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In this powerful episode of Remarkable World Commentary, Donna J. Jodhan speaks with longtime advocate Dean Steacy about the roots of his lifelong fight for justice, fairness, and equal opportunity. Dean reflects on advocating for himself from early childhood, pushing past exclusion in sports, overcoming prejudice in school and the workplace, and later building a career in public service and human rights. He shares how his work in government and at the Canadian Human Rights Commission deepened his understanding of discrimination, evidence, and institutional responsibility, while reinforcing his belief that real progress comes through persistence, courage, and a willingness to challenge barriers wherever they appear.
The conversation also explores Dean’s sudden loss of sight in 2003, the long road back through rehabilitation and workplace accommodation, and the personal resilience that helped him return to meaningful work rather than accept defeat. With honesty and conviction, Dean describes the everyday advocacy required to secure accessibility, dignity, and independence, from obtaining adaptive technology on the job to confronting inaccessible services in public life. Throughout the interview, Donna highlights Dean’s enduring contributions to accessibility, human rights, and disability advocacy, making this episode a deeply insightful reflection on perseverance, public controversy, and the quiet but constant work of creating a more inclusive world.
TRANSCRIPT
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Podcast Commentator: Donna J Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, and MBA, invites you to listen to her biweekly podcast, Remarkable World Commentary. Here, Donna shares some of her innermost thoughts, insights, perspectives, and more with her listeners. Donna focuses on topics that directly affect the future of kids, especially kids with disabilities. Donna is a blind advocate, author, site loss coach, dinner mystery producer, writer, entrepreneur, law graduate, and podcast commentator. She has decades of lived experiences, knowledge, skills and expertise in access, technology and information. As someone who has been internationally recognized for her work and roles, she just wants to make things better than possible.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Remarkable World Commentary. I am Donna Jodhan, a lifelong disability advocate and one who sees a world mainly through sound, touch and stubborn optimism. I am a law graduate and accessibility consultant, author, lifelong barrier buster who also happens to be blind. You may know me from a few headline moments. In November of 2010, I won the landmark charter case that forced the Canadian government to make its website accessible to every Canadian, not just to cited ones. And in July of 2019, I co-led the Accessible Canada Act with more than two dozen disability groups to turn equal access into federal law. And most recently, on June the 23rd, 2022, I was greatly humbled by Her Late Majesty’s Platinum Jubilee Award for tireless commitment to improving. Sorry, to removing barriers. When I’m not in a courtroom or in a committee room or in a pottery studio, you will find me coaching kids with vision loss, producing audio mysteries, or helping tech companies to make their gadgets talk back in plain language. Everything I do circles one goal to turn accessibility from an afterthought into everyday practice. I invite you to think of this show as our shared workbench where policy meets lived experience and lived experience sparks fresh ideas. Now, before we jump into today’s conversation, let me shine a spotlight on today’s guest, a change maker whose work is every bit as remarkable as the world that we are trying to build. I am pleased and I am honored, and I am privileged to have Dean Steacy, who I have known for the past decade or more, be on our podcast today. Dean, welcome to our podcast.
Dean Steacy: Wow, that’s quite a bit of an introduction, but more than happy to be here.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Dean, you and I met, I think it was in 2016 when we both attended the face to face conference or whatever you want to call it on. They were asking for input from our community. Your reputation preceded you a long time ago. I knew a lot about you, but I always wanted to meet you. And on that day, I did so. Dean, for listeners who may be meeting you for the very first time, how would you introduce yourself today? Not just by title, but by the values and experiences, experiences that have shaped your you.
Dean Steacy: Well I, I would say that I, I as well am have been a lifelong advocate. I started advocating for myself when I was about four years old. Aside from being blind, I also have a physical syndrome, which is called ectrodactyly. Which means that I don’t have all my toes and all my fingers. And it’s, it’s it’s quite the syndrome. It goes from being very mild to being very, very severe. And I’m on the severe side, but I as a kid, I wanted to play hockey and nobody would let me play hockey. So I advocated for with it for my parents and my dad, who after had right here, who was a United Church minister, agreed. And but was with the agreement that if I start, I have to play the whole season. I can’t quit in the middle of the season. So I agreed to that. And then he stepped in with the conveners of the sport and started making noise. And I was then allowed to go try out and when I try it out, I’d go into the change room with all the boys and change. Well, if you, if you were able to see and, or you can see and you, the first thing you would notice is my hands. They’re not like a normal person’s hands where they, they have a thumb and fight for fingers. I have what’s easily described as the lobster claw syndrome. My hands look like lobster claws. Okay, a and so I was. Nope. You can’t play. You get out on the ice. And you know, I couldn’t play. And then parents would see my hands and they would complain about the crippled kid. Why is he on the ice? Because he’s taking taking spot from my kid who? You know, we’re at seven, eight years old, and the parents are already saying the kid’s going to play in the NHL.
Dean Steacy: So what I started doing was when I had to go to tryouts, I come in, I’d have everything on, and I just step out on the ice so no one saw anything. And then when I made the team, then I’d go into the dressing room and there was now nothing they could do because I was on the team. Right. So that was kind of my advocating. That’s where it started. And it wasn’t just in hockey, it was in baseball. It was in football. It was pretty much any sport that I wanted to do. I had to push and shove to get on on the team. But once I made it on the team and showed that I could do it it kind of broke down some barriers and I made friends and but I have to say that from there I hit school. I was teased unmercifully throughout school until I hit university. Once I hit university, it kind of went away. But school was a, a story unto itself. But I, I mean, I was a good student. It wasn’t a straight A student. But, you know, I had pretty good marks and I made it through school and then went on to college and university. And then I got I spent six years in the militia and that going through that. And it was good because it allowed me to pay for my college and university. And then my first job was with like my first full time job was with the Department of Education in the province of Saskatchewan.
Dean Steacy: So I did, I did that. And that was back in the very early 80s where employment equity wasn’t really known as employment equity was affirmative action. And I thought, okay, well, I’m going to go in and do this on my own. But it became quite clear that the only way I was going to get permanent employee and it had to sort of stop the managers from thinking, oh, he doesn’t have all his, his fingers in his hands. So he’s got to be stupid. He’s got to be retarded. Excuse me for using that word, but that was the use that was being used in the 80s. So I used affirmative action and that then when it morphed into employment equity and all of that stuff, that’s what I used when I got into the federal government. So but to do all of that, I had to advocate. And so I’m a self-taught advocator. I’ve always gone after barriers wherever I see them and I’m not. Shy at making waves or making noise, and I’ve done that on several occasions. To get stuff varies reduced or discrimination taken away. So my values have always been justice, fair play and everybody is human. Everybody has a right to try. It doesn’t matter what the color of your skin is. It doesn’t matter what your ethnicity is. Everybody has a right to try and to to be successful. And other people need to start putting their stereotypes away and give the person a chance. That’s kind of the big thing I’ve always asked for. And sometimes I was successful, sometimes I wasn’t.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: So, Dean, when you look back on your early life and early working years, what experiences first formed your sense of justice, responsibility, and public service?
Dean Steacy: Well I think I just innately my mom once said to, to my, my wife when she was describing me and my, my brothers that I always wanted things to be just and fair. And so it kind of was innate in me that that’s what I, I wanted and I kind of pushed for that wherever, wherever I worked. And we worked at the beginning, in the 80s the early 80s was not easy. It, it people didn’t understand non visual disability and having eye problems. And my, my eye problems start really started to, to show themselves in the mid 80s in that, that my eye, my vision was going down. So I needed it in work, I needed accommodation and I needed because we’re now in the computer age in 84, 85, I needed technology to help me use the computer in just a larger screen. And it was a, a hell of a fight to get that stuff. And even when my doctors who the eye doctor I had here in Ottawa, the Ottawa Institute, Doctor Documentservices. A well known, well respected eye doctor. It was still fought. The government still fought it. And, you know, then it kind of started and I’m not saying I started it, but I was at the forefront of if you didn’t agree with the doctor’s opinion, then you needed to bring somebody from Health Canada in and reassess it because you’re not a doctor.
