports. All right. I love actually what Vancouver is doing. And they’re kind of trying to push that for Pearson too, is that do we have spaces that people with like just that kind of anxiety – they can go somewhere and be quiet, you know. Do we have a quiet room in the airport? You know, those types of layers. And then the last thing I wanted to add to that conversation is that we talk about built environment. But when you do customer journey mapping we have always three layers. So we have built environment. Then you have operation which is human touch. Somebody is coming and helping you. And then we have digital and I think we can get creative on using these platforms more and more because we can … You know, I’m not saying that everybody’s on their cell phone, but that is an opportunity. So if somebody has hearing, you know, disability – so there can be, you know, tools that you can, you know, that have a barcode on that would read it for you. Like imagine you want to find somewhere and you know, you’re in public place. Yeah. So those kind of three layers I think it’s important so not to push everything on the built environment, which is the most expensive part actually. But then thinking of the layer of technology, digital, but also again, helping people, like if you have somebody helping in these public buildings and you know, with people that they don’t, they don’t want to deal with a device, they don’t want to find their way, just like I they don’t speak the language. Maybe like that’s part of like that’s somehow that’s disability too.

Mary W Rowe You know, I was actually going to ask you that and just … I’m going to come to you next, Benjamin, to talk a little bit about building owners and where the responsibility stops and starts. But, you know, we’ve been a country for decades that’s accepting people that do not have English as their first language. We have … we are a newcomer receiving country. And why do we continue to assume that people can read English or French in public spaces, and we only put our signs in those languages as opposed to moving to a non … You guys know what the expression is, but to use symbols and things that don’t … you know, universal literacy is … What it’s called?

Gelare Danaie So universal language or like icons … icons are great. Like, you know, icons for these types  things. It’s complex too, yes? Because some people they don’t even … Like it’s hard to say what this icon says. Yes? So and that’s the part that maybe digital can come to play honestly.

Mary W Rowe I have a brother who’s non-verbal, so he’s physically completely functioning, but does not speak. So he’s navigated for, for almost, 67, 68 years, the world without being able to actually express himself. And it’s just taken us a long … and verbally, and it’s just taken us a long time to kind of appreciate that. Benjamin, when you talk to your members, one of the things that I’m interested in is, we have a lot of old building stock. So how do we prioritize and turn that mic on Benjamin because I can see you’ve muted yourself. Turn it back on. When you talk to your members, how do you actually prioritize? I’m going to just keep filling time until you unmute yourself, there. How do they prioritize their inventory, I guess, when they’ve got a bunch of aging buildings versus just starting again? Heela, we’re going to come to you next. You’ve done a lot of new buildings. So is that the challenge? How do you … we have a lot of old buildings, like we’re not Europe, but we got a lot of old buildings.

Benjamin Shinewald Oh for sure. And I’m not sure why I was on mute. I didn’t put myself on, I thought. That that is the core challenge. Like, I don’t want to be rose colored … And old buildings are not grand, beautiful opera houses in Parliament or whatever. I’m sitting in one right now. It’s 50 odd years old. It’s a regular old office tower in Toronto. And I don’t want to understate the challenges. We’ve heard a little bit in the chat and today about how hard it is in residential, and I’m sure it’s true, but there are challenges that are unique to commercial, institutional, retail, etc. The building I’m in right now … Like every, tower has a stack of plumbing that comes down from the top to the bottom and then back up again, from the moment that the building was built. So in your home, you might have space to grab the corner in the closet from the abutting bedroom or something like that, and put in a bigger space for a turning radius or a toilet or whatever. That is really hard to do in a commercial building and really, really expensive. So I think that the challenges are enormous, and I think that there has to be, you know, you got to walk before you run … The wrong metaphor to use today. Pardon me. But you’ve got to start somewhere. So, you know, more progressive landlords might say, listen, we gotta, you know, we’ll invest in an accessible bathroom. But it’ll be every ten storeys. And it sucks that that person might have to travel in the elevator every time, you know, they want to do their business. But it’s also way better than having nothing in the building. So it’s inches, not miles. And one day we’ll get to miles.

