Guide dog users in Ottawa continue to be denied access to restaurants, taxis and other public spaces, despite laws that guarantee equal access to anyone with one of these essential service animals, says a manager at the Canadian National Institute for the Blind.
September is guide dog awareness month and the CNIB is running campaigns to educate the public about the rights and etiquette surrounding guide dogs.
About 1.5 million Canadians have sight loss. Canadian Guide Dogs for the Blind estimates that two per cent of that population use a guide dog.
Stephanie Pilon, advocacy and campaigns at the CNIB, says access refusals remain one of the most common complaints from handlers, with taxis, ride-shares, hotels and clinics among the most frequent points of conflict.
Lawrence Gunther, an Ottawa resident who has used guide dogs for nearly 40 years, says taxi drivers are among the worst offenders.
“There’s very few taxi drivers that want to let you into their cab if your dog is wet,” he said. “Sometimes they claim it’s an allergy thing, but that’s not true because if they have allergies, they’re not going to be driving a cab.”
Under Ontario’s Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act and the Ontario Human Rights Code, people accompanied by a guide dog or other service animal cannot be denied entry to public spaces. Refusals are considered discrimination. According to Accessibility Partners Canada, individuals can be fined from $200 to $2,000 for violations.
A survey conducted by Guide Dogs for the Blind highlights just how common ride-share denials are for handlers. Of 185 survey respondents across the U.S and Canada, 83 per cent said that they had been refused a ride at least once. The survey also said “more than 46 per cent of respondents reported experiencing psychological impacts, which are defined as moderate-to-severe feelings of anxiety, frustration, degradation, abuse, demoralization, stress, tension, uncertainty, worry, brought on to guide dog users as a direct result of rideshare denials.”
Complicating things, not all service dogs have the same accessibility rights. CNIB’s Buddy Dog program gives children between age seven and 16 a buddy dog to help with their vision loss and allow an easier transition into the guide dog program. Unlike with fully trained guide dogs, however, there’s no legal right to bring a buddy dog into taxis or restaurants.
Dawn Pickering, mother of Ollie Acosta-Pickering, who lost his vision because of cancer, said that they can’t take their buddy dog, Hope, in many public spaces.
“We don’t have the right to take Hope into any public space if we haven’t gotten permission from whoever’s responsible for the public space,” Pickering said.
While neither Pickering nor Ollie say they have been discriminated against directly in their day-to-day lives with Hope, Pickering said there are broader issues that make it problematic for guide dog users to have their dogs in public.
“A lot of people have pets, they like to travel with their pets and they take their pets into public spaces, and technically those pets aren’t allowed in public spaces,” Pickering said. “But we’ve … allowed it, and I think that’s made it kind of problematic for guide dog users since dogs who are not trained service animals are brought into public spaces and behave poorly, and that hurts guide dog users.”
Advocates agree discrimination persists, but they differ on what should be done. Pilon says education is the best way to see change. “You don’t see [guide dog handlers] on a regular basis. And making people aware that these are the rights that guide dog handlers have is really important.”
Alongside advocacy campaigns, Pilon says the CNIB will also work on plans for teaching people how to act around guide dogs.
The CNIB’s education plan includes how to treat guide dogs as well as their handlers in public spaces.
Gunther argues that, in addition to further educating the public by clarifying existing regulations, there must be a cultural change and higher standards of training for all dogs, not just guide dogs.
“Anyone who has a dog, that dog should have a minimum level of training. The dog should have a licence that demonstrates that the dog has passed a certain level of training,” he said.
