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Illustration by Catherine Chan
As a wheelchair user, and one of the 6.2 million Canadians who identify as having a disability, I was thrilled to read about Air Canada leaving behind the wheelchair of Canada’s Chief Accessibility Officer Stephanie Cadieux for her October flight from Toronto to Vancouver.
Please don’t misunderstand: on a personal level my heart went out to her, but the visibility that she brought to the all-too-common issue of mobility aids being disrespected, lost, forgotten or irreparably broken during air travel was necessary. Now fixing the problem might finally gain some traction.
Since then, the federal government has officially launched a parliamentary committee to investigate Canadian airlines’ treatment of passengers with disabilities, and Air Canada has been fined for violating the Accessible Transportation for Persons with Disabilities Regulations. The airline apologized and is starting to improve the processes for passengers with disabilities, but for lasting change we need all Canadian airlines to give passengers with disabilities the same basic dignity and respect given to all airline customers.
I am all too aware of the perils of air travel with a wheelchair. I became a person with a disability after a spinal cord injury from a ski accident in March, 2018. Since then, my wheelchair has been my path to independence. My life looks largely the same now as it did before my accident; my partner and family stood beside me, and we were able to adapt our home to be accessible enough for me to manage. My employer has accommodated my disability and continues to provide me with new and challenging opportunities in my career. I learned how to ski again through the amazing support of Canadian Adaptive Snowsports, which is entirely volunteer-led, and I am now at a skill level where I am travelling and racing in para-alpine skiing competitively within North America.
A large part of the many roles I hold in my life involve travel. I am not willing to sacrifice my travel, my independence or my health because I cannot trust an airline to treat my wheelchair with dignity, and frankly, it is not a risk I should have to take.
I have been humiliated by airlines in a multitude of ways since acquiring my injury. My wheelchair was once returned to me soaking wet after it was left outside while the rest of the luggage was unloaded. On another occasion, I was told my wheelchair was “only a 10-minute walk away” in oversized baggage and then humiliatingly wheeled through the airport in an airport chair after a futile two-hour wait for my chair to be returned to me. I have been loudly and publicly questioned on whether I can “really” walk. I have had to sit at the gate as the only visibly disabled passenger while an overhead announcement was made that the plane was delayed due to accommodating my accessibility needs. I have been shamed and told that my accessibility needs are a burden to the gate agents. I could go on with additional examples of how I have been mistreated, but you get the point. I have learned the hard way to be hypervigilant about loudly and pro-actively communicating my accessibility needs, yet I still hold my breath every time I exit the plane, hoping against hope that my wheelchair is there and in one piece.
All I am asking for is that those of us in the disabled community can fly with our mobility aids arriving intact and alongside us.
The number of headlines about mobility aids arriving broken or not at all to their destination after a flight continues to mount: last fall, a passenger was forced to drag himself off a plane because the airline refused to provide the required equipment, a man’s custom wheelchair was lost, resulting in a loss of independence due to an inadequate loaner wheelchair in poor repair, and disability advocate Maayan Ziv’s wheelchair was irrevocably damaged, with communication around compensation only coming months after the fact. Wheelchairs are customized, complicated pieces of equipment that take months to build and are integral to the health and wellness of their users. They are not interchangeable, nor are they easy or quick to replace.
Until financial penalties are put in place to mandate that airlines treat their customers with disabilities with the same dignity, respect and rights as other paying customers, we will unfortunately continue to see this problem in the news.
I am now in the thick of my ski season and will be travelling extensively until midspring, chasing the snow across North America. Flying is often the most stressful part of my competitive travel and I do not travel lightly, I’ve got my wheelchair, my sitski, multiple sets of skis, and all of my other gear.
My wheelchair is the key to my independence; will I maintain my independence when I land? I never really know. In the meantime, I will continue to loudly advocate for respectful treatment.
Jessica McPhee lives in St. Catharines, Ont.