Dean Steacy: And I’ve got a doctor saying I need a larger screen. And because my hands are different, I need, I need a special keyboard and oh, no, no, you can’t have it. You can’t. So it was amazing how well it worked with Health Canada because my doctor was well known, good reputation, and they listened to what he said and Health Canada turned around and said, you got to give it to him. It’s accommodation. And I still had problems getting accommodation throughout. Throughout all my career, I had to push and file some formal grievances and get things done. And I did it. But most of all, when I worked the first job I had after I left Saskatchewan and came to Ottawa was working in a place called Charities Division. So where I, I registered in charities. So you, I learned to go through their documentation and from what I saw being written by organizations that wanted to be charities, I kind of developed a, a sense that there is a group of, of Canadians out there en En masse who who want to do the right thing and who want to do good things.
Dean Steacy: And I just learned that that kind of was an area that I, I wanted to be involved in. But as a federal civil servant, I had to be careful, especially working with Revenue Canada, that I wasn’t the sort of biting the hand that feeds me, or joining a group that was lobbying against what the government was doing. Revenue Canada at the time didn’t like that sort of things. But in 1990, so I worked for charities division from 1985 until 1997, when I joined the Human Rights Commission. And I’ve had all sorts of cases from pretty much I’ve done cases under every section of the the act and under every ground. It’s in the act. Up and done. Investigation reports. And from that I learned again, you know, that there’s there’s things going on. And as an investigator you have to look at, at facts and, you know, I always said there’s, there’s three sides to every story. There’s the complainant side, the respondent side, and then there’s the truth. And sometimes it is, it’s just what falls in the middle. And you go in things being unbiased. And once you gone through all the documentations, you make your determination. And I used to joke, if I made both sides unhappy, I’d done a really great investigation.
Dean Steacy: But you know, you, you make your recommendation And I knew from doing the job that one party was going to be mad at me if I said to the complainant, sorry, your complaint is unfounded. They were going to be angry. If I said to the respondents, I’m sending it to tribunal. They were going to be angry. So I learned a lot in that job. I learned the law. I learned how the law worked. And when I’m talking to the law, strictly referring to administrative law. And from there, I moved on. Once I retired, I moved on and started advocating on my own a bit. And then, you know, pushing for things with the banks and the telecommunication industry and different, different types of Organizations that I was specifically being involved in. But there were barriers and I tried to remove them. And I had other colleagues and friends who were also disabled and I would help them. And that was basically my advocacy was self-advocacy, but then it, it, it moved on to you know, once successful candidate act sort of put itself out there and said it was going to come into force. I worked amongst many different groups and I think I even worked with you a bit on.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yes.
Dean Steacy: Putting putting pieces together for the accessible Canada Act. And I think that piece of legislation, while not perfect, it it’s doing it’s or sort of doing his job. There’s lots that could be improved in it, but I think that’s where I now do my my advocacy and is reducing barriers and trying to get them taken away.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Now, you permanently lost your sight in 2003. Can you take us back to that turning point and share what that period was really like for you?
Dean Steacy: Well, I got to give maybe a bit of background. I’d had a cornea transplant, and I popped a stitch. So when I was waiting to
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: How did you do that?
Dean Steacy: I just popped it just the, the stitch just popped on the cornea. The transplant?
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah.
Dean Steacy: And when it went in to have it Have looked at. Excuse me. When I went in to have it looked at. I had a staph bacterial staph infection had gotten into my left eye. So. Yeah. And it turned out pretty bad. They had to inject antibiotics into my eye. And when they did that, I went from seeing to not seeing in both eyes like it was in an instant.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh.
Dean Steacy: So in 2003, on the weekend of, of remembrance? No, Thanksgiving on the weekend of Thanksgiving, I went from seeing to not seeing. I spent 40 days in the hospital hooked up to a drug called amoxicillin that was being pumped directly into my heart to make sure that I. The staph infection was being killed. So once. I won’t go into all the gritty details here, but once I was able to to get off the medication and I started rehab. I realized that, okay, I’m blind. What am I going to do? I’m. I just going to sit there and be a blind person. No, I’m going to do what it takes to get back to work and become a, a person who’s participating in, in work in the system. I just, I couldn’t, I couldn’t sit there even though I was being told, oh, we could medically retire you.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh, no.
Dean Steacy: You could be, you know, you could be. And I. After talking to my wife, I was going. No way, said I. I went back to work.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah.
Dean Steacy: So I didn’t again, you can call it negotiate or advocate or whatever you want to call it. I had to do that to get back to work at investigations. And luckily, you know, I’m working for the Canadian Human Rights Commission. They understand accommodation and we negotiated went back to work. And it was rough. You know, I’d been off from work for two and a half years, so I had to, you know, get back to work. You don’t go back immediately and you build up. And within six months I was back to work full time, but we were still going through a lot of accommodation and figuring out how I could be an investigator and continue to be an investigator. And we took about six months to work that out. And once I had my accommodations basically, which was having full time sighted attendant everything at the commission is received on paper and the commission didn’t have the systems so that it could be scanned and turned into a document that I could read because everybody was using PDFs. And as you well know, the PDF is usually the bane of our lives because they don’t work.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yes.
Dean Steacy: So I ended up getting an assistant who worked for me for over ten years and we developed a really good working relationship And she’d read the documents, and then I would take everything in, and then I’d start dictating to her and she would type. And that’s how we put our reports together. And you know, it’s kind of how it went. And then I decided in, in 2015 that I, I. I needed to retire because I just was not, had gotten to the point where I was not enjoying my job anymore. And I had always said that once I’m not having fun, yes, I’m going to change. So I, I, I retired.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Now.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: After that life changing loss of sight, what helped you to rebuild your confidence, your independence and sense of purpose and who or what supported you.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Along the way.
Dean Steacy: I have to give a lot of credit to my getting back off of or out of disability to, to my wife. We were told at the time I lived in, in Quebec and I now live back in Ontario, but I had an organization called la santé de the rehabilitation in Quebec, which is basically the center for rehabilitation. Right. And I had a couple of very good I’ll say trainers, but mobility trainers and a couple people that helped me. Figure out how I was going to do things. And when they realized I was going to go back to work and I was not going to retire, they had to start figuring out how to help me do that. So they did there was input and there was input from my, my eye doctor about what I could do or what I couldn’t or shouldn’t do. And but basically the Joanne, my, my spouse, she was the one who stood behind me and prop me up when I, you know, felt I couldn’t do it or I was down and, and saying, you know, I want to give up because we all go through that. You just don’t get off of or out of rehabilitation or get out of, oh, it’s time to go back to work and enter back into work. And it’s all all perfect. I mean, I think most people that have been, you know, perfect. Not perfect, but normal and then have an accident and they’re permanently disabled. Know how hard this is? I mean, it’s, it’s I know what I lost because I could see. And I’ve talked to blind people that have been blind all their lives. And you go on to talk. About things that they don’t kind of understand.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Right?