Mary W Rowe Yeah. I appreciate again people in the chat. Thank you so much. And your colleague Sarah, Dorame is putting in tons of stuff into the chat. So thank you for doing that. All the research that people can put into the chat is so useful. People will people will benefit from whatever links people are putting in there. But you know, Benjamin, the problem I have with what you’re suggesting is that we, for instance, wrote a report on the potential for conversion of commercial spaces to residential spaces. And this was a couple of years ago when we were first looking at this. And now, of course, everybody’s talking about it. But the building sector traditionally is always going to come back and tell you it’s very complicated and it’s very expensive. And I think we’ve got smart designers in this country who can help you think that through. The question, I guess, is how does it pencil out? Right. So Heela, you haven’t done any renovations. You’re only doing new construction. Correct?

Heela Omarkhail We are doing primarily new construction. But when we’ve looked at this, even at an individual unit perspective, you know, the, the phrase we’re, we’re going with now, is “it is certainly cheaper than to build it in from the start than bolted on later”. [Right, right].

Mary W Rowe That’s what we think the future of downtowns needs to be. As we repurpose commercial space. We always say, don’t we want to build in for flexibility. So I would say even in the potential market …we’re going to see ,let’s assume we’re going to see new co-living, we’re going to see more examples of multi-generational living. When I heard Gelare talking about accommodating homes, I’m thinking, yes, and you’ve got elders living in your … you’ve got to have an accessible bathroom. Aging in place, all that stuff. So the question I guess is you’re saying, well, we’re going to start from the ground and make it more flexible. But Sunil, how does an organization like yours intervene to help the stewards of existing infrastructure? And we can’t redesign the subway, for instance. Right. We can’t redesign …  We can’t. And I mean, I guess we could do curb cuts, which is what we’re doing. But are there ways to square this? Like we can’t knock every building down and start again. Sunil …

Sunil Johal That’s true. I don’t think we could knock every building down and start again, but we can barely knock one lane of the Gardiner down in five years, so I don’t think we want to take on any more. But just a quick, separate thought, Mary, before we get to your question … I mean, we’ve been talking a lot about kind of employment and accessibility of, accessibility of space. I mean, one thing we haven’t touched on yet, I mean, obviously we’re all kind of … we all lived through this with the pandemic. I mean, the massive shift to online and remote work was actually a boon to persons with disabilities in terms of their ability to participate in the labor market. I mean, there are a number of studies showing that that opened up opportunities for people who otherwise would have struggled to deal with barriers in their, in their local, communities. But right now, we’re kind of seeing a very hard pull back from that approach from business leaders. I mean, the mayor of Toronto just did a big interview with The Globe and Mail, and I won’t quote her directly, I don’t have it in front of me. But she was talking about “I want everybody back in offices 4 or 5 days a week”. And it’s kind of … I think we need to think about like, what are we losing by this kind of push back to return to office? I mean, most of the focus there is, well, that’s adding to people’s commutes. So they don’t like it. But we don’t really talk much about how that’s an opportunity to make things easier for people with disabilities. I mean not everybody. And it’s not everybody who’s going to have access to a remote job. But I think it’s kind of … It’s unfortunate that we’re pulling back so hard on that, for kind of purely economic or local downtown business core reasons. And I know Mary, you’re on one side of that story.

Mary W Rowe No, no, no no I’m not. No no no … I’m truly really not  on one side. You know, I’m Switzerland. But what I would say is what we’re observing around the country is that stomping your foot and insisting people come in doesn’t actually work. So the mayor can say that and good for her. But what we want, I think, what I think urbanists want are places that work for everyone and so when you want to use your space economically, when you’ve got a whole bunch of assets, built form assets sitting in different parts of the city, whether they’re downtown or on main streets, you want those places to be used effectively and productively. And so, I don’t know if that means you come downtown for work, you come downtown for something else, but don’t have empty assets that aren’t being leveraged in really creative ways. And I think the point we’re saying here is that we’re at an inflection point where we could do things quite differently. So if we’re going to invest in those assets, which I think we should, and to repurpose them, for heaven’s sake, let’s rebuild them in ways that make them more accessible, not less accessible.

