Forum aims to educate those with disabilities

By: Jack Carver

A local non-profit legal clinic advocating for disabled persons is spreading the word about new rights they might have provincially and globally.

The Community Advocacy & Legal Centre in partnership with ARCH Disability Law Centre is hosting an interactive forum to spread these ideas to the community on November 23 at Quinte Gardens at 30 College street west.

Advocating for disabled people is their commitment says Michelle Leering, executive director of the Community Advocacy & Legal Centre.

“We have done a lot of work over the years,” said Leering. “One of our practices is helping people who are disabled get the pensions that they’re entitled to, and the benefits that go along with those pensions.”

Some of the changing and emerging rights being discussed include providing proper facilities for disabled people, and what disabled people and facilities should be expecting concerning accommodation.

The meeting will be a mixed group of disabled persons and service providers who work with disabled people. Leering said they wanted it to be less of a lecture and more participatory.

“We didn’t want it to be a lecture format we wanted people to learn a little bit about what was happening with the new rights coming forward internationally and provincially as well,” said Leering. “Give people a chance to work through some case studies examples from both perspectives, being the person who had a disability and then through the service provider that was trying to accommodate those disabilities.”

According to Leering, the clinic has a fifty-fifty success rate for solving pension cases outside of court, and is successful eight times out of 10 in court when it comes to getting disabled people the pensions they are entitled to.

The clinic also does work with the deaf community.

With Belleville having a higher than average deaf population with the school for the deaf, the legal centre focuses on helping facilities accommodate them with interpretation services, and have improved their own centre with a video relay conferencing system to make the process easier.

The centre usually works with other clinics and centres such as they are with ARCH for the forum. But that doesn’t mean they can’t make progress on their own.

“We’re always partnered with people on things, we rarely work on things alone although we have had some successful legal case challenges within the past decade,” said Leering. “One did help expand the definition of who is disabled under the Ontario disability support plan act.”

Deidre McDade, a staff lawyer at the legal centre said, she is excited at the prospect of ARCH coming in to talk at the forum.

“It’s exciting to have specialists in the field come to Belleville and talk to people about emerging disabilities rights and issues,” said McDade. “Hopefully they will make people more aware on how they can make their facilities more accessible. “

The legal centre now represents upwards of 400 people a year who are trying to get disability pensions. Leering said they have a fairly consistent success rate.

The forum is being held on Friday, November 23 from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Quinte Gardens in Belleville. American Sign Language will be provided.