Dean Steacy: Where you’re coming from as a sighted person has lost their eyesight. And it’s it is two different things. And in some cases it’s three different things because you have people with low vision and all. I mean, there’s hundreds of different levels of blindness and each one has its own experience. So when I was getting told, oh, you can’t do this. I was going, yes, I can just give me the give me the means to do it and I’ll do it. And then I had a couple of cases of what we can’t afford it. And I said, well, you work for the federal government. You can’t not afford it. So let’s figure out how to do it by. I was was lucky in that I met a couple of other people that, that were in the accommodation industry who, you know, readily came to my help at work and showed work how they could they could do things. I’ll give you one, one example of, of the, the way the government works sometimes. And how logic is, is, is word that the government doesn’t understand. I’m totally blind, but I’ve got to print off my documents because the document has to go into the file.
Dean Steacy: And before I got my assistant, I was doing all of that. Well, I’d go to the printer. There’s nobody around at the printer. I couldn’t ask people which one my document was because there’s a stack of paper there, and I’d asked for a printer. So I started taking all the papers to find and then putting them on my scanner to scan to find out what my, which was my report. And then and I’d find it, but I’d have all the other papers there, but I’d leave them on the corner of my desk, and then people would come into my office and say, did you take. I said, yeah, I took and have a conversation about it. And it was basically the rest of the staff. Would you get him a printer? Because he’s disrupting our work because. And it. So it’s like it was logic that I should have a printer. Yes, but the government didn’t see that as a need for me to have a printer, because I could go to the printer like everybody else. So that’s the silly type of advocating you have to do when you go. You know, it makes sense that I have a printer.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah.
Dean Steacy: And I got the printer and everybody’s happy because I wasn’t taking anybody else’s reports. So it it works not just in the government, but I’ve had that happen with with my cell phone provider when stuff was coming and trying to get my bills in on disk so I could read it. And other people were, you know, I was fighting to get people. So they get the bank. They could get their their bills in Braille. And You know, that, that type of thing. So even though I was at work at the Canadian Human Rights Commission, you know, when I get off work, my time is my time, right? So I was pushing for things and, and I was making, making waves. Like I said earlier, I, I had no problem making waves when it was necessary. Even, even to the, the, the embarrassment of my family members would go do something.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah.
Dean Steacy: And where’s this? I don’t know. I said, well, you need to have it. No I don’t. Yeah. Well, yes you do. So this is the conversations you have because they just they don’t they don’t understand.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Know.
Dean Steacy: What disability means and what it means to for some people to have a Braille menu or something else so that the as a client, you can, you can be served. So it, it, it worked even when I was getting served a meal, you know, you probably experienced this, you’re at a restaurant and you order something and they just drop the plate in front of you, right? And then you’re filling up your water. You had your water glass where you knew it was, and now all of a sudden you’re searching for your water glass. Oh, you hit it and you spill it, and they get upset at you for spilling it. And it’s like I’m not it’s not uncommon for me to drop the f bomb. And there’s like, you know, sometimes I would come out when I’m explaining to the server, like you effing put it in the wrong effing place. When I told you earlier, I’m blind to put it in one spot. And so this is advocacy and people don’t think that it’s advocacy, but it is because you’re teaching someone who wasn’t thinking about, oh, I got to do things differently for the blind and that that tiny little piece of advocacy spreads because the next time you go back to the restaurant, all the servers know he’s blind and you got to do certain things a certain way with him.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah.
Dean Steacy: Or he’s going to yell at you and nobody likes being yelled at. I mean, I may yell.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: It.
Dean Steacy: At a person for for, you know, putting a barrier in my place and had a couple of times where I went to places and I told them this, you can’t have this there because it potentially could hurt me. And I’ve gone into places where they don’t care and I’ve tripped over.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Or.
Dean Steacy: Over things and it’s luckily I haven’t been hurt. I just get up and shake it off. And then of course, the store is embarrassed as all get out and you’ve got somebody there taking around the store and getting what you need. But it for me, it’s all little bits of acts that are advocacy and that that’s, that’s what is going to slowly make things better.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: I’m afraid our daily lives is comprised of advocacy for the most part.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: And yeah.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: It’s the only way that we can build awareness, make people more aware. We don’t have a choice, right?
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Right.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah. But before your accessibility advocacy became so visible, you were associated with human rights work in Canada, what did that chapter of your life teach you about rights, institutions, evidence, and fairness?
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Well.
Dean Steacy: I would have to say that the way the Human Rights Act is written, it’s, it’s all about that. It’s about anti-discrimination. Quite frankly, I think that she changed the name of the act to the Canadian anti-discrimination act instead of the Human Rights Act, because that act is really dealing with anti-discrimination under under the different 13 or 14 grounds it has now. So I learned that usually by the time a complaint comes in, the complainant is at their last straw. They tried everything and they’re there. They’re coming to us because they feel like they have no other choice. And I learned that the majority of respondents, no matter what the complaint is about their their vocabulary is deny, deny, deny.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah.
Dean Steacy: So what I, what I learned is In the case of the human rights area, because I, I was an intake officer and investigator, a conciliator, a mediator a manager in the 18 years that I was there. So I had a lot of different jobs. My last two big jobs were as investigator. And then it moved into mediation. So I learned that that, you know, you’ve got, there’s a lot of, I’m going to use the word convincing, but it’s synonymous with advocacy and it’s synonymous with a whole bunch of different things that you have to do with the respondent to understand, make them understand you as you as a respondent have certain responsibilities that you have to maintain. And when they go no you don’t. Then it becomes quite easy. You just send it off to tribunal and the tribunal deal with it. But there was a lot of times where once the, the, the respondent understood more clearly what had happened and they were speaking to me as the investigator, not the complainant, because the, the adversarial piece that was going on between those two parties, sometimes it was so broken that it just needed somebody else to step in and, you know, calm things down and take the facts from both sides and come up with that maybe isn’t the actual truth, but you come up with a better story or a more fuller story of what was going on at at the workplace. And you, you kind of developed or at least I kind of developed a style of how you treat both parties.
Dean Steacy: But I learned a lot about the law. I learned a lot about in administrative law, what the rights are and what your rights are and what my rights are. And I, I, you know, for the 18 years that I was there, I have to say, I really, really enjoyed things. And had I had a good, good 18 years, but like anybody, some days were good, some days were, were bad. But what made me retire in 2015 was that there was a whole bunch of legislative changes coming on and a whole bunch of changes that the Commission and I had the act memorized. I had the different pieces of what I had to do as an as an investigator down. I didn’t need to think about anything. I could just do my job and, you know, do it sufficiently well that my managers were happy with what I was doing. But I didn’t I didn’t want to go through the course of remembering an act with a whole bunch of changes in it and then procedures and a lot of procedures were being changed. I didn’t want to memorize them. I was, I’d had enough. So that’s kind of what I talked to my spouse about it. And I’d already been working in as a federal civil servant, a provincial civil servant in the military for 40 years. So I just pulled the plug and I haven’t looked back.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: You know, advocacy is not easy. But you, along with so many others like the late Chris Stark, the late John Ray, you guys have done so much. And you know, there’s so much more to be done, but our clock is ticking down. I wanted to ask you this question. Your name has also surfaced in difficult public debates over the years.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: When you reflect on that chapter, sir, what do you most want listeners to understand about the human side of living through public controversy?
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Well.
Dean Steacy: A, it’s not easy, but if you’re doing the right thing, you get through it and you can walk away with your your head held high. I for people that don’t know from 2006 through to about 2011, 12, I was the lead investigator on hate on the internet.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh boy.