Mary W Rowe Sarah is going to jump in and then we’ll go back to you Sunil. Go ahead. Sarah.

Sarah McCarthy Thank you. On the cost of retrofit and the cost to build to accessible. So we did do a study with HCMA architecture where we did a compare/contrast for building to national code, building to Ontario code because it’s particularly different than the other provinces. And then building to get to accessibility certified gold. And there is no question that that putting this into design is much, much … Would be an understatement … Unbelievably less expensive, it effectively costs nothing. So you can get to, to a gold level of accessibility for like a 1% increase on the total cost of the building. And Heela knows this very well … Whereas if you do a retrofit and you’re looking at a significant retrofit and we put the cost for new builds, thank you Dorame … But the cost of new builds and the cost of retrofit research in the chat. So you can see the comparison – the retrofit is much, much more expensive. And so as you’re saying, especially with all of the money coming right now, from the federal government in regards to housing, how do we get ahead of that to make sure that spaces are built to be accessible early in the process rather than later, rather than we look at something, you know, ten years down the line and we say, “oh, this, this is totally not aligned with where we want to go in regards to the Accessible Canada Act or the Accessible Standards Canada. And now we have to do a retrofit, which is expensive and difficult and takes a long time” and didn’t serve the population of people for the previous ten years.

Mary W Rowe So, what are we I mean, thanks everybody in the chat, as usual, the chat’s blowing up, which is wonderful. How do we balance then our public policy priorities, I guess because we’ve got a limited public purse, we’ve got limited levers we can pull at the federal, provincial, municipal level. If you had to pick, where would be the intervention points that you would focus on, where you think we would see gains. Gelare and then I’m going to go back to you Sunil.

Gelare Danaie So you’re talking about policies, which is not that much my ward, but I would add something that I loved that Sarah mentioned, about the front-end work. So it’s get it right the first time. Like do it … Like don’t …. And it’s not just about even kind of again, going with the code or Rick Hansen Foundation kind of, you know, the standards, which is great, but it’s really about actually doing the project right. So the flow of customer … [in the first place] How does that … Yeah, the first time, just because if it’s done wrong in a way that you’re not actually giving that kind of holistic approach of people experiencing this place, it’s really difficult to fix it later – that I can say it’s really really difficult.

Mary W Rowe So the principle is do it right the first time. I get that. When you’re looking at … Benjamin, you’ve got a membership with a lot of inventory. How do you encourage them to do that? And I’m also interested … Sunil, I do want to hear from you because of your broad experience. I want to figure out what we do about public infrastructure like busses and trains and subway trains. Go ahead. Benjamin.

Benjamin Shinewald I was gonna say, I think that my colleagues on the panel have done a really good job of making the business case for the incremental or the minuscule incremental cost of doing it properly. But what’s missing from the conversation is the benefit, you know, my members own and or manage every … virtually anything other than single family homes.  Well, you know, if you can, you know, build and manage a grocery store that’s accessible broadly, the grocer will have more customers coming in and buying tomatoes and peanut butter. Right. If you can build an office building, the tenant, I know a tenant here who has an employee that can’t get in the office or can’t get in the office comfortably, well, guess what? That’s not a good thing for the tenant. And a tenant is just a fancy word for a customer. So the upside of these things is big. And somebody on the panel, it might have been Sarah said, I think 25% of Canadians are disabled. You know, there’s this weird, and I see it in my own family, there’s this weird idea that the disabled person is somebody else, somebody other. And I think that perhaps through the, the, the movement towards, DEI – diversity, equity, inclusion – and that is an equity seeking group to use the parlance that I think needs to be more central, and it’s sort of a stigma or whatever, but just realizing that these are actual, real, productive customers. You know, put aside the word people for a second. That mental shift, I think, will force my members to capture them for the benefit of their bottom line.

