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The Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) is a social assistance program offering income and employment supports for disabled people in Ontario, Canada’s most populous province. Since its inception, the ODSP has been critiqued by policy analysts, service providers, and its recipients as flawed, principally in terms of the amount and the range of supports provided. The purpose of this paper is to assess whether the ODSP meets its stated objectives from the perspective of its recipients - an important issue for engendering substantive equality for disabled individuals. The design was a supplementary secondary analysis of data collected from seven focus groups (n=46) related to poverty and social inclusion. The overall theme, the ODSP falls short, was communicated through two types of assessments of inadequacies. The first, labelled “yes, but,” acknowledged the program’s positive intent despite its insufficiencies in services and supports. The second, labelled “no, and,” decisively assessed the ODSP as inadequate with supporting rationale. In exploring extant human rights jurisprudence, we conclude that substantive protection against systemic discrimination for disabled people will not be guaranteed unless human rights legislation truly has paramountcy over all other laws. Human rights tribunals have a mandate, reinforced in international human rights law, to provide remedial remedies to systemic discrimination. Our findings speak directly to the need for human rights tribunals and commissions to mitigate the erosion of rights and opportunities for disabled people.

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Abstract This paper will reflect on key findings from a Summer 2017 initiative entitled The Role of Culture and Land-Based Healing in Addressing and Ending Violence against Indigenous Women and Two-Spirited People. The Indigenist and decolonizing methodological approach of this work ensured that all research was grounded in experiential and reciprocal ways of learning. Two major findings guide the next phase of this research, complicating the premise that traditional economic activities are healing for Indigenous women and Two-Spirit people. First, the complexities of the mainstream labour force were raised numerous times. Traditional economies are pressured in ongoing ways through exploitative labour practices. Secondly, participants emphasized the importance of attending to the responsibility of nurturing, enriching, and sustaining the wellbeing of soil, water, and original seeds in the process of creating renewal gardens as a healing endeavour. In other words, we have an active role to play in healing the environment and not merely using the environment to heal ourselves. Gardening as research and embodied knowledge was stressed by extreme weather changes including hail in June, 2018, which meant that participants spent as much time talking about the healing of the earth and her systems as the healing of Indigenous women in a context of ongoing colonialism.

This brief paper summarizes the findings from a community-based research project examining the health needs and experiences of trans-identified people in small and rural communities as presented at the 9th annual Laurentian University Faculty of Health conference. This study involved residents who identify as transgender living in North Simcoe/Muskoka, an area comprised of small, rural, suburban and remote communities. It employed a mixed method design, with quantitative findings derived from a comprehensive online survey and qualitative findings from a series of community focus groups. A sample of findings related to health care experiences grounded in the voices of participants was presented. These findings included several common themes that characterize the health service encounter of residents who are transgender. The health care experience of trading off competent trans-specific health care provision for respect and willingness on behalf of the health care practitioner was common, and provides evidence for the lack of trans-specific health care available in these areas. Experiences of service denial or rejection as a result of their trans identities or gender expression were also common. Residents who are transgendered in areas where there is a lack of service infrastructure are also forced to become their own health care experts, a necessary and distressing reality of accessing health care as a transgender individual in small and rural areas.