Dean Steacy: So I’m proud I can proudly say that I managed shut 3 or 4 hate groups down and shut their websites down and have them prosecuted. It it wasn’t easy. I got it’s rare that an investigator gets called into tribunal to testify, but because I was the lead investigator and I set up the process to investigate hate complaints. I get called in to testify and not not by the complainer or the commission, but I get called in by the respondents because they wanted to show that the way I was investigating didn’t, didn’t make sense and that I wasn’t treating the respondents right. So I would caused controversy is and it was a very technical question, but this is what got a lot of publicity. It’s the lawyer for the respondents to the organization. That was at tribunal. She asked me, do you believe in freedom of speech?
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh.
Dean Steacy: And I said, no, it’s not that they don’t believe in that. It’s what I believe in is under the Canadian Constitution. It’s the freedom of thought and expression. It’s not the freedom of speech. We don’t have that terminology in our eye or in our context in the overall Constitution. I know it’s in the charter, but the Constitution is, is the Constitution and it has jurisdiction over the charter. So when I answered the question, of course, everybody jumps on it that you’ve got a civil servant who. Doesn’t believe in freedom of speech. That’s what they picked up on. They didn’t pick up on the rest of. The answer is that I believe in thought. The Constitution. So that was in the New York Times, the London Times, the Australian Times is it throughout. It made it into time magazine. It made it.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Into. Oh my.
Dean Steacy: It made it into a whole bunch of stuff. I was at the the I forget what is it? Bill Riley in the United States wanted to interview me. I always said there was a whole bunch of press people that wanted to interview me, but. What? Well, that caused a controversy. And for me, it it didn’t bother me that it caused a controversy because I knew what I was doing under the law was lawful and it was right and what I was doing and it was going to close down hate mongers. I don’t know anybody other than a hate monger who would think that they should be allowed to be active like most Canadians who believe in our values don’t believe in hate. And I had a Senator Findley who wanted me fired, so he went into the Senate and said a whole bunch of stuff about me, which he picked up from the press and it was wrong. So I was called to testify before the House committee, and I kind of refused and my boss at the time said, no, he’s not going to come in to be raked over the coals, but I then had a one on one meeting with I forget what his first name is, but his last name was Hillier, who was the chair of the Human Rights Commission or the Human Rights Committee. And I explained to him what was going on, and I told him what you were hearing from the press is absolutely untrue. And the two Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn had lied to the house.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh, boy.
Dean Steacy: And I could prove it. And so I gave over the documentation and they read it over and I he apologized and I said, I’m sorry. That’s not good enough. I, I was slandered at a house committee. I’d like apologies from the whole committee and I also from the chief commissioner at the time also asked that Ezra Levant and Mark Stein not be allowed on the parliamentary precinct, and then they can’t testify before the committee, which they were scheduled to do because the was known that they were going to come back and slander me again. So in the House, I felt it more important to clear my name in the government, in the House, in the House of Commons and everything. Then the press, I mean, the press is the press and they get stuff wrong all the time. Yes, but the house the House has a responsibility to make sure that Canadians especially when it comes to stuff like this, are not slandered. So it was all fixed and I continued on until 2012 when the Liberal government amended the act and took it out. And so I had moved on to other parts of of investigation. So and then the next step I had was I developed the the, the policy around racism for the commission and what, because we were having a lot of complaints from people being stopped by you know, the RCMP or even other police forces. It may not have been a federal jurisdiction, but we were still getting concern and complaints about, you know, I’m being treated in a racist manner. I got pulled over because I’m black And there were there’s a case that went to tribunal, so I can talk about it fairly freely as there was a case where a young man here in Ottawa was driving on the parkway, which is federal jurisdiction in Ottawa. He got pulled over in his mom’s convertible Mercedes, and the cop pulled him over strictly because he was black. And he wanted to know why and how he could afford to drive a Mercedes Benz.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh, no.
Dean Steacy: And so it was like, it’s my mom’s car. I’m going to pick her up. And he’s still the cop. Didn’t want to believe him. So he’s pulled out of the car and they went put him in the back of the RCMP car. Basically they arrested him. And once they got the verification from the mother who was a lawyer, happened to take it to the press, but then it came to us as a complaint. And at that point we had to decide we didn’t really know ourselves how how are we going to decide or determine if that was racial profiling? You know, did he get pulled over because he had a broken light and he should be pulled over, but if he was pulled over because he’s black driving a Mercedes, that’s outright discrimination. So it forced a lot of police forces to start figuring out how their statistics show whether or not they’re pulling over the appropriate number of visible minorities or whites or, or what, what’s what’s going on. And a lot of police forces when they started doing the statistics. We’re coming up with proportionately. They’re pulling over. Majority of black people than they are white people or a lot of other other racial groups. So I know in Ottawa, the RCMP and the Ottawa police have changed the way they, they do traffic stops, which is a good thing. But it’s all, this is all little steps and that’s what happens. And this is what really, what I learned the most is that advocacy is, is tiny little steps. But at a certain point, some of us have to decide to be the trailblazers. And if we’re not going to trailblaze, things are not going to change because I’ve talked to people, you know, why don’t you complain? Why don’t you do this? Oh, it’s too much work. Yeah, but you’re. You’re okay with being discriminated against. I don’t want to complain. And not that for me was. No, I’m. I’m going to stand up for myself. And if it means other people get it, then that’s great too. But I’m, I’m going to stand up for my rights.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: This has been one of the most insightful interviews that I’ve had with any advocate in a very long time. I’ve learned so much about your strength and your commitment, and I want to thank you for for having, you know, walked the walk with the rest of us. It’s people like you we need. And, you know, like in closing, I just want to thank you for for what you’ve done, you know?
Dean Steacy: Oh, thank you for thank thank you for the thanks. I’m still doing it. I’m. I’m not I’m not doing it as much as I was. But but I, I mean, I’ve been working with and for years and I’ve worked with the CBC to make sure that the Olympics have got descriptive video. And I think from the first year that they put it out to this year with the Olympics and the Paralympics, it’s it’s been much improved, improved. I’ve you know, I’ve done stuff with banks to get things made.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah.
Dean Steacy: Accessible. I’ve worked with TV stations. I’m still doing that. My, my pet peeve on all of this is descriptive video and trying to get it so that everybody has it, whether it’s on TV, the theaters or, or wherever. And it’s, I’m doing what I want to do and what I like. And I think that that’s an easy spot to say. If you want to advocate, pick something that you like that you know needs to be fixed. And, you know, go out and do it because it’s really not that hard because like I. I can say that from when I was a kid playing hockey and having a disabled kid on the team was like verboten. Now lots of teams are more than happy to have a disabled kid on the team because they can say, look, we are working with the disabled community or we’ve got a. Isn’t it great that we have a couple of girls playing on the team? To the point now that you know, advocacy has done a lot. We’ve now got a professional women’s hockey league.
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Dean Steacy: And I think that that obviously I haven’t worked on any of that, but I know people that have and but you know, it’s a change. There was no thought in 1974 that there’d ever be a professional hockey league for women in Canada.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Right?
Dean Steacy: So I mean, advocacy works.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Thank you very, very much, Dean. I really, really appreciate it. You keep on going.
Dean Steacy: Yeah. And you too, Donna.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Thank you. Dean.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Thanks.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Alright, now. Bye bye now.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Bye bye.
Podcast Commentator: Donna wants to hear from you and invites you to write to her at donnajodhan@gmail.com. Until next time.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA
Global Leader In Disability Rights, Digital Accessibility, And Inclusive Policy Reform
Turning policy into progress for people with disabilities.
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Remarkable World Commentary Episode #81: Interview with Dean Steacy, Lifelong Advocate
🎙️ Listen to this Podcast.