Heela Omarkhail Mary, can I jump very quickly on that, on that shift, because that’s truly what’s needed. And I’m going to call it like a big systems culture shift. And I’ll give a really tangible example. I mean, we had a retail tenant through code and everything, they had to build an accessible washroom. We did a map mission of the Regent Park community in Toronto’s downtown east, with Access Now … Brought in a whole bunch of residents, community members to go through these spaces. They visit this retailer who shall not be named, but is across the country, go into the washroom, and the washroom is full of boxes. So, yes, it’s designed accessibly. But there’s no attention paid to how it’s actually being used. And what does it mean to then … Because there’s more square footage there that becomes storage. And so a big part of what we’re looking to do, you know, ourselves and through the coalition is how do you build awareness and education? Because we’re not going to get the movement we need on construction, on design, on operations if people just don’t see it as an issue.

Gelare Danaie Can I add just a little bit? Just because I think it’s … One of our colleagues mentioned that … and I think it’s a good point. And, it’s around what Benjamin and Heela was talking about … when you’re losing those customers, we’re also losing whoever that is helping them too. So sometimes we forget that somebody, with any type of, you know, that they need help. Somebody is always with them. So they won’t come to use your, you know, your place and you’re losing like, double of the customers. And it’s not just the person with a disability, somebody that is helping them, their family. 

Mary W Rowe Go ahead. Yeah. Sarah, were you going to add to that or are you just …

Sarah McCarthy  I’m just strongly agreeing. I’m saying the entire family. Right? So it’s, yeah, you need to be able to go to a space that works for the entire family.

Mary W Rowe Lots of comments in the chat as it’s appropriate in Canada about snow removal and how we just continue to, you know, cut off our nose to spite our face because the snow removal comes and dumps it in. Yeah. I mean, honestly, welcome to the dilemma we have. Okay. Sunil just back to you for a sec –  the role of public policy, of rules, of standards, you’ve been in and out of this forever. What would you see as the sort of leverage point? I mean, I hear Benjamin talking about, you know, doing it properly the first time. If we want, I mean, we know that the government is having to provide subsidies to get commercial landlords to consider converting to residential. Do we also need some kind of public incentive program to retrofit existing spaces to comply, to do better than what the building code might have required of them then when they built them 40 years ago?

Sunil Johal Yeah, the government never has any challenges introducing tax changes, and people always support anything the government does on that front. But I mean, in all seriousness, yeah, there’s huge scope for, for progress here. I mean, we’ve already talked about we could mandate accessibility, as Australia did for all new builds right now. That would be a huge game changer, especially with all the investment money pouring into the sector. We could mandate significant renovations. And I don’t know the percentage of that that happens every year with existing stock, but that’s some, some small percentage would, would be captured by that in, in building codes too. We could think about I mean, Mary, you mentioned this. All of the public lands and infrastructure that we have across the country were federal, provincial, municipal governments. They have an onus to lead on this file. And they’re not. I mean, if you look at our transit systems, you look at many public buildings, that’s a not insignificant portion of the buildings and spaces in our communities too. And then the third point is, exactly that, like what are the incentives, tax or property tax deferrals or what? I mean, there’s a million different ways you could construct that where we give incentives to property owners, landlords to retrofit their buildings. We know there’s a cost there, but there’s a huge public benefit to making those buildings more accessible. So there is value in putting public dollars towards that objective and not expecting private landlords or private property owners to shoulder all of those costs. I mean, the point … we need them to come to the table in some way. But there’s a lot of kind of scope for improvement here. So let’s not focus on the fact that we’re not going to make every building in Canada accessible overnight. But we can make huge progress just with some of those steps, in each of those areas.

Benjamin Shinewald We’re doing it right now by the hundreds of millions for carbon and reducing carbon increases of building’s asset value and decreases its operating costs. Full stop, full stop. So there’s government money helping that that private outcome. You can call it that. Why not do it for disability as well? With the exact same model?

Mary W Rowe I mean, I think that’s an interesting question. I see Ann Belanche is saying why would you have to provide tax incentives? They should do it first at the outset. Absolutely. But just remember that, you know, we have many, many, many, many buildings that are already built. And what are we going to do with them. So it’s back to the greenest building is the one that’s already built. So you want to retain the stock as much as you can. The question is, can you actually upgrade them? Just … can I ask a question about certification? We have not much time left here, but I know that, the Rick Hansen Foundation made a decision to actually create a certification program, which I’m assuming was modeled after, you know, LEED standards, which were environmental standards for buildings. Right? Talk to us a little bit about… Has that proven to be effective? Is that an effective way to see change start to happen. Sarah.?

