Richard Harlow

Nanaimo has a street standard now where the sidewalk stays level across side streets instead of dropping a person into the road. CNIB helped city staff write it, and I was part of CNIB's push for it. I have been an ambassador with them since 2017. Strollers, walkers and wheelchairs all get the same fix.

The rule that makes it spread is the quiet one. Every new street is built to the standard, and every old street opened up for pipes or construction closes up to it. This city upgrades itself one water main at a time. What goes in: talking crosswalks, tactile mats at intersections, benches, better lighting, high-contrast paint on the edges.

It has gone in corridor by corridor. Metral Drive. Front Street, with an elevated crosswalk at the Law Courts and better transit stops. Terminal Avenue and Commercial Street downtown, where the tree roots that had been heaving the pavement into trip hazards are finally gone. Fourth Street and Albert Street connecting VIU to town, with raised crosswalks and pedestrian flashers at Selby and Dunsmuir. A signalized intersection at Fifth and Bruce. East Wellington and Madsen goes to construction this winter, and Norwell Drive is in design.

I still check the work on foot. This summer I spent hours through the Beban corridor and the Country Club bus exchange, finding what works and what would fix what does not, and engineering took me through Norwell Drive at the design stage. That is universal design. Build for the person the old design overlooked, and it works for everybody. A bus fleet that announces every stop. The accessible icon on more parking stalls each year. Bad design got us into most of these problems. Design gets us out.

We heard people were being shut out of community events at Westwood Lake and Neck Point, so we went after the whole route. Parking lots, trails, and matting down to the water so somebody using a wheelchair can reach the edge instead of watching from the bank. Accessible washrooms at both, and the same standard now in the Maffeo Sutton design.

We also changed what a city washroom is. Single rooms with a toilet, a sink and space to change, called universal now instead of family, because a person should not have to be a family to use one.

The inclusive playground at Maffeo Sutton, and the outdoor classroom and play space that opened at Beban in April, shaped at our committee and built by Beban staff.

It comes down to the same thing every time. Everybody should be able to get to this place in the way that works for them.

Until this year, a blind person could not complete Nanaimo's candidate nomination papers without somebody else reading and writing for them. I pushed to have them digitized. That is the only reason I am on this ballot. City forms and surveys went the same way, rewritten in plain language and built to work with a screen reader.

The LEAP recreation pass had been loaded with so many checks that use collapsed to 300 people in 2020. I pushed to get it online and the barriers stripped out. Last year it reached 3,326. After-school groups are in the pool and on the ice who could not afford it before, and children went to day camp this summer who would have spent it at home.

Closed captions and better sound on council broadcasts. Hearing loops at service counters. And an accessibility problem on any page of the City's website can now be reported from that page, so the City hears about a barrier instead of quietly losing the person who hit it.

An advisory committee is supposed to advise. I treated it as a job. I have been struck twice in the Country Club corridor. Engineering brought that corridor to our committee in May and took me through Norwell Drive on the ground in July. Council adopted Rick Hansen benchmark goals in March. Committee volunteers can now claim attendant and dependent care costs, so taking part no longer means paying for the privilege of showing up. We also asked the City how many of its own employees are disabled. It does not count. That question is still open. A barrier caught on a drawing costs nothing to fix. The same barrier caught after the concrete is poured costs a retrofit, and usually never gets one. That is what a seat at that table is for. It is also as far as advice can go. The rest takes a vote.