In this powerful episode of Remarkable World Commentary, Donna J. Jodhan speaks with longtime advocate Dean Steacy about the roots of his lifelong fight for justice, fairness, and equal opportunity. Dean reflects on advocating for himself from early childhood, pushing past exclusion in sports, overcoming prejudice in school and the workplace, and later building a career in public service and human rights. He shares how his work in government and at the Canadian Human Rights Commission deepened his understanding of discrimination, evidence, and institutional responsibility, while reinforcing his belief that real progress comes through persistence, courage, and a willingness to challenge barriers wherever they appear.
The conversation also explores Dean’s sudden loss of sight in 2003, the long road back through rehabilitation and workplace accommodation, and the personal resilience that helped him return to meaningful work rather than accept defeat. With honesty and conviction, Dean describes the everyday advocacy required to secure accessibility, dignity, and independence, from obtaining adaptive technology on the job to confronting inaccessible services in public life. Throughout the interview, Donna highlights Dean’s enduring contributions to accessibility, human rights, and disability advocacy, making this episode a deeply insightful reflection on perseverance, public controversy, and the quiet but constant work of creating a more inclusive world.
TRANSCRIPT
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Podcast Commentator: Donna J Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, and MBA, invites you to listen to her biweekly podcast, Remarkable World Commentary. Here, Donna shares some of her innermost thoughts, insights, perspectives, and more with her listeners. Donna focuses on topics that directly affect the future of kids, especially kids with disabilities. Donna is a blind advocate, author, site loss coach, dinner mystery producer, writer, entrepreneur, law graduate, and podcast commentator. She has decades of lived experiences, knowledge, skills and expertise in access, technology and information. As someone who has been internationally recognized for her work and roles, she just wants to make things better than possible.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Remarkable World Commentary. I am Donna Jodhan, a lifelong disability advocate and one who sees a world mainly through sound, touch and stubborn optimism. I am a law graduate and accessibility consultant, author, lifelong barrier buster who also happens to be blind. You may know me from a few headline moments. In November of 2010, I won the landmark charter case that forced the Canadian government to make its website accessible to every Canadian, not just to cited ones. And in July of 2019, I co-led the Accessible Canada Act with more than two dozen disability groups to turn equal access into federal law. And most recently, on June the 23rd, 2022, I was greatly humbled by Her Late Majesty’s Platinum Jubilee Award for tireless commitment to improving. Sorry, to removing barriers. When I’m not in a courtroom or in a committee room or in a pottery studio, you will find me coaching kids with vision loss, producing audio mysteries, or helping tech companies to make their gadgets talk back in plain language. Everything I do circles one goal to turn accessibility from an afterthought into everyday practice. I invite you to think of this show as our shared workbench where policy meets lived experience and lived experience sparks fresh ideas. Now, before we jump into today’s conversation, let me shine a spotlight on today’s guest, a change maker whose work is every bit as remarkable as the world that we are trying to build. I am pleased and I am honored, and I am privileged to have Dean Steacy, who I have known for the past decade or more, be on our podcast today. Dean, welcome to our podcast.
Dean Steacy: Wow, that’s quite a bit of an introduction, but more than happy to be here.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Dean, you and I met, I think it was in 2016 when we both attended the face to face conference or whatever you want to call it on. They were asking for input from our community. Your reputation preceded you a long time ago. I knew a lot about you, but I always wanted to meet you. And on that day, I did so. Dean, for listeners who may be meeting you for the very first time, how would you introduce yourself today? Not just by title, but by the values and experiences, experiences that have shaped your you.
Dean Steacy: Well I, I would say that I, I as well am have been a lifelong advocate. I started advocating for myself when I was about four years old. Aside from being blind, I also have a physical syndrome, which is called ectrodactyly. Which means that I don’t have all my toes and all my fingers. And it’s, it’s it’s quite the syndrome. It goes from being very mild to being very, very severe. And I’m on the severe side, but I as a kid, I wanted to play hockey and nobody would let me play hockey. So I advocated for with it for my parents and my dad, who after had right here, who was a United Church minister, agreed. And but was with the agreement that if I start, I have to play the whole season. I can’t quit in the middle of the season. So I agreed to that. And then he stepped in with the conveners of the sport and started making noise. And I was then allowed to go try out and when I try it out, I’d go into the change room with all the boys and change. Well, if you, if you were able to see and, or you can see and you, the first thing you would notice is my hands. They’re not like a normal person’s hands where they, they have a thumb and fight for fingers. I have what’s easily described as the lobster claw syndrome. My hands look like lobster claws. Okay, a and so I was. Nope. You can’t play. You get out on the ice. And you know, I couldn’t play. And then parents would see my hands and they would complain about the crippled kid. Why is he on the ice? Because he’s taking taking spot from my kid who? You know, we’re at seven, eight years old, and the parents are already saying the kid’s going to play in the NHL.
Dean Steacy: So what I started doing was when I had to go to tryouts, I come in, I’d have everything on, and I just step out on the ice so no one saw anything. And then when I made the team, then I’d go into the dressing room and there was now nothing they could do because I was on the team. Right. So that was kind of my advocating. That’s where it started. And it wasn’t just in hockey, it was in baseball. It was in football. It was pretty much any sport that I wanted to do. I had to push and shove to get on on the team. But once I made it on the team and showed that I could do it it kind of broke down some barriers and I made friends and but I have to say that from there I hit school. I was teased unmercifully throughout school until I hit university. Once I hit university, it kind of went away. But school was a, a story unto itself. But I, I mean, I was a good student. It wasn’t a straight A student. But, you know, I had pretty good marks and I made it through school and then went on to college and university. And then I got I spent six years in the militia and that going through that. And it was good because it allowed me to pay for my college and university. And then my first job was with like my first full time job was with the Department of Education in the province of Saskatchewan.
Dean Steacy: So I did, I did that. And that was back in the very early 80s where employment equity wasn’t really known as employment equity was affirmative action. And I thought, okay, well, I’m going to go in and do this on my own. But it became quite clear that the only way I was going to get permanent employee and it had to sort of stop the managers from thinking, oh, he doesn’t have all his, his fingers in his hands. So he’s got to be stupid. He’s got to be retarded. Excuse me for using that word, but that was the use that was being used in the 80s. So I used affirmative action and that then when it morphed into employment equity and all of that stuff, that’s what I used when I got into the federal government. So but to do all of that, I had to advocate. And so I’m a self-taught advocator. I’ve always gone after barriers wherever I see them and I’m not. Shy at making waves or making noise, and I’ve done that on several occasions. To get stuff varies reduced or discrimination taken away. So my values have always been justice, fair play and everybody is human. Everybody has a right to try. It doesn’t matter what the color of your skin is. It doesn’t matter what your ethnicity is. Everybody has a right to try and to to be successful. And other people need to start putting their stereotypes away and give the person a chance. That’s kind of the big thing I’ve always asked for. And sometimes I was successful, sometimes I wasn’t.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: So, Dean, when you look back on your early life and early working years, what experiences first formed your sense of justice, responsibility, and public service?
