Accessibility advocates are blasting the Ontario government for a string of design flaws at a new billion-dollar courthouse in downtown Toronto they say will make it harder for people with disabilities to access the justice system.
The Ontario Court of Justice location in Toronto opened in 2023 and cost just over $950 million to build, design and finance. It brought together six small courts, consolidating them under one roof.
The building boasts brail signage, wayfinding paths for people with vision loss and both remote and in-person options for court hearings across 73 different judicial spaces.
Announcing the courthouse, the Ontario government claimed it was “the most accessible courthouse in Ontario,” with Attorney General Doug Downey boasting his government was “supporting equal access to court services that are currently dispersed across multiple court locations.”
When chair of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance David Lepofsky went to the courthouse, however, he found claims didn’t quite stack up.
“They did include some accessibility features, but they screwed a lot up,” he told Global News.
Lepofsky has taken a particular interest in the court because he was involved in advising on the design process and said he warned the government repeatedly about problems.
“The day I first walked in there, what I was struck by is a good number of the problems that we’d previously warned about, came to fruition,” he said. “But there were new ones that I hadn’t even anticipated.”
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The issues he encountered varied. Lepofsky, who is blind, found that wayfinding routes installed to help people who walk with a stick to navigate were hard to follow and occasionally stopped at random, while brail signs were either incomplete or wrong in some instances.
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Stairs in the building had been designed with large wells underneath to let in light that could trip someone and the elevator volume was too low to be heard in all cases.
“This isn’t rocket science, this is basically doing their jobs,” Lepofsky said, pointing out mandatory building code standards fall short of what’s needed to make buildings universally accessible.
“Putting up the right sign on the right door is not a cost, it’s just part of the job. The other thing you need to know is that building accessibility in, if you do it from day one, makes it such that it costs nothing or it costs very little.”
A spokesperson for the provincial government said that the building “meets or exceeds current regulatory requirements” for accessibility and received a Rick Hansen Foundation Gold Accessibility Certification.
“We encourage feedback from stakeholders to provide input into areas where improvements can be made,” the spokesperson said, admitting that the accessibility committee involved in the building’s design had been “re-engaged” in recent months.
“We will continue to review feedback from stakeholders and the public on concern,” the spokesperson said.
The government did not respond to follow-up questions from Global News about some of the specific issues identified by Lepofsky when he toured the building.
Brad Envoy, the executive director of the Disability Justice Network of Ontario, said the fact the building had been certified despite having access issues meant nothing.
“They can say they have as many gold standards as they like, but I think the community knows fools’ gold when they see it,” he told Global News.
Envoy said the courthouse was a symptom of a wider problem — a government struggling to put people with disabilities at the centre of its justice system.
“I think that ultimately this is a really great visual and physical example that we see across the justice system, which is that disabled people, and in particular disabled racialized people, are being left behind and left out of conversations and spaces,” he said.
“The pieces around the courthouse are some of the simplest, most direct and obvious ways to engage in accessibility that this province can.”
Lepofsky said the mistakes inside the courthouse cannot be repeated, calling for a review and stricter standards to ensure accessible design is treated as mandatory for government buildings.
“It could be any mixture of incompetence, not caring. They might have heard the advice and not cared, or the wrong priorities… what that is is prioritizing aesthetics over accessibility, which they did over and over and over,” he said.
“We need a fundamental, top-to-bottom revamp of how the government does its infrastructure building. Or this is just going to keep happening.
© 2024 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.