COMMENTARY: Canadian universities’ disability policies are inadequate

In universities across Canada, accessibility provisions are offered only intermittently, leaving the nation’s roughly 200,000 disabled post-secondary students in a precarious position: live without aid or subject oneself to routine scrutiny and discrimination. 

Lacklustre policies

For fifth-year Arts student Julia Chebott, having her disability registered with the University of New Brunswick was a burdensome process. 

“In my case, I was diagnosed over the phone,” Chebott explained. “He wasn’t my regular doctor, and he didn’t know me. He skimmed through my paperwork, and although I have multiple diagnoses, he only selected ADHD. Without consulting me, he decided that my degree of impairment was moderate.”

When Chebott returned to the Student Accessibility Centre, several accommodations were made inaccessible to her. 

Chebott’s adverse experiences have made her reticent to share her accommodations with faculty. “I feel a lot of guilt and embarrassment when using [my accommodations],” Chebott explained. “Before, accessibility letters were automatically sent to professors. Now, it’s up to the student to send those letters.”

“Sending those emails fills me with so much anxiety,” she added. “That interaction is difficult for me, so I don’t often use [my accommodations].”

In total, it took Chebott two years to receive proper care for her diagnoses. 

“I was diagnosed in second year,” she explained. “That’s when I began medication and therapy. But I didn’t get signed up with [the Student Accessibility Centre] until my fourth year.”

The process is also expensive. “It costs $50 to renew disability paperwork, and you have to renew every year,” Chebott said.

Three months after his birth, Nick Gentleman, a third-year Kinesiology student at UNB, was diagnosed with a rare genetic condition that caused him to lose 97 percent of his vision. While his experiences with Student Accessibility Services have been nothing but positive, in the fall of 2021, Gentleman was challenged by a professor who took issue with his request for classroom accommodations. 

Prior to the mid-term period, Gentleman asked his professor to grant him access to recorded lectures. “During a fifty-minute lecture, there’s no chance that I would be able to take notes, look at my phone, and check the board,” Gentleman explained. “What ends up happening is that I only write down a quarter of what was [on the slides].”

Bureaucratic technicalities kept Gentleman from receiving equitable treatment while completing his degree. “I have an accessibility letter from the school’s [Student Accessibility Centre],” he said. “The fact that I needed my lectures recorded, I don’t believe that was on the letter. That was her argument. If it’s not in the letter, I don’t have to do it.”

On the ground, during day-to-day activities, a lack of disability-oriented funding is noticeable to many of UNB’s students. 

Late at night, Gentleman has difficulty navigating UNB Fredericton’s campus. For him, “having more lighting on the roads and on paths on campus” would be helpful. 

“Would it really cost that much to install a couple more lights?” he wondered.

Kelsi Evans, a former UNB student diagnosed with near sudden permanent deafness, “recommends that the university invest in assistive technologies.”

For Chebott, having access to a wider range of sensory friendly spaces would greatly benefit her university education. “Options could include adding floor seating, with cushions on the floor accompanied by small tables,” she noted.

Individualizing social oppression

UNB’s Student Accessibility Centre’s intranet homepage defines disability “as an umbrella term for conditions that involve impairments, activity limitations and participation restrictions.”

“In other words,” the homepage reads, “a disability is a mental and/or bodily condition (impairment) that creates difficulty for the person with the condition to perform certain activities (activity limitation) and function within the world around them (participation restrictions).”

However, UNB’s definition is flawed in that it assumes that disabled peoples’ exclusion from society stems from their biological and physical impairments, rather than societal oppression.

According to late disability theorist Marta Russel and scholar Ravi Malhotra, medical definitions of disability are plagued by several “serious shortcomings.” For example, they tend to minimize the existence of oppressive social forces that “produce the disabling barriers, exclusion and inequalities facing disabled persons.”

UNB Saint John’s Student Services website urges disabled students to utilize “independence and self-advocacy” while obtaining their accommodations.

When asked for comment, UNB Fredericton’s Student Accessibility Centre stated that the school was “currently working on crafting an accessibility policy.” Further, they linked to a disability statement included in the university’s academic calendar.

The Centre explained that, in Fall 2022, the university “changed the procedure for delivery of student accommodation letters.”

“Students now have the choice of where, when, and to whom they disclose this information,” the Centre stated. “This protects a student’s privacy and preserves their autonomy in making decisions about this type of disclosure.” 

Towards a social model of disability

However, as a result of inadequate policy, nearly half of all disabled students in the United States currently avoid registering with their university’s accessibility services.

For students like Chebott and Gentleman, their attempts to self-advocate were regularly countered by uncaring individuals and faceless bureaucratic regimes. 

According to Concordia’s Dr. Cynthia Bruce, self-advocacy frameworks tend to coerce students into pursuing routine and time-consuming check-ins with faculty and staff. The disabled student is made to take on several onerous social roles. These include, for instance, the activist, self-help guru, and civil rights advocate. Having to constantly seek recognition for their disabilities, Bruce argues, leaves students feeling stigmatized and emotionally exhausted.

In countries like Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, university students “are still confronted by insurmountable disability funding-oriented barriers.” These include “bureaucratisation of application processes, cuts in disability funding, means-test requirements, [and] minimal scholarships.”

Moving forward, activists, scholars, and disability advocates must link the phenomenon of disability to its roots: political economy and social oppression. “We take the view that disability is a socially created category derived from labour relations,” Marta Russel and Ravi Malhotra argue. Disability is “a product of the exploitative economic structure of capitalist society: one which creates (and then oppresses) the so-called disabled body as one of the conditions that allow the capitalist class to accumulate wealth.”

Providing people—both disabled and able-bodied—with a universal right to higher education, meaningful work, accessible infrastructure, and social services comprises an initial strategy to combat the social oppression faced by the nation’s disabled students. Combatting ableism, therefore, requires that we as Canadians fundamentally rethink the ways in which we distribute resources, allocate public benefits, and value the lives of human beings.

Harrison Dressler is a master’s student in history at Queen’s University. He writes about Canadian history, labour, politics, and the environment.