Dean Steacy: Well I think I just innately my mom once said to, to my, my wife when she was describing me and my, my brothers that I always wanted things to be just and fair. And so it kind of was innate in me that that’s what I, I wanted and I kind of pushed for that wherever, wherever I worked. And we worked at the beginning, in the 80s the early 80s was not easy. It, it people didn’t understand non visual disability and having eye problems. And my, my eye problems start really started to, to show themselves in the mid 80s in that, that my eye, my vision was going down. So I needed it in work, I needed accommodation and I needed because we’re now in the computer age in 84, 85, I needed technology to help me use the computer in just a larger screen. And it was a, a hell of a fight to get that stuff. And even when my doctors who the eye doctor I had here in Ottawa, the Ottawa Institute, Doctor Documentservices. A well known, well respected eye doctor. It was still fought. The government still fought it. And, you know, then it kind of started and I’m not saying I started it, but I was at the forefront of if you didn’t agree with the doctor’s opinion, then you needed to bring somebody from Health Canada in and reassess it because you’re not a doctor.
Dean Steacy: And I’ve got a doctor saying I need a larger screen. And because my hands are different, I need, I need a special keyboard and oh, no, no, you can’t have it. You can’t. So it was amazing how well it worked with Health Canada because my doctor was well known, good reputation, and they listened to what he said and Health Canada turned around and said, you got to give it to him. It’s accommodation. And I still had problems getting accommodation throughout. Throughout all my career, I had to push and file some formal grievances and get things done. And I did it. But most of all, when I worked the first job I had after I left Saskatchewan and came to Ottawa was working in a place called Charities Division. So where I, I registered in charities. So you, I learned to go through their documentation and from what I saw being written by organizations that wanted to be charities, I kind of developed a, a sense that there is a group of, of Canadians out there en En masse who who want to do the right thing and who want to do good things.
Dean Steacy: And I just learned that that kind of was an area that I, I wanted to be involved in. But as a federal civil servant, I had to be careful, especially working with Revenue Canada, that I wasn’t the sort of biting the hand that feeds me, or joining a group that was lobbying against what the government was doing. Revenue Canada at the time didn’t like that sort of things. But in 1990, so I worked for charities division from 1985 until 1997, when I joined the Human Rights Commission. And I’ve had all sorts of cases from pretty much I’ve done cases under every section of the the act and under every ground. It’s in the act. Up and done. Investigation reports. And from that I learned again, you know, that there’s there’s things going on. And as an investigator you have to look at, at facts and, you know, I always said there’s, there’s three sides to every story. There’s the complainant side, the respondent side, and then there’s the truth. And sometimes it is, it’s just what falls in the middle. And you go in things being unbiased. And once you gone through all the documentations, you make your determination. And I used to joke, if I made both sides unhappy, I’d done a really great investigation.
Dean Steacy: But you know, you, you make your recommendation And I knew from doing the job that one party was going to be mad at me if I said to the complainant, sorry, your complaint is unfounded. They were going to be angry. If I said to the respondents, I’m sending it to tribunal. They were going to be angry. So I learned a lot in that job. I learned the law. I learned how the law worked. And when I’m talking to the law, strictly referring to administrative law. And from there, I moved on. Once I retired, I moved on and started advocating on my own a bit. And then, you know, pushing for things with the banks and the telecommunication industry and different, different types of Organizations that I was specifically being involved in. But there were barriers and I tried to remove them. And I had other colleagues and friends who were also disabled and I would help them. And that was basically my advocacy was self-advocacy, but then it, it, it moved on to you know, once successful candidate act sort of put itself out there and said it was going to come into force. I worked amongst many different groups and I think I even worked with you a bit on.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yes.
Dean Steacy: Putting putting pieces together for the accessible Canada Act. And I think that piece of legislation, while not perfect, it it’s doing it’s or sort of doing his job. There’s lots that could be improved in it, but I think that’s where I now do my my advocacy and is reducing barriers and trying to get them taken away.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Now, you permanently lost your sight in 2003. Can you take us back to that turning point and share what that period was really like for you?
Dean Steacy: Well, I got to give maybe a bit of background. I’d had a cornea transplant, and I popped a stitch. So when I was waiting to
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: How did you do that?
Dean Steacy: I just popped it just the, the stitch just popped on the cornea. The transplant?
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah.
Dean Steacy: And when it went in to have it Have looked at. Excuse me. When I went in to have it looked at. I had a staph bacterial staph infection had gotten into my left eye. So. Yeah. And it turned out pretty bad. They had to inject antibiotics into my eye. And when they did that, I went from seeing to not seeing in both eyes like it was in an instant.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh.
Dean Steacy: So in 2003, on the weekend of, of remembrance? No, Thanksgiving on the weekend of Thanksgiving, I went from seeing to not seeing. I spent 40 days in the hospital hooked up to a drug called amoxicillin that was being pumped directly into my heart to make sure that I. The staph infection was being killed. So once. I won’t go into all the gritty details here, but once I was able to to get off the medication and I started rehab. I realized that, okay, I’m blind. What am I going to do? I’m. I just going to sit there and be a blind person. No, I’m going to do what it takes to get back to work and become a, a person who’s participating in, in work in the system. I just, I couldn’t, I couldn’t sit there even though I was being told, oh, we could medically retire you.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh, no.
Dean Steacy: You could be, you know, you could be. And I. After talking to my wife, I was going. No way, said I. I went back to work.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah.
Dean Steacy: So I didn’t again, you can call it negotiate or advocate or whatever you want to call it. I had to do that to get back to work at investigations. And luckily, you know, I’m working for the Canadian Human Rights Commission. They understand accommodation and we negotiated went back to work. And it was rough. You know, I’d been off from work for two and a half years, so I had to, you know, get back to work. You don’t go back immediately and you build up. And within six months I was back to work full time, but we were still going through a lot of accommodation and figuring out how I could be an investigator and continue to be an investigator. And we took about six months to work that out. And once I had my accommodations basically, which was having full time sighted attendant everything at the commission is received on paper and the commission didn’t have the systems so that it could be scanned and turned into a document that I could read because everybody was using PDFs. And as you well know, the PDF is usually the bane of our lives because they don’t work.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yes.
Dean Steacy: So I ended up getting an assistant who worked for me for over ten years and we developed a really good working relationship And she’d read the documents, and then I would take everything in, and then I’d start dictating to her and she would type. And that’s how we put our reports together. And you know, it’s kind of how it went. And then I decided in, in 2015 that I, I. I needed to retire because I just was not, had gotten to the point where I was not enjoying my job anymore. And I had always said that once I’m not having fun, yes, I’m going to change. So I, I, I retired.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Now.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: After that life changing loss of sight, what helped you to rebuild your confidence, your independence and sense of purpose and who or what supported you.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Along the way.
Dean Steacy: I have to give a lot of credit to my getting back off of or out of disability to, to my wife. We were told at the time I lived in, in Quebec and I now live back in Ontario, but I had an organization called la santé de the rehabilitation in Quebec, which is basically the center for rehabilitation. Right. And I had a couple of very good I’ll say trainers, but mobility trainers and a couple people that helped me. Figure out how I was going to do things. And when they realized I was going to go back to work and I was not going to retire, they had to start figuring out how to help me do that. So they did there was input and there was input from my, my eye doctor about what I could do or what I couldn’t or shouldn’t do. And but basically the Joanne, my, my spouse, she was the one who stood behind me and prop me up when I, you know, felt I couldn’t do it or I was down and, and saying, you know, I want to give up because we all go through that. You just don’t get off of or out of rehabilitation or get out of, oh, it’s time to go back to work and enter back into work. And it’s all all perfect. I mean, I think most people that have been, you know, perfect. Not perfect, but normal and then have an accident and they’re permanently disabled. Know how hard this is? I mean, it’s, it’s I know what I lost because I could see. And I’ve talked to blind people that have been blind all their lives. And you go on to talk. About things that they don’t kind of understand.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Right?