Sarah McCarthy It is. Well, and I can comment on the program. and then Heela and Benjamin can also kind of comment on the program because they’re both very close to it. So we’ve done just over 2000 ratings across the country. And we’ve trained thousands of professionals, to be able to conduct an accessibility certification rating. So it’s quite purposely capacity building with the idea that we train architects, engineers, designers who are already working in this field, to become our RHFAC professionals. So you think about lead  AEPs, it’s the same kind of idea. The course is offered in, post-secondary institutions across Canada. And we’re just in the process of moving into the states. And the idea of it is that it provides a tool, particularly useful in a large retrofit or a pre-construction, to be able to follow along on your level of meaningful access. And we talked about that a little bit in reference to the universal design piece. But, that a space is truly accessible for everyone is the idea here. One of the things I wanted to note, too, when we were talking about disability, the most recent version of the certification program also includes neurodiversity. When you look at different countries, different countries do have different standards for accessibility. BSI, the British Standards Institute, last year published the first standard internationally on neurodiversity in the built environment. And so we were able to take that international standard and integrate it into the tool. And so that’s what we’re looking at. The accessibility certification program is way above code. That’s how we want sites to be built rather than us thinking about code as being a baseline. You know, we think about it as being way below baseline.

Mary W Rowe So interesting, isn’t it? How do you actually incentivize better performance, over performance beyond a code? Benjamin … We’re going to … go ahead.

Sarah McCarthy I just want to note with CMHC, because Sunil was mentioning about the incentive piece. So there are some incentives, particularly on the residential side right now. In their MLI Select program, they do provide better financing for sites that are RHFC gold. So that’s the first time that’s happened because previously it was only in greening initiatives. And so they’re just starting to look at accessibility as being something that that they need to incentivize.

Mary W Rowe All right. Okay, we’re kind of in that place where I give you all, like, 30 seconds to say something really important. And then we’ll sign off. Thanks for everybody in advance for joining us. So I’m going to go to Benjamin, Heela, Sunil, and then you Gelare at the end. Just final thoughts in terms of what you think people should be prioritizing. First you Benjamin.

Benjamin Shinewald Super quickly – I think this is a journey I think that my grandkids will be working on this one day, but, we will get closer every step of the way. So I don’t think we can be expecting perfection overnight. The perfect is the enemy of the good, and we gotta work towards the good if we’re going to get to the perfect.

Mary W Rowe Yeah. It’s incremental. I get that. Heela.

Heela Omarkhail Well said. I mean, you probably hear this a lot, in these CityTalk conversations about partnerships. Like this is not something that the development industry is going to do on our own, or the accessibility industry or government. This needs an all hands on deck, like so many of our issues across the country do. And it needs everyone to invest something. So I don’t … I think the time is over to, like, be pointing fingers and expecting one group to to stand up and shoulder this burden. I think we all need to build those relationships and collaborations and do this together.

Mary W Rowe Sunil …

Sunil Johal Well they stole everything I was going to say. So I’ll just say, I mean, I think the business case is there. It’s just like, we need more, we need more of a push. I mean, this has to be higher up on the political and public agenda than it is. And unfortunately, it’s not. But we’ve talked about the data. I mean, we also haven’t really talked about … we’ve got an aging society. So, I mean, this is going to be something, the prevalence of disability is going to continue to rise. This is going to become more and more of an issue for everybody out there. So we need to get ahead of it before it gets ahead of us.

Mary W Rowe Last word to you Gelare …

Heela Omarkhail Well, I would be minimal. So change your point of view and bring the camera down. So that’s my suggestion.

Mary W Rowe Bring the camera down. That’s interesting. Start focusing on the real, what we’re actually seeing. Right. Thank you everybody. Thanks for joining us for this CityTalk. As you know we record it. We’ll post. We appreciate everybody taking the time to spend an hour with us. And we appreciate Sunil, Sarah, Gelare, Benjamin and Heela. Thanks for joining us and thanks to the Rick Hansen Foundation for the leadership you’re providing on us. Great to see you. Thanks!