David Onley leaves a memorable legacy of advocacy

Disability advocate David Lepofsky remembers first meeting reporter David Onley in May 1995 as a provincial election was underway.

Onley had heard that then Conservative leader Mike Harris had made an off-the-cuff reference to the employability of people with disabilities and headed up to CFRB, where he knew Harris was at the time, asked him to clarify his remarks and filed a story for Citytv.

“In this two-minute story — literally neither David and I knowing what our futures would be in this disability advocacy work or how our paths would converge — all of the themes are captured in that story of what our future would be and the cause we would care about,” Lepofsky recalled.

Lepofsky, new to his role as an advocate in 1995, said Onley’s decision as a reporter and later as an on-air anchor to be visible about his disability (Onley had polio as a child) “communicated a message and it’s a message that’s still important today.”

“What happened with David on Citytv back then is something we wish we saw a heck of a lot more across the media today when we’re talking about equity, diversity and inclusion,” Lepofsky said.

In 2005, after a 10-year struggle and due to the work of Onley and other activists, the Ontario government passed the Accessibility to Ontarians with Disability Act, pledging a barrier-free province by 2025.

Onley was appointed the province’s lieutenant-governor in 2007, a post he held for seven years and one in which he was required to stay out of politics, although one of his first acts was to champion accessibility as his social cause, Lepofsky said.

After his term, Onley became a special adviser to the provincial government on accessibility and disability issues. In 2017, Onley — tasked with undertaking a mandated review of the act — issued a report that Lepofsky recalled was scathing in its assessment of the province’s progress.

“It is a blistering report and it really is the culmination of David’s experience. He basically said the goal of fully accessible Ontario (in 2025) is nowhere in sight because the progress on accessibility has proceeded at a glacial pace. He said that Ontario is a province full of soul-crushing barriers,” Lepofsky said.

Thea Kurdi, president of President of DESIGNable Environments, a company that designs accessible work spaces, tagged Onley in 2017 tweet and the two struck up an enduring friendship.

“It’s hard to properly capture the magnitude of this loss to the disabled community and to all of Ontarians and Canadians alike. Onley was a classy, kind, dynamic speaker who was not only an amazing advocate himself but also made the job of advocating for accessibility by others easier to do. He gave us hope and permission to speak up,” Kurdi said.

“I cannot stress enough how much it helped when he (Onley) first started calling out inaccessibility as being not just bad design but discrimination. Before that people were very reluctant to use that word despite the truth of it,” Kurdi said.

NDP MPP Lise Vaugeois, the party’s seniors and disability issues critic, said among Onley’s many achievements is Queen’s Park itself.

“Queen’s Park is a rabbit’s warren, it takes a map, but it is accessible. I’m sure it wasn’t when he (Onley) first got there,” Vaugeois said.

Vaugeois said, while she didn’t know Onley personally, all of the people in the disability community that she has met remember him for his personal accessibility.

“I know for many people in the disability community, he (Onley) was very open to meeting with people and sharing ideas and that’s an important thing. He advocated to recognize many people with disabilities want to work and to be seen as important contributors to the economy,” Vaugeois said.

Both Lepofsky and Kurdi agree that Onley was frustrated by the slow pace of change.

“He (Onley) was so kind and smart and so fed up with the ableism (and) so fed up with what he called the virtuous signalling, people looking like they’re trying to do something, trying to say the right things but not actually getting off their butts to change anything,” Kurdi said.

“He (Onley) went from being a journalist who covered the story … to the impartial role of a lieutenant-governor to, in the end, someone who very publicly declared ‘here’s how we’re doing and it’s not good and we better call it what it is’ and then giving a road map about how to fix it,” Lepofsky said.

“And his legacy is not just the road map he left but our obligation to honour that legacy by implementing that road map,” he added.

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