Dean Steacy: Where you’re coming from as a sighted person has lost their eyesight. And it’s it is two different things. And in some cases it’s three different things because you have people with low vision and all. I mean, there’s hundreds of different levels of blindness and each one has its own experience. So when I was getting told, oh, you can’t do this. I was going, yes, I can just give me the give me the means to do it and I’ll do it. And then I had a couple of cases of what we can’t afford it. And I said, well, you work for the federal government. You can’t not afford it. So let’s figure out how to do it by. I was was lucky in that I met a couple of other people that, that were in the accommodation industry who, you know, readily came to my help at work and showed work how they could they could do things. I’ll give you one, one example of, of the, the way the government works sometimes. And how logic is, is, is word that the government doesn’t understand. I’m totally blind, but I’ve got to print off my documents because the document has to go into the file.
Dean Steacy: And before I got my assistant, I was doing all of that. Well, I’d go to the printer. There’s nobody around at the printer. I couldn’t ask people which one my document was because there’s a stack of paper there, and I’d asked for a printer. So I started taking all the papers to find and then putting them on my scanner to scan to find out what my, which was my report. And then and I’d find it, but I’d have all the other papers there, but I’d leave them on the corner of my desk, and then people would come into my office and say, did you take. I said, yeah, I took and have a conversation about it. And it was basically the rest of the staff. Would you get him a printer? Because he’s disrupting our work because. And it. So it’s like it was logic that I should have a printer. Yes, but the government didn’t see that as a need for me to have a printer, because I could go to the printer like everybody else. So that’s the silly type of advocating you have to do when you go. You know, it makes sense that I have a printer.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah.
Dean Steacy: And I got the printer and everybody’s happy because I wasn’t taking anybody else’s reports. So it it works not just in the government, but I’ve had that happen with with my cell phone provider when stuff was coming and trying to get my bills in on disk so I could read it. And other people were, you know, I was fighting to get people. So they get the bank. They could get their their bills in Braille. And You know, that, that type of thing. So even though I was at work at the Canadian Human Rights Commission, you know, when I get off work, my time is my time, right? So I was pushing for things and, and I was making, making waves. Like I said earlier, I, I had no problem making waves when it was necessary. Even, even to the, the, the embarrassment of my family members would go do something.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah.
Dean Steacy: And where’s this? I don’t know. I said, well, you need to have it. No I don’t. Yeah. Well, yes you do. So this is the conversations you have because they just they don’t they don’t understand.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Know.
Dean Steacy: What disability means and what it means to for some people to have a Braille menu or something else so that the as a client, you can, you can be served. So it, it, it worked even when I was getting served a meal, you know, you probably experienced this, you’re at a restaurant and you order something and they just drop the plate in front of you, right? And then you’re filling up your water. You had your water glass where you knew it was, and now all of a sudden you’re searching for your water glass. Oh, you hit it and you spill it, and they get upset at you for spilling it. And it’s like I’m not it’s not uncommon for me to drop the f bomb. And there’s like, you know, sometimes I would come out when I’m explaining to the server, like you effing put it in the wrong effing place. When I told you earlier, I’m blind to put it in one spot. And so this is advocacy and people don’t think that it’s advocacy, but it is because you’re teaching someone who wasn’t thinking about, oh, I got to do things differently for the blind and that that tiny little piece of advocacy spreads because the next time you go back to the restaurant, all the servers know he’s blind and you got to do certain things a certain way with him.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah.
Dean Steacy: Or he’s going to yell at you and nobody likes being yelled at. I mean, I may yell.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: It.
Dean Steacy: At a person for for, you know, putting a barrier in my place and had a couple of times where I went to places and I told them this, you can’t have this there because it potentially could hurt me. And I’ve gone into places where they don’t care and I’ve tripped over.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Or.
Dean Steacy: Over things and it’s luckily I haven’t been hurt. I just get up and shake it off. And then of course, the store is embarrassed as all get out and you’ve got somebody there taking around the store and getting what you need. But it for me, it’s all little bits of acts that are advocacy and that that’s, that’s what is going to slowly make things better.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: I’m afraid our daily lives is comprised of advocacy for the most part.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: And yeah.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: It’s the only way that we can build awareness, make people more aware. We don’t have a choice, right?
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Right.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah. But before your accessibility advocacy became so visible, you were associated with human rights work in Canada, what did that chapter of your life teach you about rights, institutions, evidence, and fairness?
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Well.
Dean Steacy: I would have to say that the way the Human Rights Act is written, it’s, it’s all about that. It’s about anti-discrimination. Quite frankly, I think that she changed the name of the act to the Canadian anti-discrimination act instead of the Human Rights Act, because that act is really dealing with anti-discrimination under under the different 13 or 14 grounds it has now. So I learned that usually by the time a complaint comes in, the complainant is at their last straw. They tried everything and they’re there. They’re coming to us because they feel like they have no other choice. And I learned that the majority of respondents, no matter what the complaint is about their their vocabulary is deny, deny, deny.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah.
Dean Steacy: So what I, what I learned is In the case of the human rights area, because I, I was an intake officer and investigator, a conciliator, a mediator a manager in the 18 years that I was there. So I had a lot of different jobs. My last two big jobs were as investigator. And then it moved into mediation. So I learned that that, you know, you’ve got, there’s a lot of, I’m going to use the word convincing, but it’s synonymous with advocacy and it’s synonymous with a whole bunch of different things that you have to do with the respondent to understand, make them understand you as you as a respondent have certain responsibilities that you have to maintain. And when they go no you don’t. Then it becomes quite easy. You just send it off to tribunal and the tribunal deal with it. But there was a lot of times where once the, the, the respondent understood more clearly what had happened and they were speaking to me as the investigator, not the complainant, because the, the adversarial piece that was going on between those two parties, sometimes it was so broken that it just needed somebody else to step in and, you know, calm things down and take the facts from both sides and come up with that maybe isn’t the actual truth, but you come up with a better story or a more fuller story of what was going on at at the workplace. And you, you kind of developed or at least I kind of developed a style of how you treat both parties.
Dean Steacy: But I learned a lot about the law. I learned a lot about in administrative law, what the rights are and what your rights are and what my rights are. And I, I, you know, for the 18 years that I was there, I have to say, I really, really enjoyed things. And had I had a good, good 18 years, but like anybody, some days were good, some days were, were bad. But what made me retire in 2015 was that there was a whole bunch of legislative changes coming on and a whole bunch of changes that the Commission and I had the act memorized. I had the different pieces of what I had to do as an as an investigator down. I didn’t need to think about anything. I could just do my job and, you know, do it sufficiently well that my managers were happy with what I was doing. But I didn’t I didn’t want to go through the course of remembering an act with a whole bunch of changes in it and then procedures and a lot of procedures were being changed. I didn’t want to memorize them. I was, I’d had enough. So that’s kind of what I talked to my spouse about it. And I’d already been working in as a federal civil servant, a provincial civil servant in the military for 40 years. So I just pulled the plug and I haven’t looked back.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: You know, advocacy is not easy. But you, along with so many others like the late Chris Stark, the late John Ray, you guys have done so much. And you know, there’s so much more to be done, but our clock is ticking down. I wanted to ask you this question. Your name has also surfaced in difficult public debates over the years.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: When you reflect on that chapter, sir, what do you most want listeners to understand about the human side of living through public controversy?
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Well.
Dean Steacy: A, it’s not easy, but if you’re doing the right thing, you get through it and you can walk away with your your head held high. I for people that don’t know from 2006 through to about 2011, 12, I was the lead investigator on hate on the internet.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh boy.
