Burnaby releases draft Accessibility Plan

The City of Burnaby unveiled its draft accessibility plan almost one year after initiating the process. In December 2023, the city announced that it was initiating the process of creating the plan in cooperation with a consulting firm, Urban Matters. 

The city and its consultants hosted several engagement events with city staff, members of the community, and service providers in late 2023 and early 2024. The city’s Access Advisory Committee discussed the results of these public engagement events during its meeting on May 30, 2024. 

According to Coun. Daniel Tetrault, chair of the committee during 2024, the accessibility plan aims to address gaps and outline ways the city can improve infrastructure and eliminate obstacles for people with disabilities. 

The draft plan provides a summary of the results of the city’s public and internal engagement activities in the document’s appendices. In addition to its public engagement events, the city distributed a survey among its staff members and held a follow-up focus group for them. The internal engagement results focused on addressing physical barriers and obstacles within the city and training staff to understand accessibility and barriers and how to address them. 

Section four of the plan addresses employment in the City of Burnaby. It states that the city aims to be “an accessible and inclusive workplace that emphasizes attracting and retaining a diverse workforce of all abilities.” 

One of the stated actions in the plan is to “Facilitate the hiring of people with disabilities at the City of Burnaby, particularly to support the administration of the actions of this plan.” 

However, the draft plan does not mention details about the changes to its hiring process and whether it will consult people with lived experience regarding its hiring practices. More information may be forthcoming when the full plan returns to the committee for further feedback and then goes to council in 2025. 

During the Access Advisory Committee’s final meeting of 2024 on Nov. 28, city planners Margaret Manifold and Kyra Lubell presented the draft plan to the committee and requested feedback from committee members. Manifold described the draft as a “framework” for the city’s finalized accessibility plan. 

“Tonight, we’re asking for your feedback on the framework and the content within the framework. This report isn’t meant to go on to council. It was brought here just really for the purposes of getting feedback from the committee tonight,” Manifold said. “In the new year, we’ll be back with what we hope will be the finalized plan and, again, an opportunity for you to provide your feedback at that time.” 

Coun. Maita Santiago spoke about how the city can prioritize working with businesses that support people with disabilities and changing the city’s communications materials to be more inclusive. 

“I was wondering if we could also look at the city’s public-facing material and see how people with disabilities are represented through that as well,” Santiago said.  

Resident representative Sonny Senghera commented on the city’s hiring goals in the accessibility plan and offered suggestions for the city to attract people with disabilities. 

“Volunteering is a great way to make that happen in a safe environment. So consider ways that the city could be encouraging and creating volunteering opportunities to attract volunteers from some of the groups that don’t necessarily have those same opportunities,” Senghera said. “The other thing that I wanted to raise is just in the hiring process. I think it’s widely recognized now that hiring can always produce barriers that aren’t well understood, where people that may have accessibility issues or they could be neurodiverse may not be as successful going through a traditional interview. A lot of organizations now are taking a look at different ways that they can remove some of those barriers.” 

Several committee members commented on the lack of consistency in the city’s accessibility measures, the obstacles encountered, and the importance of retrofitting the city to improve safety and accessibility. 

“We need to retrofit the whole city because there are some dangerous places,” resident representative Odette Brassard said. She added that the city must also improve the wayfinding of its public transportation hubs. “When you leave a public building, there should be really very clear signs everywhere where you can take the SkyTrain or the bus.” 

Resident representative Karim Damani spoke about the cost of retrofitting existing buildings and improving accessibility in the city. 

“How much is going to be put on the city to retrofit the existing buildings, to bring them up to the new accessibility code? Because it is going to be a lot of money,” Damani said. He questioned whether the city was merely checking off the boxes in order to say that it had consulted the committee and whether it would actually consider the committee’s feedback when finalizing the plan and putting it into action.

This piece was made possible by the Local Journalism Initiative.

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