ODA Committee Update
dated March 5, 2005
posted March 10, 2005

ONTARIANS WITH DISABILITIES ACT COMMITTEE UPDATE Legislature Sets Schedule For Clause-By-Clause Consideration Of Bill 118 March 5, 2005 SUMMARY We are now on the verge of the next critical phase in the development and enactment of Bill 118. The schedule has been set for the Ontario Legislature's Standing Committee on Social Policy to consider amendments to Bill 118, the proposed Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act: * The three parties must each deliver their proposed amendments to the bill to the Standing Committee by Friday, March 18, 2005. Each political party can table its own package of amendments. They all must be tabled by the same deadline. We will attempt to get these as quickly as possible, and then will circulate via our email update list. * The Standing Committee will begin considering these proposed amendments on Tuesday, March 29, 2005 at Queen's Park. It will then continue considering the amendments during its clause-by-clause debate of the bill at its successive Standing Committee meetings until it is finished. The Standing Committee on Social Policy usually meets on Mondays and Tuesdays. Thus, the second and third possible dates for the bill's consideration will be Monday April 4 and Tuesday April 5. We don't know how much time the Standing Committee will take to go through the bill and all the proposed amendments. * After the Standing Committee finishes clause-by-clause debate, it reports the bill, as amended, back to the Legislature. The Legislature can then hold its third reading debate on the bill. That is the last step needed before it passes into law. We don't now know when Third Reading debate will take place. We strongly encourage you to plan to attend the meetings of the Standing Committee. You cannot make formal presentations. However, a strong attendance from the disability community helps show the importance of the issue. Also, you can try to chat informally with MPPs when the Committee takes breaks, or when an MPP walks away from the table. This is "lobbying" at its most literal! We don't know if the Standing Committee meetings will be televised. If the Standing Committee meets at the same time as there are debates going on in the Ontario Legislature itself on some topic or other, the TV coverage on the Legislative Assembly channel includes what is going on on the floor of the Legislature itself, not what is going on at a Standing Committee. We don't yet have the times and room numbers for the Standing Committee meetings on March 29, April 4, and if needed, April 6 and beyond. We will get you this information as soon as we can. We have urged that all proceedings of the Standing Committee on Bill 118 be conducted with appropriate accommodations such as captioning and American Sign Language interpretation to make it fully barrier-free. We will eventually get Hansard transcripts of these meetings, but Standing Committee transcripts are not posted to the Legislature's website quickly. We encourage you to continue to contact the three political parties to urge each party to introduce the package of amendments to Bill 118 that the Ontarians with Disabilities Act Committee has put forward. If you need appropriate email addresses to contact the parties, let us know and we can provide them to you. Once the political parties table their packages of amendments on March 18, we will all have 11 days (i.e. until March 29) to blitz the three political parties to urge them to support the proposed amendments that have been tabled and that will effectively strengthen Bill 118. In the meantime, if you want to read all the oral presentations made to the Standing Committee on Social Policy that were made during the 6 days of public hearings on Bill 118 between January 31, 2005 and February 8, 2005, you can now see them at: http://www.ontla.on.ca/hansard/committee_debates/38_parl/session1/SocialPol/index.htm Send us your feedback at: oda@odacommittee.net

 

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