Scott Neigh of Talking Radical Radio speaks with Paul Gilbert & Margo Bok. They are involved in the BC Disability Caucus, a group whose work has spanned the range from online education and discussion to mobilizing people into the streets to get disability issues on the public agenda in British Columbia.

Gilbert currently serves as the group's media spokesperson. Bok is a regular contributor, including of original articles in which she combines research and analysis of disability issues that are mostly ignored in the mainstream. They speak about some of the key issues facing disabled people in the province, and about what their group has been doing to address them.

According to today's guests, there are multiple ways in which the struggle for disability rights in Canada lags behind many other countries. It's not only that governments have so far failed to take many of the most obvious steps that disabled people and their allies identify as necessary for addressing the barriers, poverty, and injustice that they face. It's also that there just isn't the same density of grassroots groups focused on disability as there is in the U.S. or the U.K., for instance, and substantive coverage of disability issues in the mainstream media in Canada is sporadic and often not very well done.

Gilbert and Bok have taken a number of approaches to working for disability rights over the years. For awhile, Gilbert had a focus on traditional lobbying – meeting with government ministers, particularly at the provincial level in British Columbia, and with other politicians. That didn't seem to be getting anywhere, so he joined the political party in power in B.C. at the time and worked to set up a formally recognized disability caucus within the party. That was ultimately successful, but once the caucus was in place he again came face to face with the serious limits to what such a body could actually achieve, within the constraints of the institution. He needed a new approach and, he said, "It had to be disability first rather than any party first."

To that end, they decided that the way to go was to make use of social media, but to go beyond how many groups use it. The B.C. Disability Caucus has a Facebook page at its centre, but it is also a group with an active core of contributors that is managing not only to build consciousness of crucial disability issues, but to promote dialogue among disabled people about their needs, put together demands from that ongoing dialogue, present these demands to governments, raise the profile of disability issues in conventional media, support other kinds of human rights struggles, and – from time to time – get people protesting in the streets.

Grass Roots Disability Politics in BC

The needs of BC's disabled are being ignored by the complicit BC NDP / Green government. Paul Gilbert discusses how the government is failing to provide supports to disabled victims of interpersonal partner violence. Likewise the government is failing to provide healthcare, library services, and even basic recognition that the disabled exist in BC.

Community-Living-Show-January 30, 2018 - interview with the BC Disability Caucus

Bonnie Brayton is the executive of the DisAbled Women's Network (or DAWN) Canada, the country's only national advocacy organization focused on the needs and rights of women with disabilities. Scott Neigh interviews her about the issues that disabled women and girls face and about DAWN Canada's work.

Back in 1985, bureaucrats in the federal government dealing with issues related to women, and other bureaucrats dealing with issues related to disability, realized that while there were multiple advocacy groups hard at work in their respective areas, there were no national groups in Canada focused specifically on disabled women. They consulted with various women's groups and disability groups to identify disabled women who already played leadership roles, and put up the money to bring seventeen of those women together for meetings in Ottawa. Before the meetings were done, the women had decided that a one-time get-together was not enough and they started the ball rolling to found DAWN.

Thirty-three years later, DAWN is still going strong. From the beginning, its mission has been to end discrimination against women and girls with disabilities in Canada, in light of the fact that women with disabilities face among the highest rates of poverty, the highest rates of social and economic exclusion, and the highest rates of violence in Canadian society.

Moreover, Brayton estimates that upwards of one-quarter of women in the country have some sort of disability but the official statistics are lower than this. In Canada such stats are derived through self-identification, and stigma and underdiagnosis mean that many women who are functionally disabled in one way or another do not identify as such. Despite these numbers, it is quite rare for governments or advocacy organizations other than DAWN to give the experiences, barriers, and issues faced by disabled women, the specific consideration that they require. Though all of this points towards a large and complex spectrum of needs, much of DAWN's work in recent years has focused largely on the high levels of violence disabled women face.

Though the group has kept working for more than three decades, they have never had core funding, and subsist mostly on funding for specific projects and on donations. It was only in 2007 that the group hired its first executive director, Bonnie Brayton. Though not all of its staff are disabled women, all of the organizational leadership and the board of directors are. They organize their work around four pillars: education, research, policy, and advocacy. They collaborate extensively with other women's groups, disability groups, and also trade unions.

Recent accomplishments include challenging Canada's lack of progress on disability issues by presenting to the committee reviewing Canada's compliance with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of People With Disabilities. They have been providing input to the current federal government around violence against women, and with respect to federal legislation related to disability that is in the works. They also completed the first-ever comprehensive research report on the conditions of women and girls with disabilities in Canada, and are hard at work turning their findings into a comprehensive, long-term agenda for policy and advocacy work.

And as for what they would like to see from other activist, social justice, and human rights organizations, they are happy for the extensive opportunities they have to collaborate with other groups. But they are very clear that they want the struggles of disabled women to be taken up in a central way by all kinds of different groups, rather than falling largely to DAWN. They want groups in all kinds of different locations and sectors to do the work and spend the money to ensure that disabled women are at their tables, disabled women's voices are central to their work, and disabled women are in leadership positions.

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Bonnie Brayton ED of Dawn Canada on Talking Radical Radio

Carers who kill on Background Briefing (An Exceptionally Well Done Program)

http://radio.abc.net.au/programitem/pgLG8b2MXV?play=true

Trigger Warning:

this audio program includes discussions of suicide and murder. If it raises any issues for you, contact your local crisis line. 

Almost every three months, for the last 15 years, a person with disabilities in Australia has been killed by their carer. That's not a number that's easy to come by—here at Background Briefing we've discovered this by poring over court records and media coverage and doing the maths ourselves.

A carer is a family member or a friend, with responsibilities for someone else's care.

One person with disabilities killed almost every three months is high, but because in some cases disability may not be reported publicly, the true figure is almost certainly much higher.

Graphic Text - Carers who kill 
Image: MARTIN MANRIQUE  WHO ALONG WITH HIS SISTER AND MOTHER WAS KILLED BY HIS FATHER IN 2016