Dean Steacy: So I’m proud I can proudly say that I managed shut 3 or 4 hate groups down and shut their websites down and have them prosecuted. It it wasn’t easy. I got it’s rare that an investigator gets called into tribunal to testify, but because I was the lead investigator and I set up the process to investigate hate complaints. I get called in to testify and not not by the complainer or the commission, but I get called in by the respondents because they wanted to show that the way I was investigating didn’t, didn’t make sense and that I wasn’t treating the respondents right. So I would caused controversy is and it was a very technical question, but this is what got a lot of publicity. It’s the lawyer for the respondents to the organization. That was at tribunal. She asked me, do you believe in freedom of speech?
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh.
Dean Steacy: And I said, no, it’s not that they don’t believe in that. It’s what I believe in is under the Canadian Constitution. It’s the freedom of thought and expression. It’s not the freedom of speech. We don’t have that terminology in our eye or in our context in the overall Constitution. I know it’s in the charter, but the Constitution is, is the Constitution and it has jurisdiction over the charter. So when I answered the question, of course, everybody jumps on it that you’ve got a civil servant who. Doesn’t believe in freedom of speech. That’s what they picked up on. They didn’t pick up on the rest of. The answer is that I believe in thought. The Constitution. So that was in the New York Times, the London Times, the Australian Times is it throughout. It made it into time magazine. It made it.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Into. Oh my.
Dean Steacy: It made it into a whole bunch of stuff. I was at the the I forget what is it? Bill Riley in the United States wanted to interview me. I always said there was a whole bunch of press people that wanted to interview me, but. What? Well, that caused a controversy. And for me, it it didn’t bother me that it caused a controversy because I knew what I was doing under the law was lawful and it was right and what I was doing and it was going to close down hate mongers. I don’t know anybody other than a hate monger who would think that they should be allowed to be active like most Canadians who believe in our values don’t believe in hate. And I had a Senator Findley who wanted me fired, so he went into the Senate and said a whole bunch of stuff about me, which he picked up from the press and it was wrong. So I was called to testify before the House committee, and I kind of refused and my boss at the time said, no, he’s not going to come in to be raked over the coals, but I then had a one on one meeting with I forget what his first name is, but his last name was Hillier, who was the chair of the Human Rights Commission or the Human Rights Committee. And I explained to him what was going on, and I told him what you were hearing from the press is absolutely untrue. And the two Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn had lied to the house.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh, boy.
Dean Steacy: And I could prove it. And so I gave over the documentation and they read it over and I he apologized and I said, I’m sorry. That’s not good enough. I, I was slandered at a house committee. I’d like apologies from the whole committee and I also from the chief commissioner at the time also asked that Ezra Levant and Mark Stein not be allowed on the parliamentary precinct, and then they can’t testify before the committee, which they were scheduled to do because the was known that they were going to come back and slander me again. So in the House, I felt it more important to clear my name in the government, in the House, in the House of Commons and everything. Then the press, I mean, the press is the press and they get stuff wrong all the time. Yes, but the house the House has a responsibility to make sure that Canadians especially when it comes to stuff like this, are not slandered. So it was all fixed and I continued on until 2012 when the Liberal government amended the act and took it out. And so I had moved on to other parts of of investigation. So and then the next step I had was I developed the the, the policy around racism for the commission and what, because we were having a lot of complaints from people being stopped by you know, the RCMP or even other police forces. It may not have been a federal jurisdiction, but we were still getting concern and complaints about, you know, I’m being treated in a racist manner. I got pulled over because I’m black And there were there’s a case that went to tribunal, so I can talk about it fairly freely as there was a case where a young man here in Ottawa was driving on the parkway, which is federal jurisdiction in Ottawa. He got pulled over in his mom’s convertible Mercedes, and the cop pulled him over strictly because he was black. And he wanted to know why and how he could afford to drive a Mercedes Benz.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh, no.
Dean Steacy: And so it was like, it’s my mom’s car. I’m going to pick her up. And he’s still the cop. Didn’t want to believe him. So he’s pulled out of the car and they went put him in the back of the RCMP car. Basically they arrested him. And once they got the verification from the mother who was a lawyer, happened to take it to the press, but then it came to us as a complaint. And at that point we had to decide we didn’t really know ourselves how how are we going to decide or determine if that was racial profiling? You know, did he get pulled over because he had a broken light and he should be pulled over, but if he was pulled over because he’s black driving a Mercedes, that’s outright discrimination. So it forced a lot of police forces to start figuring out how their statistics show whether or not they’re pulling over the appropriate number of visible minorities or whites or, or what, what’s what’s going on. And a lot of police forces when they started doing the statistics. We’re coming up with proportionately. They’re pulling over. Majority of black people than they are white people or a lot of other other racial groups. So I know in Ottawa, the RCMP and the Ottawa police have changed the way they, they do traffic stops, which is a good thing. But it’s all, this is all little steps and that’s what happens. And this is what really, what I learned the most is that advocacy is, is tiny little steps. But at a certain point, some of us have to decide to be the trailblazers. And if we’re not going to trailblaze, things are not going to change because I’ve talked to people, you know, why don’t you complain? Why don’t you do this? Oh, it’s too much work. Yeah, but you’re. You’re okay with being discriminated against. I don’t want to complain. And not that for me was. No, I’m. I’m going to stand up for myself. And if it means other people get it, then that’s great too. But I’m, I’m going to stand up for my rights.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: This has been one of the most insightful interviews that I’ve had with any advocate in a very long time. I’ve learned so much about your strength and your commitment, and I want to thank you for for having, you know, walked the walk with the rest of us. It’s people like you we need. And, you know, like in closing, I just want to thank you for for what you’ve done, you know?
Dean Steacy: Oh, thank you for thank thank you for the thanks. I’m still doing it. I’m. I’m not I’m not doing it as much as I was. But but I, I mean, I’ve been working with and for years and I’ve worked with the CBC to make sure that the Olympics have got descriptive video. And I think from the first year that they put it out to this year with the Olympics and the Paralympics, it’s it’s been much improved, improved. I’ve you know, I’ve done stuff with banks to get things made.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah.
Dean Steacy: Accessible. I’ve worked with TV stations. I’m still doing that. My, my pet peeve on all of this is descriptive video and trying to get it so that everybody has it, whether it’s on TV, the theaters or, or wherever. And it’s, I’m doing what I want to do and what I like. And I think that that’s an easy spot to say. If you want to advocate, pick something that you like that you know needs to be fixed. And, you know, go out and do it because it’s really not that hard because like I. I can say that from when I was a kid playing hockey and having a disabled kid on the team was like verboten. Now lots of teams are more than happy to have a disabled kid on the team because they can say, look, we are working with the disabled community or we’ve got a. Isn’t it great that we have a couple of girls playing on the team? To the point now that you know, advocacy has done a lot. We’ve now got a professional women’s hockey league.
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Dean Steacy: And I think that that obviously I haven’t worked on any of that, but I know people that have and but you know, it’s a change. There was no thought in 1974 that there’d ever be a professional hockey league for women in Canada.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Right?
Dean Steacy: So I mean, advocacy works.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Thank you very, very much, Dean. I really, really appreciate it. You keep on going.
Dean Steacy: Yeah. And you too, Donna.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Thank you. Dean.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Thanks.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Alright, now. Bye bye now.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Bye bye.
Podcast Commentator: Donna wants to hear from you and invites you to write to her at donnajodhan@gmail.com. Until next time.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA
Global Leader In Disability Rights, Digital Accessibility, And Inclusive Policy Reform
Turning policy into progress for people with disabilities.
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Published in Remarkable World Commentary